Morning Comrades.
Not wanting to bug anyone out but I spent a few hours today actively ignoring my Son’s Christmas list ( get real my dude ) and pondering what to actually get him that will not only make him happy, but, wishfully thinking, will also have the potential to have a lasting positive effect on him.
Of course, my immediate thought turned to books but anyone with children, mine being 13, knows that getting them to engage with them can be a challenge. I was an avid reader at 13 but most of the fiction I was devouring at the time really doesn’t hold that much relevance these days and then it struck me, it’s time to get Terry Pratchett into his world and hope for the best.
I was a massive problem for everyone at age 13, there is no need to sugarcoat it. Undiagnosed ADHD, authority issues, trust issue, police records, you know it, I was neck deep in trouble. Luckily, I had a couple of teachers in High School that channeled a lot of that rage into, at the least, being academic and part of what genuinely caught me in this time that partly radicalized me and created a construct to my rage was Terry Pratchett.
Now, I don’t have to explain anything to anyone that knows his work. For those that don’t, his stories take places on Discworld and to this day is the best work in regards to radical humanism edged with anti-authoritarianism and more in science fiction. It’s absolutely brilliant and helpful for anyone, no matter the age, but it specifically shaped much of early days of radical direct action.
Two concepts, that are directly linked, dependent and related to each other from his work are these:
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play
Directly related from this theory then comes the idea of Militant Decency.
Militant decency is the idea that you can look at how terrible the world — socioeconomic injustice, racial inequity, the general cruelty and horribleness that humans perpetrate on each other — and get deeply, intensely angry. In fact, you should get angry — there’s a lot of horrible stuff out there going on every day.
The next step in militant decency, however, is turning that anger into energy for doing the right thing and making the world a better place. Without knowing it at the time, this lay the foundation for my work, before theory, in not only channeling this intense rage that so often ended in useless physical alterations but never, at least seemingly, changed anything. Pratchett’s work, specifically the stories that revolved around Vimes’ ( the character who pinned the above theory ) and how he acted in the face of injustice, specifically injustice based on economics - ahem - shaped how I wanted to engage with it all. Militant Decency then allowed me to acknowledge that this rage was justified but that it had to be used in ways that made sense, not only for myself but for the world around.
I never understood that to mean to not be angry, quite the opposite and the more I learned the angrier I became, however, keeping the idea in my head that most reasons for my anger were the result of systemic inequality, rather than individual purpose allowed me, mostly to this day, to be as supportive and purposeful in my day to day engagement with my world. Additionally, this allows me to focus my rage on the people that created this system of inequality and injustice and figure out ways to fight that. Of course, like any teenager at the time, this was 1993 for all that matters, studying Rage Against The Machine’s lyrics added extra context to this idea:
It's set up like a deck of cards
They're sendin' us to early graves for all the diamonds
They'll use a pair of clubs to beat the spades
With poetry, I paint the pictures that hit
More like the murals that fit
Don't turn away, get in front of it
Brotha, did ya forget ya name?
Did ya lose it on the wall playin Tic-Tac-Toe?
Yo, check the diagonal, three brothers gone, come on
Doesn't that make it three in a row?
(Anger is a gift)
Freedom. Yeah, Right.
-RATM
Anything I can do to be decent to someone means I’m fighting back against the cruelty and awfulness that permeates existence these days. Anything I can do to fight injustice, right wrongs, and improve the world turns my anger into action.
Terry Pratchett helped me way before any Marxist Theory did. Figured passing this on to the spawn and yourself is a good way to spend a Wednesday morning.
Yours, never going quietly into the night,
V