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Carlo Federico's MANIFESTO

PART II

13.

 

Let's wake up, my friends, and laugh. Look around, how many laughable subjects are engaging our sleepy fellows: Collectivism, Egalitarianism, Cradle-to-Grave versus Selfishness, Inequality...
Selfishess, again and again. Why not the Pursuit of Reason, instead of pursuing the impossible unselfishness? Because Reason - along with its by-product Wisdom - is, like Beauty, in the eye of the beholder. So the pursuit of Reason is a long way ahead, and we stay with the Selfishness isuue. For how long? you know the opera ain't over until the fat lady sings. But we the Rich are sure that unselfishness doesn't exist, and granted sensible selfishness is the only bulwark against the dangers of dishonest hypocrisy. Remember Chaucer: For ye be lyke the sweynte cat that wolde have fissh; but wostow what? He wolde nothing wete his cloves!
And Equality? Where on earth did or does it exist? I am not equal to my brother: he is energetic and successful, I am lazy and easy-going. My kids are different each from the other and health, IQ, firmness of will and any other feature in them are different. One is good at school, the other at games, and some other apparently good at nothing. And what music might ever come out from an orchestra where the gifted musicians and the inept ones are all accepted as equals? The Proudhon idea of granting to everybody equal opportunities is appealing, though one must have a heart of stone to read certain melodramatic declarations (by persons with both feet firmly planted in the air).... without laughing. While their pronouncement is long on good intentions, it is so helplessly short on detail.

STOP. Here comes a priority e-mail saying, in a rather flaming style, that all this is junk. All this pretence to laugh about things which are serious. People suffering hardship and injustice are no laughable matter.
«Sir» concludes my unknown correspondent «I understand you are a character in which arrogance, conceit and superficiality are each struggling to take the upper hand. You think and sit. Mostly sit. Your treatment of the poor inheriting the Earth is superbly stupid. You keep confusing yourself with God and you don't know when to step aside and give God a chance».

All right. Thank you. You are helping me to understand that something else has to be discussed.

All right. Let's go back to my jocular words about the Poor inheriting the earth. Now: a Wanting Person, in our own Rich vocabulary, is a Poor, a person that we deliberately ignore because, as our Manifesto clearly announces, we the Rich do not want to mingle with the Poor's frenzy to acquire, to amass, to gain - the Earth or anything else. We, the wise Rich, just feel content with what we have got to be and here we stay, joyfully wrapped in our shell. The silly opinions of the Poor, of the glutton covetous around us, their suggestions, their plans and contrivances are met by us with total indifference - short of contempt. We don't care to have a world to win (still less the polluted Earth to conquer) because we already are endowed with our inner world, we own it and that's the reason of our serene joy.
Yet, as the priority e-mail I got just now shows very clearly, many of our colleagues the Rich have their inner peace and self-gratification rooted precisely in their "outward" activity, in being involved in humanitarian actions, indeed in helping the "poor", participating in their very quest for more prosperity - perhaps, horribile dictu, even subscribing to some of those Organizations which are inherently repellent to the genuine Rich. Are we expected to judge these numerous colleagues as naive heretics, and their hurly-burly just as trivial means to achieve some sort of frivolous juvenile complacency?
I hear a roaring consensus coming up: "Of course, we the rich, the fortunate, MUST do something to help those unfortunate. It is a shame, such an injustice. Any person of common sense and good will can have no doubt about where the inner stance of us the Rich must drive ourselves.
We, who have been fortunate to be born among comfortable walls, where we even got the undeserved privilege of a humanistic education that gives us taste for inner richness in its best manifestation, altruism, we must take the leadership to curb all wrong..."

All right. Let's talk about that in PART III of this essay of mine. I warn you: be prepared to read some filthy words!

(13.To be continued)


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