Success

"To get all that money you must be dull enough to want it."
G.K. Chesterton
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/chesterton-to-get-all-that-money-you.html

"The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word "success" - is our national disease." William James

"The Love Of Money Is The Root Of All Evil" - An Open Invitation To Christian Conservatives

https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-love-of-money-is-root-of-all-evil.html 

Thomas Merton was once asked to write a chapter for a book entitled "Secrets of Success."  He replied: "If it so happened that I had once written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again.  If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this:  Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing:  success." 

"The secret to success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you can do anything."

Television executive counseling newcomer Daniel Schorr, 1953

Bob Dylan On Money And Success

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/12/bob-dylan-on-money-and-success.html

"Those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.  And, inasmuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People.  We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven.  We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity.  We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no nation has ever grown.  But we have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.  Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming an preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!  It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.... I do by this proclamation designate and set apart the 30th day of April, 1863 as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer." Abraham Lincoln

Without mindfulness, the tyranny of the "Disjointed Moment" binds us to the daemons of fashion, fatuity and dispirited physicality. Burdened by the claustrophobic crush of materialist immediacy, we accumulate tokens of "success," slowly coming to believe (whether consciously or not) that "s/he who dies with the most toys wins."

Alan Archibald

Underneath the dragon's  hoard -- never put to good use -- lies someone's skull.

The following essay introduces my legacy website, "Apokatastasis." 

http://alanarchibald.homestead.com/Index.html

       

        Herbert Hoover would be proud. There's a chicken in every pot.

We delight in our possessions --- homes, cottages, cars, boats, appliances, electronic gadgetry. 

We get and beget. We plan the future.

We're confident "the economy" will produce an uninterrupted supply of creature comforts.

      

No sooner did we achieve "Freedom from Want" than our determination to "acquire more" became a patriotic obligation. America specializes in the fabrication of want: we have made wantoness a cornerstone of culture.

We are at ease with greed, gluttony, lust and anger, and no long question the re-classification of these vices as virtues. We strike religious poses but live by "bread alone," contemning visions that rattle the box of materialism.

Driven by compulsory consumption, prosperity endangers survival. 

Another millenium is presumed possible. But at what cost?

Climatological patterns shift. Ice shelves dwindle. Coastal waters surge. Aerial photos of Ganges' headwaters reveal negligible snow-fields where glaciers sprawled 40 years ago. At the turn of the 20th century, ocean-going ships sailed up the Rio Grande. By Spring, 2001, a sand bar blocked the river's egress to the Gulf of Mexico. Zoologists define the present era as "a blow-out extinction event." Field biologists refer to their work as "documenting the decline."

Ultra-violet radiation scorches the collective psyche. Kids rarely "go out" to play: fretful parents see the sun as an enemy.

Our retreat from "nature" is not complete, but we are oddly eager to enclose ourselves in "the air-conditioned nightmare," to insist on personal "comfort zones" hemmed in by increasingly stringent conditions.

"The fire next time..."

 

Amidst the unexpected gaiety of slow-motion apocalypse, it's difficult to see the road ahead. Surrounded by labor-saving devices, we lack leisure to examine our lives.

How did we get here? 

Ultimately, history is an outgrowth of principle, and the principle we hold most dear is that "the business of America is business."

Busy-ness pervades our lives.

Obsessive accomplishment is the chief means by which humans secure personal validation in spiritually vapid cultures. We pride ourselves on "notable careers" and "professional achievement," but find our families in disarray, our friendships on "hold," a chorus of discomfiting voices whispering in the night.

Meaningful communities have been replaced by jejune networks. We collude in the creation of atomizing structures, soborned by Systems that require depersonalization as a pre-requisite for employment.

Our dedication to "busy-ness and accomplishment" starts early. K-12 schooling trains us to "stay on task," to focus minutely on our daily rounds, to assume that the unquestioned  (and unquestionable) sub-systems we serve, "somehow" manage to further "the good." We are taught to be pliant agents of corporate/collectivist effort. Our "educational" structures devalue each individual's genius so we enter the world hollow people, ill-prepared to create our own work in the world. We are pressed into service by hapless institutional agendas and labor submissively at "shadow work" --- dedicating ourselves to sound and fury signifying precious little.

We emphasize the transcendental importance of "choice," chthonically suspicious we've surrendered every meaningful choice to merchants, mercenaries and plutocrats.

Always, the tide of busy-ness justifies our ignorance of collusion.

Addressing the United Nations, Czech leader Vaclav Havel declared that "consciousness is prior to being." Whether Havel's assessment is accurate or not, his observation recalls the possibility that contemplative repose is -- "in the ordained scheme of things" -- prior to meaningful achievement.

Philosophically, we subscribe to utilitarianism, a spiritless world view exacerbated by Yankee ingenuity, propelled by our self-justifying determination "to get the job done," "to subdue the wilderness," to achieve "manifest destiny" (recently re-christened "Globalization.") Often, our hyperactivity reduces to meddlesomeness. We pretend to do "good" while denying the mutual exclusivity of peace and compulsion.

The upshot of our unsettling haste is permanent pre-occupation and the ubiquitous urge to go faster. We want things "done yesterday" --- a tautly-strung fixation that pre-empts meaningful relationship with the living moment. We cannot sit still. We fidget. We cling and grasp, refusing to let go. America has become the land of "stuff, more stuff and where the hell am I going to store the stuff?" In the end, salvation depends more on "undoing" than "doing," more on renunciation than acquisition. The greatest make do with least.

         (See "The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies," by Robert E. Lane, Yale University, 2000)

It is becoming apparent that compulsive busyness is not the path to "salvation," but the cornerstone of personal dis-integration, social havoc and planetary despoliation.

We have sacrificed the context of meaning for the content of consolation, and dote on the latter to stonewall the former.

It is important -- perhaps urgent -- that we take time to meditate, deliberate, and articulate our "findings."

Without mindfulness, the tyranny of the "Disjointed Moment" binds us to the daemons of fashion, fatuity and dispirited physicality. Burdened by the claustrophobic crush of materialist immediacy, we accumulate tokens of "success," slowly coming to believe (whether consciously or not) that "s/he who dies with the most toys wins."

Apokatastasis explores alternatives to the existing "world order" aptly described by John Paul II as "a culture of death."