The conflict of the current political world in America can be defined thus: there are two groups which have conflicting definitions of freedom.
One group, I will call them group A, feels that freedom is to be in possession of a goal of some kind and have the power and ability to pursue that goal to success. This is like a sailing ship with a rudder. The rudder and the sails give the ship tools with which to use the sea and the wind to steer and propel it toward a goal.
The other, group B, feels that pursuing some goal is missing the point of life entirely; life is only to experience the moment, total aimlessness with a happy feeling, for every moment until death (whenever that may be). They can be comparable to a raft which has no rudder and no sail; the passenger merely lays on his back and drifts forever, caring nothing about where he is or where he is going so long as right now he is happy.
Obviously if we think about it, group A is more likely to actually be happy and live a long time, because a ship with a rudder and a sail will take them across the sea and get them out of the searing-hot sun to a place with fresh food and water as quickly as possible. On the other hand, group B’s raft is going to float around like a tiny island in the middle of a desert for only a short while until the unhappy, scorched, and extremely bored passenger perishes and dies.
Group A is known for their forethought, their ability to plan, think, succeed, and take care of themselves. They are self-motivated and always involved in new progress. Group B is known for their reliance on plain stupid mysticism that makes no rational sense, hedonism, and the ‘wounded beggar’ trick to stay alive. They are beggars and borrowers. They are a drain and parasite who slows progress in the society around them. In short, all the guys on rafts are always giving the guys on ships guilt-trips so the guys on ships will keep throwing down food and water and sunblock so these raft people don’t just all die. And the ship people keep doing it; because they have all been taught, ‘crossing the sea is hard. When someone asks for help, never ever refuse them, because someday you might need help yourself.’
When boiled down, every kind of person can fit into one of these two categories. Is he a merry rogue? He is a raft person. The philosophy of the raft, otherwise known as the bohemian and other more infamous titles I won’t bother to list, is that anything goes. As long as you continue to remain free from all ties and entanglements, any method of securing your freedom and continued existence in your happy moment is allowable. This includes betrayal, sabotage, lies, murder, anything. And no matter how ‘noble’ a raft person believes they are, at one point or another it’s guaranteed they will at some stage sink to the lowest levels to cut a clinging rope. Their very religion of hedonism insists they do so, for they must never be bound to any obligation or forced to think too deeply, or they might jeopardize the Happiness of the Moment.
Because raft people don’t later remember their evil act doesn’t mean anything; raft people train themselves to have notoriously short memories so that they can continue to experience the moment of bliss without reference to future or past. Thinking of the future (how they are going to eat and how they are going to survive) is too scary, and thinking of the past (all of their criminal actions) is too humiliating.
Raft people assume that ship people are miserable; because raft people believe fervently that their lifestyle defines true happiness. Since the ship people are their opposite, that means the ship people must also be the opposite of happy. Of course, raft people don’t realize they are building their argument on a flawed foundation: they are assuming they are both free, and happy. From a ship person’s point of view, a hapless castaway trapped on a little raft with no food, no water, no way off, and nowhere to go is in a miserable jail. Not only that, but who can be happy when they are that sunburned? But perhaps the rafters only are able to tell when they are ‘happy’ by hovering so close to misery, that any slight relief seems to them like feelings of ecstasy.
Raft people like to lecture ship people on how the ship people should become just like them; because after all, you see, the raft people have proven that you can successfully drift on a raft all your life just bumping along, doing whatever makes you happy in the moment without any forethought or hindsight. By nature of their peculiar blindness, of course, the raft people cannot see that they are actually parasites living off the ship people, and if the ship people weren’t so loyal and reliable, hardworking and forward-thinking, they would not have enough supplies to share with both their own crew and the hundreds of stray rafters they come across with every voyage.
It is no wonder, then, that ship people don’t listen to the nonsense of raft people. No ship person who has spent his life supplying not only his own needs but also making up for the lack of the rafters around him, who are bleeding him dry, could ever conscience becoming such a useless entity himself. He knows the cost, which the raft people have never counted. He would feel so guilty that he is forcing other ship people to take him on as yet another charity case that he would be unable to live with himself.
But raft people have never faced this dilemma. They feel absolutely no guilt at their shameless usury, because they have trained themselves not to think too far into the future. Perhaps their lack of the simple and satisfying ability to plan — a skill which in itself dissolves worry and fear and makes the future bright and happy — has sentenced them to their pathetic fate. Perhaps it is a purposeful refusal to plan which has done so, or an unreasonable conviction that only evil awaits them if they should ever think of the future, kind of like the superstition that if you think of something too much it must happen.
Whatever the failing, raft people are crowding up the seas in these great and awesome days, only moments before the year of fire and emergency. The first law of emergency is this: he who is fit will survive. The weak, the sick, the lame, the parasite will all be washed away by the simple logistics of calamity. Only those who can run will escape the falling building. Only those who can swim can stay afloat in the flood. Only those with a sail and a rudder can remain stable even on tempest-tossed stormy seas.
When catastrophe hits our world on a global scale all at once, Armageddon won’t be enough to destroy the earth as silly rafter-type doomsayers like to preach. (Rafters, without any ability to realistically gauge and perceive the future, always blow things wildly out of proportion; but, poor things, they can’t help themselves). The earth is a very big, very strong structure and will survive just fine. It’s survived many catastrophes like this before without so much as a few new rift valleys and maybe a slight shift in climate.
No, the ‘world’ that will be destroyed is not the physical earth. It is the world of the Rafters, a world which allows them to exist. When only the fit will survive, and only the fore-thinkers and the planners, the ones who are able to set goals and reach them, the ones who have realistic perceptions of the sea and the supplies needed to cross it, will be able to adapt to the earth’s new climate for generations afterward, this hedonistic and foolish idea that ‘freedom is aimlessness’ will vanish even from the memory of the human race.
We won’t believe in the future that people could have thought something so blatantly stupid. Our children will probably laugh at us when we attempt to tell them about it.
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