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O'Malley's Best Eager Slavery The Temple officials set Jesus up cleverly. If he says, pay taxes, tax-poor people will hate him for a weak-kneed collaborator; if he says, “no,” he’s in trouble with the Romans. But Jesus deftly eludes the trap: “Pay Caesar what’s Caesar’s; pay God what’s God’s.”Clever, Jesus, but not too helpful. Just where, specifically, does Caesar legitimately call the shots, and where do we have to stand up and say, “Thus far; no further”? In Jesus’ day, Caesar’s word was law. Play fast and loose with it, and you ended up in a quite distasteful stone prison, or on the slave block, or–at worst–on a cross. In our day, Caesar’s imperial control is in the hands of something called “society.” A student once wrote, “Society tells us we have to sacrifice our own happiness and, more importantly, our own principles and values in order to maintain lifestyles and excesses beyond our daily needs. Through no fault of our own, we yearn for more and more because of the constant bombardment of advertisements through the media.” Unquote. No one would deny that complaint is pretty common. Conform or be exiled. Wear the “wrong” kinds of clothes or lack either a cellphone or an I-pod or set your sights higher than money-fame-sex-power, and you might as well be a leper or in the galleys. But I have a few problems with that. First, if this “society” decides what’s right and wrong and then militates our choices and goals, where the hell is this society’s office? Where can I go to lodge a contrary opinion? Romans could assassinate Caesar, but I can’t assassinate “society.” Second, if “society” decides what’s right and wrong, then it was morally right to kill Jews in Nazi Europe because Nazi society said it was right. Third, I’ll admit we’re all to some degree victims of years and years of relentless consumerist brainwashing, but why do so many describe themselves as helpless victims, like someone with diabetes or epilepsy? Saying “society forces us” at least seems to imply we have no choice. If you didn’t pay your taxes, Caesar tossed you into prison; if we don’t compete and consume, society won’t let us feel normal. But we do have a choice: Don’t pay your taxes and choose prison; don’t compete-and-consume and choose to be a different kind of winner from all the brainless couch potatoes. That mindless “society-forces-us” alibi, which is surely pervasive, is the same kind of self-defensive, cowardly, numb-headed crap you hear from people who say, “Oh, well, I guess I’m just a procrastinator” or “I’m just shy and reserved; that’s how I was brought up” or “I just come out swinging; that’s the way I am.” They blame their faults on their personalities instead of blaming themselves for not making the effort to change their personalities, to take themselves out of the hands of their own tyrannical moods. In the same way, we lay blame for our own lust and greed and mediocrity and passivity on society. The phrase that rankles me most from that student essay is, “Through no fault of our own.” If I do something wrong, or if I’m a tangle of lousy habits and screwed up values, it’s got to be someone else’s fault. Universal victimization. Bertrand Russell said, “Many men would rather die than think; most of them do.” And Dostoevsky nailed it: “There is no gift human beings will more willingly surrender than the freedom with which the poor wretches are born.” Because freedom takes thinking, and thinking takes effort, and effort is not only painful but risky. That’s why so little thinking goes on. Society tells us we have to give up our happiness and our principles and values? And we do it? In exchange for what? I have a hunch that what society offers as the road to happiness is–perversely–achieved only at the price of genuine happiness. In another paper, I’ve asked both adults and youngsters, if they had a choice between a job they loved (a forest ranger, teaching impaired kids) that paid only enough for the family to get buy or a job that paid 80 grand a year on an assembly line making plastic vomit for novelty stores, which would they take? Almost invariably they take the deadly, high-paying job “so I can give my family the good things in life.” First, they’ve never once even questioned what the hell “the good things in life” really are. Second, they’re incapable of seeing their family would have to see them, miserable, all week. See what I mean? Thinking that’s not thinking at all but stimulus-response. A very wealthy man came to me on a retreat once. He was absolutely wretched; he despised his job; and his around-the-clock anger at it was threatening his marriage. He was making $90,000–and this was 30 years ago. I asked if he ever remembered being happy at work, and he said, “Of course. At the job I was promoted from to this one. I couldn’t wait to get to work on Monday.” Well, could you go to your boss, thank him for the promotion, but ask for your old job back? He looked at me, dumbfounded. I asked how much he was making back then, and he said “$75,000.” Again the bewildered look. Finally, he said, “You’re asking me to give up 15 grand.” And I said, “Is it making you happy? Is it worth your marriage?” He seemed baffled by my naivete. He came back again the next day for another hour of the same go-round, and when he left he still couldn’t choose between 15 grand and happiness. Scary, isn’t it? We could become as witlessly enslaved to “what society says” as that. And even more aberrantly in our time, you can’t be enslaved without your own cooperation. There’s an oxymoron for you: eager slavery. And very, very few seem reluctant to accept it, and no one at all seems to be shocked that it’s such an appealing option. Yep. Scary.
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Copyright © 2008, McQuaid Jesuit |
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