One of my sisters loves to quote Jerry Seinfeld, and one of the bits I most enjoyed being introduced to was a contrast drawn between the comedian’s life priorities at different times of day. “That’s morning guy’s problem,” he recalled declaring about his future self in making an unwise decision before bed.

On Insularity

During one of the most creative periods of my life, I discovered that there are three outward pursuits that, if integrated into my daily experience, help me feel fed, productive, and present in a deeply satisfying way: making art, caring for animals, and engaging in athletics. Although the last was greatly enhanced by my membership at a gym that prioritized running achievements, I learned quickly that it was still only me in the moment who could decide what I should and could do on any particular day.

I laughed when pondering the introductory anecdote recently as, so often, the night before a timed benchmark measurement, I found it easy to reason that my plan would be to run, for example, just the same way I did the last time a particular distance was timed – just a little bit faster – only to declare all of a few seconds into my actual treadmill session that the sitting down version of myself knew absolutely nothing. Only when running would I make decisions about running.

I do believe experiences like this are relevant to the distinctly different policy positions taken (especially as media corporation dominance has catalyzed our recent transition to an appearances-based informational infrastructure) by those directly and those indirectly involved in various public affairs matters. While I do not believe it was always the case, today, talk is cheap.

For much of the history of the world, it has been at least as possible to accumulate power by subtracting from others rather than by adding any sort of net value to mankind. And, for awhile, it seemed this tendency was bound to stop – and quickly – with the advent of the Internet and social media as no thinking person would stand for it, once exposed. But it seems that this advance – both for the world and for logic itself – has been stalled by the defection of media corporations as a bloc who have simultaneously dropped the mantle of journalistic responsibility without announcement and made the world temporarily unsafe for real journalists, seem either unwilling or unable to recognize in themselves the ability to survive without resorting to extraction.

This seems to have resulted in what is often termed a post-truth, but might better be termed a post-word, era. But, even if deprived of a normal communications apparatus (and I mean this in the geometric sense of the word), it is still possible for citizens to correspond via action.

On Arrangements

For well over a decade, tensions seem to have intensified over concerns that not all business configurations – and particularly those with Wall Street ties – operate transparently enough. While, as many people articulate, often, it is absolutely necessary to take a moderate position between advocating for immediate and total change within these organizations and being complacent with stagnation, I believe far too little attention has been paid to hindrances to their evolution. Although certainly not without exception, by and large, the stock market system seems to have historically tended much more to enrich the corrupt and impoverish the ethical, rather than the other way around. While this is certainly (or, at least, hopefully) changing, I believe a bottleneck to real reform has been a reticence to name the unique nature of the journalism industry’s relationship with the stock market and the connectedness between this relationship and many of the country’s most stubborn problems.

Everyone agrees that it is the people who add creativity, courage, honesty, ingenuity, and grit – those who could be termed the country’s adders – who should be rewarded for their contributions, and that systems that only manipulate value for personal gain should not.

Just as important as disentangling the why and the what of what is termed “wokeness” – an idea, which, at first, promoted independent thinking toward the end of more just outcomes for all but which was soon co-opted and transformed into what may better be termed sleeping pills by those organizations most invested in perpetuating injustice – is, I believe, identifying the reason these were allowed to become conflated in the first place. While I disagree – vehemently – with our former president’s assertion that the country’s journalism sector is an “enemy of the people,” I am not sure that this industry’s relationship with the stock market should be exempted from such labeling.

This is as the current conflict is arguably not really between people of different races (although racial prejudice is and has long been a major problem); and it is not a conflict between intellectual and manual laborers (for all we know, William Shakespeare wrote King Lear while laying down on the Elizabethan version of a La-Z-Boy; creative work is, after all, some of the most taxing and important in the world). And it is not between adders and rearrangers of value as rearrangement, at times, is needed. It is not even, arguably, between adders and investors. I believe that today’s principal rivalry is between the country’s adders and speculation itself and that the remedy will be the disentanglement of the journalism sector and stock market.

On Frames

As I have written before, it at least seems to me that much of the frustration of the constituency that could be termed the country’s adders – which include, potentially, everyone – stems from a lack of acknowledgment in public dialogues. And speculative corporations’ current strategy of isolating and buying off former adders is not helping.

For their part, corporations seem increasingly intent on confounding problems inherent in their business models by attempting to conceal them within debates about racial divides, which, while an enormously important topic in urgent need of addressing, does not alone get at the heart of the problem the increasingly conglomerated journalism sector’s relationship with the stock market presents. (I do, however, believe that there are topics that seem to require national – and sometimes, even international – attention in order to be solved, and much of these organizations’ recent work, even if despite themselves, has done much good.)

Maybe Biden’s answer of simply making everyone effectively stockholders of the stock market by raising corporate taxes across the board and raising expectations of such entities to better center concepts of equal opportunity – is right. But I still believe this will be nearly impossible without a more functional journalism sector and that the reasons for such change need to be articulated.

Without such acknowledgement and change, particularly as many oligarchs and marketers seem content at the moment to allow the way forward to become increasingly overgrown, even when we can no longer see, it will be important, I believe, to listen more soberly to the persistent request of a republic full of adders: “don’t tread on me.”