- What happened?
- I find myself in fundamental agreement with the Messiah, the Guru.
- The guy you live with who gives away money. Which is it? Messiah or Guru?
- Doesn't matter.
- He invites crazy prostitutes over to the house he shares with his demented mother who attacks you when you try to leave in the morning. She hides things, forgets where she hid them, accuses you and everyone else of stealing from her. What are you accused of stealing now?
- The Jewish moneylender in The Merchant Of Venice cries out, "My daughter! My Ducats!" In modern day Beverly Hills the Jewish matriarch screams, "My chicken leg! My peanut!"
- And what is this agreement you mentioned?
- The Messiah has method behind his madness: every week he gets his allowance, and within a day or two has given it all away to the desperate his sees on the street. He does this, he says, deliberately without knowing or wanting to know the people he is trying to help: he is explicit, in theory and practice, that he acts only by rule.
- What rule?
- The Jewish god's rules.
- And now you think that is not madness? Do good without caring about people? You've said you believe it is impossible to do good without knowing the people you are trying to help and that it impossible to know the people you are trying to help unless you care for them. Have you changed your mind?
- No. This morning the crazy mother went as usual on the attack, fists flying. I didn't respond. I looked at her quietly in a way I can't recall ever looking at anyone before in my life.
- You looked without caring?
- That's right. And like the Messiah, the lack of caring went along with a strong awareness of the rules of conduct I had to use in the circumstances.
- What were they?
- Avoidance of harm, of course, and a quick end to the situation. But this is not what amazed me. The Guru...
- Call him The Messiah.
- The Messiah considers himself dispossessed of property. Lodged more or less permanently in the house there is also another old woman, the crazy mother's widowed sister-in-law from the old country. She sits on the couch in the living room eighteen hours a day, making admiring noises or laughing hysterically the several hundred times a day the mother tells the same two stories, how the Messiah when he was eight years old went to the bizarre with her and demanded she give money to a beggar, then demanded she give more, and how the old tyrant of the old country was good, and the new gang of tyrants bad. This widowed sister-in-law doesn't move a muscle when she sees the mother go at me. At the end of the eighteen hours of sitting and laughing hysterically at the mother's stories she lowers herself to the horizontal on the same couch, talks herself to sleep and goes on talking in her sleep. She says she has a house in the old country, but apparently to save money she rents it out and camps in our Beverly Hills flop house. The mother is the tyrant in control of the family property. We've talked about democracy. From the beginning in Ancient Athens democracy relied on citizens having property. No property, no democracy. No democracy, no rules of cooperation.
- What rules then?
- The minimal.
- Don't do harm, and keep your eyes open for a better opportunity.
- Yes.
- The Messiah's religion is the religion of the dispossessed. And you get down on your knees to practice it with him when his mother attacks.
- Something like that. For example, yesterday: to get out the door I have to turn two lock bars and the door knob. It takes a couple of seconds, seconds I don't have when the old woman is screaming at me, "My chicken leg! My peanut!" so what I did was turn back, reared up on my hind legs and roared at her like a lion.
- And that worked?
- Like a charm. Escape successfully executed, I went over to Starbucks, struck up a conversation with a man in his sixties. We commiserated on the economic situation. He was a retired architect. Medical expenses from a heart attack had ruined him, wiped out his assets. Our county was entering into an unprecedented era of extreme poverty, a million people sleeping on the streets every day, nature was being destroyed by pollution and global climate change. He worried for the future of his grandchildren. I said:
- I'm not worried. I'd like to see the world go down.- You are crazy.
- You're crazy. Why don't you go away, to Cuba? You can teach there, find a woman.
- How am I supposed to do that?
- What's stopping you?
- Money.
- Alright, I see. You could go to Yosemity, sit under the giant Redwood trees.
- With no money.
- You have no money at all?
- Even if I did, even though I like trees, it could be that I'd find more pleasure in staying put and seeing out the destruction of nature.
- Only a crazy person could talk like that.
- But if I blame Mother Nature for the crime of allowing the human species to persist? Doesn't Mother Nature deserve torture and death for allowing the human species to flaunt its love of death and torture?
- You're crazy.
- I could be detached from my circumstances, wait patiently for improvement, do no harm. Or I could hope that destruction of nature would clear the slate for another better kind of nature and I could do away with detachment and care deeply about what I was doing.
- You're crazy.
- I was playing with the revolutionary mood in which one finds life not worth living and is willing to risk all on the chance of something better. It is our nature as human beings to like each other. And we have a faculty usually called "spirit": as the body has its desires, so we by education and habit develop a "social body", and have desires to protect that social body. If our society attacks us physically and dispossesses materially, that "spirited" faculty of our nature cannot be practiced.
- Thus lack of compassion.
- Yes. The revolutionary mood shows our faculties of desire and thought working in the absence of compassion to remake a social body in which compassion can again be felt.
