So, if I didn’t persuade you that the world is a sh*t show and there is nobody in charge, here is more of the same.
Remember how I was talking about kids sent from workhouses to work in dark satanic mills? Courtesy of John Waller in The Real Oliver Twist?
Well, the kid he based his tale on, one Robert Blincoe, finally got out of the cotton mills in which he was working for over ten years as an indentured apprentice and being beaten and robbed of his youth. So what happened? He got jobs at various spinning mills and ended up in Manchester, where he started a business dealing in “waste cottons.” After a year, in 1818 still in the past Napoleonic War deflation, he started to make a profit.
Wat? This helpless waif, who spend 14 years as a virtual slave, figured out how to set himself up in business? Then at age 26 in 1819 he got married. He signed his name in the register; his bride marked an X.
Wat? This helpless waif, starting out life in a workhouse, could read and write?
I want to make something clear. The Industrial Revolution was taking place in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars in which trade and business and life were warped and plundered by governments financing and fighting a world war. The world was being turned upside-down by wars, revolutions, the rise of factories, steam power, the ongoing agricultural revolution, the rise of capitalism, the spread of European imperialism, you name it.
And yet ordinary people managed to make a life for themselves and wive and thrive, despite the chaos, the cultural revolution, the economic revolution, the political revolutions.
At the same time, at the gym, I am reading lefty David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years so you don’t have to. His basic line is that debt is the equivalent of the ten plagues of Egypt, a veritable worldwide pandemic. It comes along and ruins lives wherever it lands. Right now he’s talking about Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. Even though the chap relieved the Aztecs of all their gold and silver, and enslaved the locals to dig more metal out of his mines, Our Hernán could never keep out of debt.
Well, yes, Davy boy. Isn’t that the way of all gubmints? They get deep in debt and then they turn on the Jewish bankers and accuse them of greed. Meanwhile down on the farm, says Davy, the villagers managed to get on without debt and without money: they trusted each other. Mind you, the men were all patriarchs, so there’s that.
Perfectly true. But the whole point of capitalism is to create a world of trust among people that don’t live side-by-side and where everyone is related to everyone else, and whose reputation is spun daily in the gossip of the women of the village. How do you do trust in the city, or national, or global economy? Well, you have money and debt and limited liability companies, and stock markets, and investors, and you have credit rating agencies that keep an eye on everyone’s trustworthiness. It’s a complete bloody mess, but it works.
And it even allows a former semi-slave millworker to try his hand at the “waste cotton” business.
Underneath the Narrative that we are carefully taught there are all the other stories, stories of birth and death, of cruelty and kindness, of chaos and order. And still the world turns.
Plus, of course, the rather significant fact that all stories are survivor stories. Survivor stories are typically not stories about escaping from the jaws of death like in the movies; they are usually about how nothing happened. My dad, for instance, was too young for World War I and too old for World War II. Nothing happened. I was of military age in the Vietnam era but my boss got me a deferment. Nothing happened.
“And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges”
Or not, we hope.