[The Rude Guy and Rich Zubaty recite Zubaty's stage play, MORE, and talk about how women serve corporations and corporations serve women, and how the only solution to modern male angst is a spiritual solution, along the lines of economist E. F. Schumacher's philosophy that Less is More. And, they reiterate that the right wing does not own God, and that the greatest Leftists of all time, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., were both deeply religious men.]
RG: This is The Rude Guy, and my sidekick Rich Zubaty.
RZ: Yeah, right…
RG: And this is the show that believes—
RZ: …that everyone who is calm and sensible is insane.
RG: that corporations are vampires
RZ: that men are NOT the oppressors of women
RG: that WOMEN are the oppressors of men
RZ: This just in from our WHITE HOUSE SPIES.
RG: Karl Rove does not produce human bowel movements.
RZ: Yes, folks. It’s confirmed, by our White House toilet cam. Karl Rove shits cupcakes.
RG: Chocolate cupcakes.
RZ: Then feeds ‘em to journalists like Robert Novak, and Brit Hume and Bill O’Reilly. And pill-popper Limbaugh.
RG: Atta boy Karl. That’s Bush’s brain, workin’ it out for ya.
RZ: AND… remarkably… ethnologists from Princeton University just revealed that George Bush and Dick Cheney share common ancestors.
RG: Yeah… Olive Oyl and Popeye the sailor man.
RZ: kinda explains their temper tantrums, wouldn’t ya say?… ha ha hah hah… We had a GOOD time at the protests against George Bush, at the Drake Hotel in Chicago.
RG: Yeah, didn’t get arrested. Or trampled by the horse-cops.
RZ: Or falsely accused by some undercover psycho cop… man, I had one of those guys attached to me like a leech, from when I first got off the subway. Kept talking about how “I” was the NEW Abbie Hoffman, and he wanted to tag along while I created havoc. Jesus.
RG: Yeah, but basically the Chicago cops are OK. Their motto is: don’t fuck with us, and we won’t fuck with you.
RZ: They don’t like Bush in this town. The Anarchists even burned an American flag in plain view and nothing happened to them.
RG: AND best of all, you got on WGN TV all around the country, wearing your silly American Flag/Impeach Bush hat, and making a very clear case for why we should impeach Bush and Cheney for lying.
RZ: I can’t believe they played that clip, over and over again, six times on the cable channel in Chicagoland alone … I’ve never seen mainstream media give that issue so much air time before.
RG: Then we took a 41 hour bus ride from Chicago to Helena Montana.
RZ: Not as bad as I thought it would be. Sat next to some guy talking about how the best jobs to get in prison are in the kitchen.
RG: And, dropped a kid off at drug and alcohol rehab in Butte.
RZ: I really love Montana. Saw a small herd of pronghorn antelope, and a large herd of elk, munching irrigated green grass, right outside the bus window.
RG: But what we did… on the bus… we took one of Rich’s old stage plays/slash/lectures, and reworked it for podcast.
RZ: It’s just two guys, comparing mental notes, in front of an audience of eavesdroppers. Like maybe two guys, on a very long bus ride, talking loud enough to be overheard by some of the other passengers.
RG: So let’s run through it. MORE, by Rich Zubaty
[tweet (pheasant?) and bus “vroom” sound]
RG: Somewhere on a Greyhound bus, speeding alongside the blue ribbon of the Yellowstone River, across the tan grasslands of Central Montana.
Female high-pitched voice: I got a kid that’s three, and another that’s two months. Left their father back in Oklahoma City. What a LOSER. What the hell’s wrong with MEN these days?
RZ: Modern men are really screwed up. We’ve lost all sense of who we are, or what we’re for.
RG: We see it in our exalted leaders. We have presidents who lie (Clinton and Bush), business leaders who bleed us like vampires, (Enron and Worldcom), and celebrities who are all style, and no substance. Who have nothing to contribute to the world beyond a certain way of “looking” in front of a camera.
RZ: In fact, most of our leaders are men who behave like the very worst type of woman. Lying, cheating, good-looking, airheads.
RG: Psychologist Carl Jung warned us about this long ago.
RZ: He referred to it as confusing anima with animus. Confusing female persona with male persona. He said that, though men should be AWARE of their female side, ACTING OUT of their female side produces men, who behave like the most self-serving women. Lying, cheating, good-looking, airheads. And vice versa. Women who act out of their male side, makes for women who act like the most self-serving men. Aggressive, careless, dominating.
RG: Is this situation severe?
RZ: I think it is. And I’m not alone. I recently read an article in a woman’s magazine, where women complained that men are so wimpy today, that the women have been acting more aggressive to take up the slack – and they don’t like it.
RG: Good for them.
RZ: They know in their heart something’s wrong.
RG: What can be done about it?…
RZ: There IS a type of magic bullet – or secret formula – that will improve things, but we gotta begin at the beginning. With Sigmund Freud
RG: Sigmund Freud invented the art of psychotherapy about a hundred years ago. At the end of his life, after decades of studying case histories, he said, “The one thing I have never been able to understand is: what do women want?”… WHAT do women want?”
RZ: A hundred years later another German, a comedian, took up the problem. Within fifteen minutes he had an answer. He rushed off to tell his friends, “I got it. I know what women want. It’s simple. It’s one word: MORE.
RG: MORE?
RZ: Women want MORE.
RG: More money, more love, more clothes, more attention. Just MORE.
RZ: This creates a big problem for men.
After a couple years of living with a woman, ANY woman, a man gets comfortable. He likes reaching over to the other side of the bed and feeling that big hip. He’s used to clearing all the mascara, and diaphragm jelly, and Q-tips, out of the way, to find his toothbrush. He’s overheard her snapping at her mother on the phone, and has learned how to disappear into the garage when her kids come over asking for money. And finally, after a year or two of being badgered and cornered and investigated and interrogated, he has been able to reach into the depths of his soul and pull forth the simple words: I LOVE YOU. By which he means, “I love ALL of you.” I love your funny hair and I love your cold cream hands. I love the smell of your underwear and the way you pout when you don’t get your way. I love and accept all of you, the good and the bad. I devote my love completely to YOU.
RG: By now she’s had the time to get used to his bad habits. His appetite for barbecued flesh. Washing whites with colors. She doesn’t even complain much when he misses the toilet, and somehow resists poking him in the ribs, when he’s snoring to wake the frogs. She’s just giggled and shook her head over these foibles, for two years. To him the future looks like clear sailing, for centuries to come.
RZ: So he’s in Love.
RG: He’s deliriously in LOVE.
RZ: That woman, his woman, is happy for about 36 hours. Two days later she wakes up in the morning, starts fumbling with her coffee, and exudes an air of grumpy silence. Something’s wrong. He asks her about it, but she brushes him off. He doesn’t know what’s wrong. But WE do. She wants something. She wants MORE.
RG: Men are simple creatures.
RZ: We don’t experience 84 kinds of love. We only experience one. It’s pretty much the same love we feel for our children, our wife, and even a fish we caught. It’s just LOVE. TOTAL LOVE.
RG; You can see the problem already.
RZ: This dumb fool has given himself totally and completely to this woman… and she wants MORE. It’s a problem that cannot be solved. There IS no MORE.
RG: And there’s a scary side to it.
RZ: When a woman tells a man those simple words, “It’s over,” he doesn’t get it. It doesn’t fit into his brain. This isn’t like a football game where the buzzer rings and you know it’s over. This doesn’t make sense. For two years she’s told him she loves him, and why doesn’t he love her. He’s been honest. He’s given it time. He’s gotten used to her big hip, and her kids coming by. He hasn’t rushed it, and finally he has decided that it’s true. He DOES love her. He has given her ALL his love. But suddenly she’s in love with someone or something else. Why? Because she wants MORE.
RG: His brain fries. He could become a stalker or worse. He has no ability to handle this. He has given ALL, and all is gone.
RZ: That’s why religion was invented. A marital breakup is supposed to involve pain. Great pain. So much pain that it should be employed only as a last resort in cases of severe physical abuse. Psychological abuse is the daily fare of a family. That’s what happens in a family. That’s what you’re there to learn. Psychological abuse is what happens when you beat your head against the world of business and politics – and the place you learn how to handle that is in the family. Where you are loved. Families are not SUPPOSED to be happy. They are cauldrons of battling egos where you LEARN the art of compromise within a safe container.
RG: According to psychologist Scott Peck, there are only two reasons to get married: One, to have children. Two, to have friction.
RZ: For 2.2 million years, humanoids have walked the earth. In that time we have learned to speak words, make tools, control fire, fly through the air. We have evolved physically and culturally, to be able to do amazing things. But in all that time, men and women have never evolved the simple ability, to get along.
RG: Never?
RZ: Not once. She wants new furniture, he wants to go on a safari in Africa. She wants a Lexus, he wants a boat. She thinks the kids suffer from low self-esteem, he thinks they suffer from lack of knowledge about fishing.
RG: This inability, to get along, tells us something.
RZ: Since… over the millennia… we have evolved in all kinds of amazing ways… and since we never evolved the ability to get along… the obvious conclusion is: men and women were not MEANT to get along. The creative tension between men and women is just that. Creative. And tension. Friction. She pulls one way. He pulls another. And something new, and bigger than both of them, is born.
RG: The idea that families are supposed to be happy is a modern myth.
RZ: It has no basis in history.
RG: Families are testing grounds?
RZ: Places where egos clash. Places where people of different ideas, and dispositions, live together, and negotiate and barter and compromise. You live with people, you would zip right past on the street. You’d have nothing to do with them. Except for one fact. They are FAMILY. You HAVE to live with them, and work through things with them. Friction. And the skills we gain in the family, serve us throughout all of life. Families are not SUPPOSED to be happy. They CAN be happy, but they are not supposed to be happy. The sad refrain that, I was “unhappy so I left him” would be laughable were the consequences not so disastrous for men and women and especially children.
RG: And what does female-inspired pop psychology tell us the problem is? Talking. Communicating. Like all of a sudden, after 2.2 million years of creative evolution, running to the contrary, we have stumbled upon the solution. Just talk. Just sit down and talk it out.
RZ: Talking is therapeutic, but it’s not an answer-answer. It’s something you can do to make yourself feel good, but it’s not a solution to anything. It’s just talk.
RG: As a man, there’s nothing harder for me to follow, than women talking.
RZ: It’s like watching a butterfly bounce from flower to flower, never staying anywhere long, wondering where it will land next… I could start out talking about fishing. My beloved will sit there, eyes wide, rapt, attentive, listening, with a pasted-on smile – waiting to pounce on the first word that she can associate with.
RG: This, of course, is BEFORE you told her you loved her.
RZ: I’m talking about fishing. All of a sudden she says, “I ate a fish once.” I stop mid-sentence. I’m discombobulated. But she views this hesitation as an “opening”. So she plunges ahead. “I was with my college boyfriend once in Rome and we ate a fish. It was a marvelous fish. Covered with this marvelous sauce. The Italians have such a sense of style you know. They make the best sauces and the most amazing clothes. Those Italians!” (So far so good. She’s talking, and that makes her happy, and I can still follow her as she flits from fish to her old boyfriend…ahem…to Rome to Italians. I’m hanging on. I’m still with her…But then…she says). “A couple years ago my mom sent me some perfume from Italy and I adored it. Italian perfume. Who woulda thought? Better than French perfume.”
RG: My brain is fried. I can’t follow. Within 20 seconds we ‘ve gone from talking about fish…to talking about perfume. I can’t take it.
RZ: I shut down and simply listen. After a few minutes she wonders why I get up to go check the oil in the car. She thinks I’m “ignoring her.” But in truth,
RG: she’s ignoring YOU… Women think this type of talking is energetic and cute and normal
RZ: It is…for them…But men think, it’s careless psychological abuse.
RG: Because they don’t even listen to us.
RZ: They’re just trying to make a word association and run with it.
RG: We’ve been hearing this from our mom and sister for decades and we’re used to it.
RZ: We know what to do. Go check the oil in the car. Focus on something as UNLIKE a butterfly – that we can find – anywhere near us. We need something SIMPLE and focused to grab on to.
RG: Is there a reason for this verbal disconnect.
RZ: Men process words ONLY on the left side of their brain. Women process words on BOTH sides of their brain. Women interpret the world through words. Men interpret half of the world through words. And half of it through abstractions, intuitions and visuo-spatial relationships. We see strange things inside our heads. Indescribable things. We can twirl images and objects around inside our brains. That’s why we’re better at catching baseballs. Our brains are made for it. And that’s why we don’t talk as much. Talking only describes a small portion of our experience. Men speak on average 2000 words a day, women speak 7000.
RG: There are vast differences between male and female brains?
RZ: I can’t go into all that right now. Though I do go into it in my book, What Men Know That Women Don’t. But the main point to understand, is that for very sound and important evolutionary reasons, men and women do not think the same. We are BUILT like that. Our brains are different. And trying to force women to think like men or men to think like women is contrary to nature – warring with evolution. Men don’t know what relationship skills are. And women don’t know what an infield pop up is. So what? They’re both important in their own way. The thing that keeps us from hitting the deer on the road at night, is our facility with infield pop ups.
RG: Not relationship skills!
RZ: OK, brace yourself. Here’s a zinger. A forgotten truth. Mater, the Latin word for mother, is the root word of materialism.
RG: Mater, the Latin word for mother, is the root word of materialism.
RZ: The important thing to understand about this, is that for thousands of years, people have understood that women are more materialistic than men.
RG: More physical?
RZ: More literal than men. More analytical and more grounded than men. Earth Mother, Sky Father – a common concept down through history from the Egyptians to the Polynesians.
RG: Earth Mother, Sky Father.
RZ: Contrary to the fiction of our age, women are NOT more spiritual than men.
RG: And not more intuitive than men.
RZ: Men lust after those abstract, spiritual, infield pop-up, type of non-verbal cues from life. Men adore the invisible and unspoken.
RG: Women flee from them.
RZ: Women want to understand the world through words. Men inhabit abstract worlds, riddled with unsolved mysteries. We CARE about how the universe was created, or whether history repeats itself,
RG: or how fish think.
RZ: But in this era, our penchant for abstract mysteries, wondering upon a star, has been channeled into bean counting. Men have been sucked into performing within economic and cultural templates, that strip us of our dreams, our spirituality. Our spiritual outlook. We are immersed in a female-friendly, corporate-driven, consumer society, that has all but eliminated natural male pathways, to religious experience.
RG: Male religion is tough.
RZ: It’s not about singing in high voices, and smelling incense in stone buildings. It’s about fasting, and crying,
RG: and walking through the wilderness alone.
RZ: We have trivialized the male initiation rituals, that made boys into men, for tens of thousands of years. If I were to initiate my son into the masculine world, the way it has been done for thousands of years, my ex would have me arrested for child abuse. Solid male judgment, about what is good, and necessary, to turn a boy into a man, has been banished to a dark place, somewhere at the bottom of Oprah Winfrey’s laundry basket – and replaced with prattle about relationship skills. We inhabit a feminized world. So feminized that we cannot even see it,
RG: the way fish cannot see the water they swim in.
RZ: Here’s another zinger: Men are NOT the oppressors of women. If you take away only one thing take away that.
RG: Men… are NOT the oppressors of women.
RZ: Not now. Not ever. Men are the protectors and providers for women. Always have been. It’s part of our biological make-up.
RG: Women live 10% longer – seven years longer – than men.
RZ: Four out of five suicides are men.
RG: 85% of the homeless are men.
RZ: Men are drafted in time of war
RG: Women can choose to go or not.
RZ: Nineteen out of twenty people who die on the job are men.
RG: If 19 out of 20 people who died on the job were women we would have a federal task force investigating this outrage.
RZ: Throughout human history men have created “safe zones” for their women. We bring food to them and keep the wolves away. There are rules about staying in the safe zone. That’s what the Bible is: a book of rules about maintaining the safe zone.
RG: Women don’t like those rules.
RZ: But if I were told I would never have to fight in war, that I would live 7 years longer, that I would never have to work a deadly job, and all I had to do was obey certain rules, I MIGHT very well opt for that choice.
RG: But, as a man, I don’t have that choice.
RZ: Women can opt out of the safe zone, but men cannot opt in.
RG: I would not expect to do whatever the heck I FEEL like doing, and still enjoy those protections. I would understand that something is being traded off. More rights MEANS MORE responsibilities.
RZ: It means more freedoms…and more losses.
RG: Is society unfair to women?
RZ: Of course.
RG: Is it unfair to men?
RZ: Absolutely. But whereas we have spent the better part of a century addressing unfairness to women, we have not, for one moment, discussed unfairness to men.
RG: And it’s high time to talk about it.
RZ: The oppression of men by human society is a life and death issue of enormous spiritual proportions. Everything about modern society depletes healthy masculinity. There’s a REASON why men are so lost today… That reason also has a one-word answer: Corporations…
RG: corporations.
RZ: Corporations that are not growing, are dying. Corporations wake up every day of the year, and want one thing: MORE.
RG: The reason women have made such a head-long rush into working for corporations, over the past 30 years, is that they have the same goals. They wake up every morning, wanting the same thing.
RZ: Corporations want more investors, more profits, more customers.
RG: They never have enough.
RZ: What if an invisible alien being came to earth from another galaxy? An invisible alien being that didn’t eat, sleep or die. And the alien looked around and decided that the best thing to be, down here, on Earth… was a person…
RG: A person?
RZ: So, it descended on the government with money and influence – and prevailed on the court system – to get itself declared to be a person, with all the same Bill of Rights protections as any other person. Free speech, ownership of property.
RG: All the rights Americans supposedly have.
RZ: And let’s say this alien person didn’t like war or taxes, so it managed to exempt itself from both. No sacrifice during time of war. No paying taxes for health care and roads and all the things needed by human persons.
RG: All the rights of a person but none of the responsibilities.
RZ: And what’s more, the alien even figured out ways to profit during time of war. During the invasion of Afghanistan, American pilots air-dropped one million pop tarts on the civilian centers of the country. One million pop tarts floating down from the sky. These people needed rice and water and flour, and the American taxpayers paid to have American food corporations drop junk food, pop tarts.
RG: This is what we call foreign aid.
RZ: Foreign aid is really payouts to American corporations. These alien corporate persons, who avoid paying taxes, are paid by OUR taxes, to distribute their products overseas.
RG: And we call it foreign aid.
RZ: Halliburton is another famous alien person. It figured out a simple fact. Since it profits from war, the best thing to do is encourage our government to MAKE war. Like every corporation, Halliburton hates PAYing taxes. But it invests millions of dollars, contributing to the war chests of politicians, who it then encourages to MAKE war – or be cut off from its contributions.
RG: This is known as a conflict of interest
RZ: and it should be illegal… Our media makes me swoon. When the invasion in Iraq was over they tried to give us the impression that our wise leaders looked around and asked themselves, “What’s a good company to come clean up this mess?…Ah, Halliburton. They clean up messes like this all the time. We should give the contracts to them without even wasting time on bidding.” That is criminally deficient news reporting. What the media SHOULD have said is: “Well, Halliburton has been paying off politicians for five years, trying to get this war. And now it got it. So of course it’s going to get the troop support and oil field contracts.”
But let’s get back to our generic alien person.
RG: The one from the corporate galaxy?
RZ: The natives are getting a little restless down here. They’re watching this invisible beast sashay through their neighborhoods buying up the prime real estate, driving out small businesses, controlling the distribution of goods and services,
RG: buying up the small newspapers, and radio, and TV stations, and public radio,
RZ: and turning them into clear-channeled voices of huge corporate conglomerates.
RG: Plus, once in awhile, someone gets killed by a faulty product.
RZ: The natives REALLY don’t like that. So the alien comes up with the idea to convince the courts that it should not be held responsible – not be held liable – for what it does. It cannot be brought into criminal court. It can make a sleazy business decision, someone dies from it, and it pays a bit of a fine. That’s it.
RG: No jail time.
RZ: No revocation of its corporate charter.
RG: If a human person makes a bad decision and someone dies from it, can HE get off without criminal prosecution? Can he rob a bank, shoot someone, get caught, say “ah shucks”, and pay a fine?
RZ: What is happening in our midst is deep shades of sci-fi…increasingly other-worldly. These alien corporate persons – who do not eat, sleep, die, pay a fair share of taxes or suffer in time of war – can kill people and pay a fine. That’s it.
RG: They’re not responsible for what they do.
RZ: On top of all that, a universal fiction called the Stock Market has grown to huge proportions out of the legislation that makes corporate aliens not liable for their dirty deeds. Pollution, health protection, infrastructure, education of its very own workers – the corporate alien skips out on paying all these bills, and calls it profit – and people fight each other in trading pits to buy pieces of paper, that entitle them to share in this profit – profit being those portions of their expenses that corporate aliens have skipped out on paying.
RG: Studies by Ralph Estes have shown that if corporations were forced to pay the TRUE costs of their operations, they would owe US money every year – they consume MORE than they produce
RZ:…and if they DID pay the full costs of their operations, this thing called the Stock Market would dry up and blow away.
RG: Profit is stolen life energy.
RZ: Corporations are alien vampires, sucking the life energy out of human beings, and calling it profit. There’s no nice way to put it. No way to say it, so it won’t sting, and won’t offend. Profit is what corporations make by not paying living wages, and not paying their share of taxes, and by not cleaning up their environmental messes, and by soliciting government – taxpayer-funded – contracts and handouts.
RG: Corporations have colonized America’s wealth. In the USA 20% of the people own 94% of the wealth, and the other 80% of us are fighting over 6% of it.
RZ: It’s preposterous… Few people know that the United States is 4% of the earth’s population, consuming 24% of the earth’s resources, and producing 24% of the earth’s pollution. This thing our corporations are selling the world, the American Way, simply cannot work for the rest of the world.
RG: Not unless the earth suddenly grows 6 times bigger… But what if the natives figure this out? Will peasants with pitchforks march through the streets, and trash corporate property?
RZ: The alien must have some way to protect itself. Some way to make itself even more invisible… So it tears a page from human history. It spreads its wings and incorporates yet another human organization.
[sound effect? Donkey? Vampire bats?]
RZ: Corporations are cults. As long as there have been humans there have been cults. Cults are seductive, secretive organizations. So secretive they are nearly invisible. They let us see only what they wish us to see, about them. They come at us all smiley-faced on TV, but we don’t know what they’re really doing. We don’t know what Halliburton is doing…Paying politicians to make war…We didn’t know what Enron was doing. Fraudulently overcharging Californians billions of dollars for energy, and booking it as profit. We don’t know what our pharmaceutical companies are doing. Every year hundreds of people die from Tylenol poisoning – but the label on Tylenol doesn’t tell you, you can DIE from it. Labels on SOAP, tell you not to put it in your eye, because it might burn… but Johnson & Johnson doesn’t tell you, you can die from swallowing Tylenol.
RG: How do they GET AWAY WITH THAT!
RZ: Moreover, these cases are settled “out of court”, for money, in amounts the courts forbid us to know. Astounding!
RG: Corporations are cults.
RZ: All cults share certain characteristics. In writing my book The Corporate Cult I studied cult researchers, who studied the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Scientology, and they listed the three things that all cults do. One: restrict people physically. Two: restrict access to knowledge and ideas. Three: manipulate feelings… Virtually all corporations inhibit people physically, mentally and emotionally. They tell us where to sit, what to think, and what to feel.
RG: Like a grade school teacher.
RZ: Or a cult guru… Punch in your time card at High Jinx Incorporated (ka-chink) and your Bill of Rights protections disappear for 8 hours. No freedom of speech, or freedom of assembly, on the corporate job. If you’re a construction worker or a farmer, you still have these rights on the job… but not when you work for a corporation. IT has Bill of Rights protections, and you DON’T.
RG: And they actually have us believing that corporations are efficient. They make exploding tires, export our jobs overseas, blow billions on the dot.com economy, lie to consumers, overcharge us for health care, refuse to pay their true costs of operation, and we call them efficient…
OUTRAGEOUSS
RZ: Government operates like a Swiss watch, compared to the corporate economy. Believing that corporations are efficient, is like believing airplanes run on Jello.
RG: No bearing on reality. Just a statement repeated over and over, so MANY times, by right wing parrots, that we assume it’s true. Like telling us the earth is flat. Or lowering taxes stimulates the economy. Perfect phantasms.
RZ: And even if they were efficient – which they’re not – but even if they were, I do not see the goal of human life as efficiency. Soulfullness yes, efficiency no.
RG: Humanness yes, efficiency no.
RZ: The more we worship efficiency, the more we relinquish our souls. The more thoroughly we are absorbed into the corporate cult… But the main thing I dislike about corporations is that they are addicted to MORE. Corporations are female institutions.
RG: Not male institutions, female institutions?…
RZ: Corporations are organized like a barnyard. The female part of the barnyard. Corporations have a pecking order, just like laying hens. The big old hens get the best feed and the best laying boxes. All the other chickens line up beneath them in a self-imposed hierarchy. Every hen knows who’s above her and who’s below her.
RG: Just like every woman sizes up every OTHER woman for details of clothing and jewelry and grammar, to determine who is above, or below, whom.
RZ: Male organizations don’t work like that – whether platoons of soldiers, or hunting groups, or barnyard roosters. Male units have one commander, and a bunch of basically equal subordinates. The barnyard has one main rooster, and a fleet of basically equal, younger cocks. A platoon has one lieutenant, and a bunch of basically equal, soldiers, each adept in one particular skill: radio, bazooka, medic.
RG: And the interesting thing about male groups is that the leader often changes.
RZ: I once lived in the jungles of Peru and went hunting and fishing with a band of brothers. One was a better hunter. One was a better fisherman. On the days when we went hunting, the best hunter led us, and organized us. “You go behind that hill, you stay with this dog.” On the days when we went fishing, the best fisherman led us. “Set up the net over there.”
RG: This is just common sense.
RZ: But this is not how corporations are run. People who know nothing about the business you’re in, sit on the board of directors –
RG: and twenty other boards, of twenty different companies –
RZ: and make decisions about what is to be done. They make decisions according to economic principles which, by law, place profits before people.
RG: There’s an economist who addressed this situation. His name is E. F. Schumacher, and his book is Small is Beautiful. As an economist, one who thinks about money and capital, Schumacher proposed the radical idea that LESS is MORE.
RZ: A sustainable economy is one that is not obsessed with mindless growth. The mad rush to buy more and more objects, leads straight to the fouling of the earth, and the deprivation of the human spirit.
RG: And, as an economist, Schumacher proposed, that what threatens us economically, is a METAPHYSICAL problem, and it requires a metaphysical solution. A spiritual solution. Radical stuff for an economist to say.
RZ: My thesis is that modern men have been forced to operate in a world hurtful to our natures. A world where the ever-present lust for MORE, screeches at us, both, from the women we love, and their female-friendly corporations.
RG: Women, after-all, make 80% of consumer buying decisions.
RZ: Women feed corporations and corporations feed women.
RG: And men are stuck on a treadmill, trying to make women and corporations happy…
RZ: and our souls shrivel… There’s a metaphor that helps me understand the phenomenon of economic growth. Vertical growth versus horizontal growth.
RG: How do you tell the difference?
RZ: Vertical growth goes up. Horizontal growth goes sideways. Vertical growth is skyscrapers, and space programs and soaring stock markets. Horizontal growth is improving bad roads, and reinvigorating bad schools, and improving the distribution of everything from food to books.
RG: Vertical growth gets the glory. Horizontal growth is passed off to government to pay for.
RZ: Vertical growth creates a huge gap between rich and poor. It enlarges the distance between who has access to what they need, and who doesn’t. Horizontal growth diminishes the gap between rich and poor. Horizontal growth gives poor people just as much access to a good education, as rich people. It gives the small farmer or publisher, just as much access to a store shelf, as agribusiness or publishing conglomerates get… Despite the fact that small business entrepreneurs, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, have invented products that completely revolutionized our society… despite the fact that 70% of new jobs are created by small businessmen and women… small businesses are OPENly discriminated against, in America. They do not qualify for the huge government handouts corporations get. They do not receive corporate welfare.
RG: And worse, they are prevented from competing in a free market because large corporations actively inhibit the distribution of small business products.
RZ: The federal highway system was sold to the truck farmers of Illinois as a great new way to get their produce to big markets in Chicago. But overnight huge agribusinesses from California, receiving federally subsidized water, started sending trucks, on federally subsidized highways, from the west coast to Chicago in 36 hours – and wiped out the small local growers.
RG: Corporations control distribution, and in doing so they remove choice.
RZ: Instead of getting local fresh food we get unripened food in plastic bags, grown with chemicals. Instead of getting a tremendous variety of books and newspapers and news programs, we get mass-oriented corporate offerings. Corporations control our lives, and eliminate the free market, by controlling distribution. Wal-Mart wrecks small businesses and eliminates choice from the retail market. You only get, what Wal-Mart sells. They’re the only game in town. Corporate distribution is the biggest oppression we face. It strangles us by eliminating choice from the market.
RG: Choice of food, choice of transportation, choice of ideas. Corporations eliminate choice, by controlling distribution.
RZ: Small businesses need help with distribution. They make good products, but they cannot get them onto store shelves, without corporate approval.
RG: That sucks!
RZ: Someone much wiser than me once said that human problems are not solvable on the human level. We need the help of a God. That goes to the heart of what I believe.
RG: The right wing does not own God.
RZ: The Civil Rights movement came out of the Black churches, and marched onto the streets. Mahatma Gandhi was a spiritual leader, who made a political impact, by living out his spiritual philosophy. Gandhi’s spiritual beliefs of putting people before profit, put him in direct conflict with the corporate colonial powers of his era.
RG: Many other great leaders took this same stand,
RZ: but we don’t talk about them in school because they are associated with “religion”. Da da dum dum. That taboo topic… Gandhi practiced non-violent non-cooperation. For us that means not sucking up to corporate culture. It means not capitulating to the “fear of the moment.” It means bringing the mountain to Muhammad. It means knowing who we are, and what we believe, and letting the market adjust to accommodate us, not rushing in to accommodate an economic system which ultimately cannot work.
RG: It means waking up in the morning, and NOT being obsessed with, MOOORRRE.
RZ: In 2.2 million years, men have never figured out, how to get along with women. In 2.2 million more years I do not believe we will figure out how to get along with corporations either. We coexist with them. They need us.
RG: But they are not part of us.
RZ: If we are not wary of them, they WILL, like vampires, suck out our souls, and trivialize our lives… The War in Iraq was about MORE. The dot.com economy was about MORE. Enron and Worldcom were about MORE. Exporting U.S. jobs overseas is about MORE… Unless we can begin waking up in the morning – at least half the time – and be content with, and grateful for, what we have.
RG: Unless we can wake up NOT lusting for MORE.
RZ: Our future will be a carnival cruise to Afghanistan.
RG: A superbowl played under water.
RZ: A horrendous disconnect from everything we belie ve to be true about ourselves… What I’m talking about here is not so much a choice, as a reality. American jobs are being exported overseas, at an alarming rate. We are being presented with an economic dilemma that does not have an economic solution. There is only a spiritual solution to our predicament.
RG: We cannot stop the raw greed of the global economy until we stop the greed within ourselves…
RZ: By opting to live with less we step off the treadmill –
RG: and get our souls back.
RZ: We have more time for friends and family and for unfettered creativity. For horizontal growth. We cannot be manipulated by fear of loss, because we have already opted for less.
RG: The American consumer is going the way of the American buffalo.
RZ: Someday the federal government will step in to protect us and preserve us. But until that day – while we have people like Carly Fiorina, the female, former CEO, of Hewlett Packard, announcing that American People can no longer expect to have JOBS with American companies – until that day when the government steps in to address this dire need, we need a survival strategy… We need a magic bullet.
RG: Something we can do right now!
RZ: Something to quiet the clowns and tame the elephants of this runaway economic circus…
[screeching circus noises]
Waking up every day wanting MORE is a prison. Constant striving produces constant striving. There is no peace to be had there. Less is MORE. That’s the magic bullet.
RG: That’s the metaphysical answer. Less is MORE.
RZ: Most people think this is not enough of an answer.
RG: They want something to grab onto, to twist and turn, to conquer or buy or strive for.
RZ: But that is precisely the problem. That’s the metaphysical nature of the problem… The only reason this formula is so hard to understand, is because it’s not part of our culture. Every single American movie has the same exact plot. The underdog hero strives against incredible odds, and finally wins.
RG: It’s mass insanity.
RZ: Cinema psychosis.
RG: A way to keep us all alienated and working our hearts out for the alien person.
RZ: Life isn’t like that. Life is about searching the depths of your soul and finding out how you can contribute to the human community. How you can serve. We are all cells in the body of humanity…said the female American mystic Peace Pilgrim.
RG: You could become a Big Brother.
RZ: You could boycott Wal-Mart for employing slave labor both within and without this country.
RG: You could take your money out of the Stock Market and invest, long-term, in a local small business.
RZ: You could challenge your local County Council to support horizontal development. As an involved and informed citizen, you can be much more creative than any of the things we’ve just mentioned, in pioneering pathways to enlarge male soul. You are the protector and provider for your community.
RG: Always have been… Every country on earth has the legend of the wiseman.
RZ: The man who lives a simple life, and imparts his wisdom to anyone who asks him. This legendary wiseman is revered more than the greatest captains of industry or government. He is a cultural icon across the ages. Every country has this legend…Except
RG: the United States of America.
RZ: The attitude here is: if you’re so smart why ain’t you rich. What profound spiritual poverty. If you can’t make money selling what you got in a corporate economy, what you got must not be worth anything.
RG: That’s the invisible alien talking.
RZ: On the day before my divorce I owned five houses, two cars and a boat. I had a drinking problem and I was miserable. On the day after my divorce I had a suitcase, a typewriter, and a one way ticket to Singapore. And I had FREEEEEdom for the first time in decades. Freedom. I was headed out on a pilgrimage.
RG: A classical spiritual journey on which EVERYthing is risked, in the hopes that EVERYthing will be re-gained.
RZ: It was scary and fun and it saved my life… But no point flitting off into that spiritual journey here. That’s another bus ride. But what I learned on that journey is what we’ve been talking about here. That is:
Men are messed up
There’s a reason men are messed up
The reason men are messed up has something to do with the institutions of our times
The problem with the institutions of our times is that they are too female…
RG: too feminized.
RZ: The problem with their being too feminized is that they inhibit the natural pathways to healthy masculinity. We revere lying, cheating, airheads… not honest regular guys.
The institutions of our times may not change any time soon.
RG: But men can change.
RZ: Men can become IMMUNE to the forces that attempt to subvert and trivialize our lives… And we can START immunizing ourselves by understanding that Less is MORE.
RG: Less is more.
RZ: I don’t expect anyone here to enter a monastery. I’ve done that. I know what it is, and what it’s not… What a monastery teaches is how to live with less. There’s no sex, therefore no occasion to be distracted by sex. You learn to be thankful for simple food, not gourmet meals. You read, instead of watch TV. You perform simple jobs. You pray instead of talk. You downsize ALL your expectations…All of these things can be done outside the monastery walls… But the main thing I learned in the monastery is that the hardest thing to do is – nothing.
RG: To do nothing!?!
RZ: When I first arrived at the monastery in India the Abbot, Bede Griffiths, said, “Your job is to do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Let your soul rest – for at least a week.”
RG: No TV, no phone calls, no talking, no reading,
RZ: no nothing. No distractions whatsoever. Just give yourself time for your body and soul to find each other again… Six months later, when I first entered the Buddhist monastery in Thailand, they told me exactly the same thing. Do nothing. Follow your breathing. That’s it. Don’t talk. Don’t read. Don’t watch TV or listen to the radio. Do nothing. It was rough. Very rough. Nothing to distract me from my self, and all my various fears, and memories of loss. After a few days most people broke down in tears. This thing of letting your body and soul find each other again is very very difficult to do.
RG: There are thousands of spiritual leaders who can lead you on a course of spiritual pilgrimage if you desire.
RZ: That’s not our expertise. In fact, I think we can safely say that we distrust most of them. Most of them seem to be selling some certain package of beliefs. They want you to become a Buddhist or a Baptist or bullfighter.
RG: That’s not our thing.
RZ: But what they are ALL correct about is: you need to step outside the world created by the invisible corporate alien, and give your soul time to find your body again. Personally, I believe that life will lead you, if you allow it to. If you get out of Its way. Personally, I believe that God will lead you, if you ask Him to. If you get out of His way.
RG: A Sufi mystic once said: the wise man battles his own ego, the fool battles everyone else’s.
RZ: The global corporate agenda is about control and materialism… The female agenda is about control and materialism. The Marxist agenda is about control and materialism. All of these are deadly to male soul. We must stand apart from them, step away from them, for sanity’s sake.
RG: The problem is the same for all of us.
RZ: But the solution is different for each of us. We each have our own path to discover. Yours is there, waiting for you.
RG: Someway, somehow, tomorrow, by allowing your soul to catch up with your body, you can find a way to implement the idea that
RZ AND RG together???: Less is MORE.
RG: email us
RZ: go to therudeguy.com and happyfool.org
RG: Buy a book. Make a donation. Throw us a bone
RZ: We need to know if anybody’s listening.
RG: This is The Rude Guy. We’ll be back. Stay strong. Don’t let anybody intimidate you. Don’t let anybody shame you. No more bullshit. That’s our motto…. No more BULLssshhhiiittt.
Ahhhh, feels a little better already.