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KippMuellerSecondPaper 12 - 03 Sep 2012 - Main.EbenMoglen
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META TOPICPARENT | name="SecondPaper" |
Worker Bees | | Her life is stolen, whittled down to a vapid, futile existence. She seeks to get ahead in a game in which the winner loses. | |
< < | "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." | > > | "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
| | Oscar Wilde
Why Doesn't the Worker Bee Revolt? | | And yet it is what we constantly strive for throughout our lives. Ambitions change, but the pursuit of money never wavers. | |
< < | "Money often costs too much." | > > | "Money often costs too much."
| | Ralph Waldo Emerson
Money | | Will we say the same about our lives? Can we? | |
< < | "Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one." | > > | "Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one."
| | Benjamin Franklin | | Professor Moglen,
I would like to continue working on this piece as long as it needs. Thank you! | |
> > |
The extended metaphor seems to me in the end to do more harm than
good for you. The reader doesn't know for more than 400 words which
part of your discussion is figurative and which literal. By the time
you are attributing insect social behavior to "how the worker bee
sees it," one assumes that this is all metaphor and it doesn't matter
whether it is accurate biology. But the further you go the more it
becomes apparent that if the description isn't factually valuable it
isn't really valuable at all. It's moralizing from bee behavior, but
having less to do with bees than, say, Mandeville.
In fact, bee behavior, based on genetic haploidy, has nothing
remotely like primate sociality, let alone human sociality, about it.
The beehive, when human social reformers get around to practicing pop
political economy on it, is a symbol of communism. That's how
Fourier used it, which is where the Mormons picked it up from, using
it everywhere, including the Utah state regalia, to denote
Association, which is the primitive communism Mormonism believes is
divinely commanded, but is in temporary abeyance due to the need to
get along with the gentiles. Like Mr Romney, you seem to imagine
that capitalism is really what communism stands for. Or something.
So I think we could put that all aside, and ask what you're really
writing about. Is it money, or desire? If it is desire, then maybe
we could understand the confusion. People are confused about desire.
Money is one of the things they desire, and because desire is
confusing it is often not clear why the object desired is important,
if indeed it really is. Perhaps by considering money a little less,
the bees not at all, and desire a little more, you could take the
next draft somewhere quite important to you.
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