This post doesn’t really have anything to do with what this site is about.
Sometime during your childhood you realise that Santa Claus and hobbits aren’t really real. A bit later, maybe in your twenties, you work out that Marx asked the right questions, but might not have hit upon the right answers.
Advancing age brings further bitter-sweet advances in maturity. I had just such a moment today.
Merlin Mann ruthlessly strips away a myth that has sustained me for many years. I have always believed that the Fisher Space Pen is the archetypal example of American extravagance and waste, the icon of a culture gone mad with abundance.
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Additionally, I’ve heard that another one of the hazards of the pencil is that it’s flammable.
One of the other perks of the space pen is that it writes in extreme cold too. (this could be nice for space people) Being able to write vertical (rather than just upside down) is also very nice for technical people who find themselves standing up next to lots of walls and racks and not many tables.
Note: all of this information from Merlin Mann comes with every Space Pen. I just think people choose to interpret it strangely… Or they just refuse to spend $15 and try it out. (it would be nice if there was a fine tip version… I think that some German company offers refills for it that are fine tip)
Hmmmm…. Now that I know Space Pens are not evil personified, perhaps I should buy one and check it out for myself.
Marx was wrong? Perhaps the cycle is to read Marx (Karl, not Groucho, though I rank them equally in the scheme of world history), then believe Marx, then listen to the right-wing criticism of Marx, then abandon Marx, then grow up larer to re-consider Marx, then settle in to an understanding that Marx was right–just how to apply his principles is the crux of the problem with socialism. “The devil is in the details” as they say, and dumping Marx into a country such as Russia which seems to have had an eternal history of exploitation and abuse of ordinary citizens did not fare well.
I’d move from the USA to Norway, a socialist/Marxist state, except I just don’t want to freeze my butt off. Norway is sometimes ranked using tangible and not-so-measurable factors as the “best” country on the planet. In terms of the overall economic wealth, personal health, and happiness of the citizens.
So, maybe Marx was right after all, but few schools in the US offer meaningful discussions about what constitutes a free, happy, and healthy society. For all the hoopla about the US, our government throws away such a vast quantity of money on war that (the money spent on the war in Iraq alone could wipe out world-wide starvation, according to the UN) our own standard of living continues to degrade. One could cogently argue that capitialism and the American experiment failed. We live by the myth of the entrepreneur. “Each of us could be a Bill Gates worth 250 billion, if we only got the right break tomorrow.”
So, just as we might do well to re-assess the role of the Space Pen, tossing out Marxism as you did in an off-the-cuff remark perhaps is worthy of deeper discussion in some other forum.
As you say, this is not really the place, but as I read your comment, I think that we are largely in agreement. The Norwegian Labour party
, with its social democratic platform, is a kind of living testimony to the balanced view that Marx asked the right questions but might not have hit upon the right answers.