The Patrons (of Paternalism)

THE PATRONS

(OF PATERNALISM)

The study was complete. Ron Gelding had submitted it to the Peer Review panel, which nit-picked over the data base and the methodology he used. Gelding had used magazine subscriptions , classified ad category numbers, TV and radio ratings, consumer items purchased, plus attendance figures at events, shows, and other public activities as his data from which he abstracted opinions from the people who generated that data. He was found a pattern of thinking as well as behavior, which ‘the peers’ were skeptically and dismissively questioning (that coincided as a corollary to his findings to the caste system of predisposition and susceptibility).

Gelding had found that people exist as tangible and intangible scavengers, much like their pre-historic (as well as historic) ancestors had operated. There were those few, who with the more stringent lack of empathy, had ruthlessly hoarded resources and the physical and ‘economic-political’ access to those resources for their control and manipulation. The next lower sub-class of ‘non-empathy’ were those without the resources for access, but with the skills to achieve a local predominance in their provincial niche. After them were those with an indifferent sense of empathy, which was sentimentally whimsical for the luxury of resources they had managed.

After these former were those inclined to empathy. These were broken down by the breadth of their extended and inclusive circle of empathy. Since this latter group is without resources, tangible or politico-economic, to assist them, their ‘success’ is dependent on the mechanical mental and physical organizational efficiency of their efforts. The degree their training and overall education that has complemented and enhanced that end allows them a degree of self-sufficiency. That self-sufficiency is a dependent function of the actions of the former three classes. That self-sufficiency is a dependent function on its own meta-mechanics of organization and self-training efficiencies. This latter group is working on a double impediment: 1) those who are adverse or indifferent to their state and welfare, plus 2) their own adverse or indifferent states to their own organizational and operational efficiencies, mechanical and physiological.

At its worse, those with the worst efficiencies have turned empathy on its head, so to be so-called, ‘compassionates’, yet enablers of poor to the bad efficiencies in others because of their own degraded and degenerative habits.

Gelding concluded that an economic and learning caste system has been created. Those without the economic, plus political, resources faced a filtering social gauntlet of  adversities for which the few would achieve their aspirations. Of those few, a even less percentage of empathetic compared to the ruthless and callous, due to the hardships encountered.

The Peer-Review group, not wanting to accept the non-egalitarian and pre-determinative conclusions of Gelding, picked at what he chose as his resource base and the data demographics of that resource base. The papers written in response to his submission were condescending and disparaging of his paper’s gravitas.

He had to look for some smaller, lesser known and academically obscure publishers for his findings. There was this one company that was heavily funded and boarded by members of the Plutotarch Group. Ron had moved on to his lectures, knowing that his popularity with the faculty of his department and other academic peers was not as great as that with the students attending his lectures. He was sorting through his mail in his stale-smelling office with a window with the view of the cemetery across the street (a subliminal reminder to him of his career options at the university) when he saw an envelope from Cavalier Publishing. Curious, he opened it.

Providence Publishing, LLC.
166 N. 13th St
East St. Louis, Il 62201
(618) 274-5599
Admin@providencepub.com

Mr Ronald Gelding
Department of Economics
Royal University
Warm Springs, VA 24484

Mr. Gelding,
An associate obtained a transcript of your paper, Economic Castes of the 21st Century. We found it quite interesting and would like you to visit us to discuss its publication.

Please contact us at the number above or by the email address, if you are interested in pursuing our solicitation.

Yours,
Henry Jackson

Gelding was pleased, but knew little about this publisher.  He laid the letter on the middle of his desk, for his attention, the first thing tomorrow. He turned toward the door and left the office. As he came down the iron banister, spiral staircase to the front door he viewed the quadrangle surrounded by the grey-stone and more modern brick buildings. He thought (The blue-nosed mandarins here may have shot him down, but that letter opened this new door of ‘Providence’).

He drove into the driveway of his cottage off Little Back Creek Road, and felt the tension drain from him as he beheld the woods leading down to Little Back Creek to the rear of his land.  The oak and elm trees, mixed in with the pine trees provided an organic cathedral at which his random meditations were taken in like prayers from this wooded surroundings. He liked this solitude away from the cacophony of the posturerers back on campus. He turned on the light to illuminate his living room and moved across the living room to the dining room table chair where he took off and hung his jacket. Turning toward the kitchen, Gelding walked to the refrigerator to get something to drink and see what was there to cook or just snack on. He grabbed the bottle of apple juice as he looked to see what else there was. There was a roll of sliced liverwurst. seeing its possibilities with the tomato, rye bread, and lettuce, plus mayonnaise, Gelding grabbed all four after turning back from the counter where he had placed the apple juice. He placed them on the counter with the apple juice and reached up into the cupboard to grab a glass. It was a tall glass into which he poured the apple juice to within a quarter-inch of the top. He made the liverwurst, tomato, and lettuce sandwich on the rye bread and proceeded to his bedroom where he could eat and watch television until he nodded off into the sleep that he felt on the heels of fatigue that had come over him.

He woke up with the glow of TV illuminating his bedroom. It showed the few artifacts of utility and sentiment setting or hanging in his room. The picture of his ex-wife with him was on his bureau. They were divorced. She had asked for the divorce, which was, by her reasoning, for the lack of his sensitivity. Gelding considered it a cruel irony, that he the social scientist as an undergrad, with a masters in economic-metrics. The masters courses he took as a social enhancer for its status and job potential.He wanted to make himself a better marital candidate. Academia was his compensation for himself, since the grind of the corporate world was too impersonal and dispassionate-a degradation of the sensitivity for which he was being accused of lacking in his wife’s, Rhonda’s, divorce decree. There was an autographed picture of Willie Mays in a Mets uniform. He’d followed Willie’s final years with the Mets from the enchanting tales and replays of Mays when he played with the San Francisco and New York Giants. A lamp, whose base was in the shape of a brass urn, sat on his night stand. It had a NY GIANTS bulb shade on the top. Though living in Virginia, he brought the Yankeeness of his New York background with him. Over by his chest of drawers was a maple antique chair, which had gargoyles  hand carved into the front posts and the tops of the back of the chair. This collage of sentimentalism and iconoclastism was reflective of the person rising in a grog from his bed to lurch his way to the toilet for a whiz. He checked his phone and there was a text from a she-friend, leaving a picture of the Lincoln Memorial from her visit on the National Mall. He smiled, being glad Brandi had shared the joyous zen of her trip with him.
He came back to the bedroom and picked up the remote to channel surf to one of the late night talk shows that he’d watch while eating a light snack before going to bed. The street light on the road in front of his house radiated its glow into his living room allowing Gelding to move across the room and flip the switch to the kitchen. He looked into the frig. Grabbed the bottle of sherry wine and the half-gallon jug of milk. After pouring about three ounces of sherry into the glass tumbler, Ron diluted it with twelve ounces of milk-just filling the plastic tumbler. He put the sherry and milk back into the refrigerator,  went over and flipped the light switch to off and moved across the light silhouetted living room to his TV-screen illuminated bedroom. He sat down and stared at the TV, reading the captions, since he had the sound turned down. He seemed casually disinterested, and more interested in the flavor of the sherry-spiked milk. The events of the day passed through his mind. The meeting with the Department Head  passed through first. The Head was staring at the door waiting for his appearance at the doorway. He waved a hand to the chair to the side of his desk, “Sit down, Ron”. There was a coldness in the Head’s voice. It sent a chill of anticipation down Gelding’s back. “Ron, here are the results of the Peer Review. I’m not going to sugar-coat this. Three of the four members rated your paper low, questioning your conclusion and the demographic samples you used. The sample population they considered was not broad enough for your conclusions. The fourth member of the panel said the data sources skewed your conclusions, making them practically unavoidable.” Gelding remained silent, creating an uncomfortable pregnant pause. “Ron, you’ll have 9 months to present a new paper, if you intend to have your contract renewed.” Gelding thought about the three years of gathering data and interviews-all for this dumping. Gelding took a breath in and exhaled slowly as he raised himself up. Nodded, and said, “I’ll get back to you.” Gave the Head a dead-fish handshake and left the office.

His 10:30 AM senior seminar class bought brunch, treating Ron to his favorite snack, nachos with ground sausage and guacamole-along with a liter of mixed margaritas in a milk carton. The surprise took off the sour edge Gelding had been carrying since his meeting with the Department head. Joe, Bobbie, and Ken had distracted him until Chrissie and James came in LATE, a number one Gelding pet-peeve, with the food and drink as if it was theirs until they set it in front of Ron saying, “T-G-I-F! Let the weekend begin!!!”. Ron had to smile at that remembrance as he sipped the last amount of spiked milk and looked with sleepy-dead eyes at the TV screen. The droning of the the conversation and the interrupting laughter was a rhythmic mantra that allowed him to nod-off into slumber.

The next morning Gelding got up with a resolve to get in the office early to do the due-diligence on Providence Publishing. He made it to the office and did the search engine on ‘Providence’. It had started across the river in St Louis after the First World War by a returning war vet Philip Gaston, who had been able to woo a Belgian heiress of faded aristocracy of his French roots and with his Yankee audaciousness to marry him. They moved to St Louis, where Philip was reunited with a high school buddy whose family connections had kept him out of the war and at an elite Eastern university from which he graduated with a degree in English. He got a job in advertising in New York City. While at a cocktail he met a editor at one of the blue blood publishers. The editor had a group of young authors who had the grittiness of the muckrakers and yellow journalists of the turn of the century, but who were devoting their writing to the personal foibles of the different classes. His publishing house was still looking for gilded age themes. He wanted to give these authors some exposure. Philip was intrigued, knowing the shrewdness of Tom, his high school friend. He asked Tom to send over some of the manuscripts so he (meaning his multi-lingual Belgian wife of trendy tastes) could read them. Gerte, Philip’s wife, read the manuscripts avidly, engrossed by the plots. Even Philip’s prodigious wooing couldn’t distract Gerte from her otherwise strong feminine desires for satiation. Philip made the deal with Tom and Providence Publishing (named for the luckiness of the factors that helped to produce it) came into business. The Great Depression market crash ate up the invested profits of the company, so that Providence was unable to pay the royalties for any of the new and established writers. Philip was short on cash for paying his expenses. He was at a fundraiser for a local non-profit, when he ran into Franklin Jackson, a merchant who owned a string of stores in southern and southwestern Illinois. Franklin was a big, burly man of a gregarious temperament and deep conservative values based on his southern Baptist up-bringing. He had been disturbed by the lawlessness and the flaunting of the Volstead Act, the prohibition of alcohol. Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Capone and their ilk were dominating the headlines and the ‘talkies’. He knew people whom he thought deserved a platform for their conservative views and causes.

Philip was more interested in the revenue than the content which brought the revenue in. Franklin sweetened the deal, stating he was connected to the bishop of the regional churches who’d purchase these books in bulk which his members would sell at the county fairs and door-to-door to other church members. Selling cheap pamphlets to a mass, ‘captured’ audience. It was a better investment than the upfront large payments and the uncertain return of good writers without a defined reading public. The deal was made. Providence was saved, operating in ‘the black’ but without the big profits of the early twenties, but a steady and growing stream. Philip agreed to move the business to East St. Louis where Franklin had obtained the title to a printing shop.

Franklin’s family had taken an interest in publishing. Franklin’s wife, Carrie, came to help out in the office and was the de facto auditor of the business for Franklin. Franklin’s son Hal came into the business, part-time and worked his way into management over the years, stepping into the void that Philip Gaston’s death created in the company. Hal’s son, William followed in Hal’s footsteps. William’s presence brought Providence into the beginning stages of the new mass media, and the emergence of partisan advocacy publishing. William had been grooming  his brother Michael’s son, Henry to take over in ten or so years when he planned to go as an emeritus consulting position with the publishing house.

Gelding saw that the company had a stable history and a market amongst congregations and their companion institutions so that his ideas would have a market. How receptive, he did not know, but Henry had written that letter of solicitation to him. Gelding called the number and left a voice message with his phone number. He organized some notes for the Tuesday lecture and left the office and the campus for home and the rest of the weekend.

That Monday, around 1 o’clock the phone rang. The Ron picked up his office phone, “Hello?”
“Hi. Is this Ronald Gelding?”, the voice on the other end of the line.
“Yes. This is Gelding.”
“Henry Jackson of Providence Publishing, here, Mr. Gelding. I wanted to speak to you directly then have my secretary communicate how pleased we are of your interest for us to publish your paper.”
“Thank you, Mr. Jackson.”
“I was wondering...May I call you Ron?”
“Sure.”
“I was wondering, Ron, when you’d be able to come out here to East Saint Louis to speak with us about your contract? We’d pay for your expenses.”
“Would a Saturday be good for you, Mr Jackson. I could catch a red-eye out on a Friday, after classes.”
“Sounds good. Let us know the airline times and we’ll take care of your travel and lodging.”
“Sounds good. I’ll get back with you.” Gelding hung up the phone.

Henry had been brought up with the new media, from game modules to the internet, and had been exposed to the profitability which conservative causes were for the company. He was conservative enough to  see the lucrative side, if not the absolutist side of these conservative causes. William and Henry had been approached by operatives for causes challenging the liberal trends of the Kennedy-Johnson era. They wanted to create publications for the working groups, which they called ‘think tanks’, doing advocacy for them. The think-tanks were funded by donors, some of whom were philanthropists of new money. Some of their donors were from the treasuries of organization whose ends may have been dubious, but whose rhetorics was compatible with the points of the think tanks. Rarely were there people of ‘old money’ who’d approach William or Henry. They’d usually talk casually or informally with the Jacksons about this person or this group who was looking for a publisher, if the group was not directly recommended as a ‘lead’ for the Jacksons.

Gelding was one of those persons who had been recommended indirectly. The copy of his paper was forwarded to them by the Plutists, an organization which advocated for the predominance of those with high IQ’s and great material wealth. They attached a note to his paper, saying “This is the kind of work which needs a broader-than-academic audience”. to that note were the covering fees for the plane fare and lodging.

Gelding arrived in St. Louis that Saturday morning. Standing near the baggage carousel was a young man with Gelding’s name on the card. Ron identified himself and he and his escort went to their vehicle in the valet parking lot. The young man was William II, the grandson of the editor emeritus of Providence. He was curious about Gelding’s academic pedigree and the campus facilities and social ambience. Ron a former survey and polling producer sensed he was getting the scout team. He did his best to be candid without being too revealing of himself. He did his own biographical questioning of ‘Will’ II to keep things flowing and organic to the moment and not sounding ‘cold and aloof’-flashbacks from his wife, Rhonda’s recriminations against him in her pre-decree arguments with him and in her divorce decree.

They arrived across the bridge at Providence Publishing, which was a 3-story building that took up half the block in its brown, ivy covered brick presence. Gelding was led upstairs into the main conference room, where he was given a seat with some coffee and his pick of pastries to munch on. As he looked around the room, the faces of those whom he read about were staring at him from the walls. Gelding appeared somewhat bemused as he correlated those pictures to the Peer Review board of Royal University, one month before. Ron heard the door behind him open with the voices of Henry and ‘Will’ in conversation-(I wonder about what, Gelding was left wondering).

“Ron, good to meet you! Please, sit down and relax”, as he shook Gelding hand as he held his forearm with his other hand. “How was the trip?”
“Good. Very nice, for an early-bird flight”.
“We’re just delighted that you agreed to come out here to talk to us...Your paper aroused some interest around here. What made you to decide to write on that topic?”

‘Having lived in New York, Richmond, and teaching at Royal, I was seeing parallel patterns of behavior amongst the younger people as well as people our age-even of differing cultural biases. Perhaps, I thought, cultural bias was a superficiality like skin color. The common dynamic was THE WAY in which they sought to affirm their personal identities. I started doing research on the concerts and other events. No matter what type of event, I got the same or similar answers about why people were going to these events and what they were looking to get out of it. With further questioning he found parallels in their cognitive organization and their emotional predispositions and biases for their intimate and extended circles. Empathy, the ability to identify to the point of willing and compulsive assistance to another correlated strongly to their organizational and emotional traits,

Will interrupted his thoughts to ask, “What IS the organizational-emotional correlation?”

“It’s more how the emotions may and can inhibit organizational, efficient thought. A good example is when you incur an injury. Your first reactions revolve around the pain of the injury and your reactions being in that pain. Thoughts are the verbal translation of those visceral signals. Even when thought kicks-in, the habits of thinking, as influenced by prior emotional impressions play a role. Those who have been able to be more dispassionate about the affecting signals and feelings have a better chance of making a productive, not necessarily materially lucrative, choice.’

Henry asked, “How does this play out in the class-caste distinctions?”

“Over one’s lifetime, we become habituated, rather addictively, to lesser and greater extents, to several responses to the signals of the conditions which our environment presents to us. From deference or lack-of deference to authority to the menu of foods we seek to eat the most. Many times that predisposition has more to do with unthinking acceptance than with any analysis of the consequences of those preferences on us in the larger broader context. Emotional smugness and contentment are significant, if not the big factors of this.”

“And the empathetic and non-empathetic persons?”, Will interrupted.

“Empathy having more to do with one’s shared sentiment with an outside entity IS a big emotive energy. It provides a set of ethical and moral boundaries for which there are identity and guidance in one’s ethical response to others. IF the identity is soooo strong that it blinds the person to conceptual options about himself or the other person, for the good and betterment of them both, then it becomes the blind-leading-the-blind. Family bonds, often, promote such behaviors”.

“And over generations that ‘learning’ or lack-of is perpetuated?”, Henry interjects.

“Yes. And these sub-cultural influences are also supported or resisted by larger cultural subgroups. Much like a leaf caught in a current of a stream, the current that affects it can itself be affected  to magnify or minimize its effect on the leaf’s direction and course of travel.

But there are other considerations that are reciprocal on this physic between the person and their environment. When an individual chooses, from ignorance, per se, or the habit of ignorant practices of other role models,his cognitive discernment of the options and their permutations is degraded. Such repetitive degradation over a long period of time will eventually have a degenerative consequence on the individual’s capacity of discernment. Quite literally, the person has reached the point where ‘They know not what they do..’

At this point, I’ll insert the role of the non-empathetic, highly non-dispassionate to the point of contra-passion. These individuals are not bounded by strong emotional sentiments towards others. They are very internally driven, and have little sympathies for the sentiments or the conditions of others. They have been conditioned, from various experiences, to have a freer licence to choose their options, since social and cultural morals are not a significant affecting influence of inhibition or deterrence. For them    the efficiencies of expediencies are the stronger determinants. What is feasible and possible for them to effectuate (get away with) is their crucial motivating consideration. It doesn’t have to be illegal thoughts, but morality and ethics are NOT an absolute barrier for them as it is with those who are empathetically-oriented.”

“The ‘Ant and the Grasshopper’ fable”, blurted Henry.

“Somewhat, very much along those lines. The efficiency and expediency of reaching point ‘B’ from point ‘A’ is their focus for conceptions and perceptions. The predispositions of behavior of those with sentimental to sensual inefficiencies presents legal-illegal, ethical-unethical, moral-immoral opportunity spectra for the non-empathetic.”

“Are you implying that that is bad?”, Henry’s eyebrows were raised in objection as he spoke.

“No. The empathetic, because of their predisposition for social cohesion, form social and political groups to advance their ethics and moral standards. Laws and ordinances act as deterrents for too extreme socio-pathological behavior and thinking by the more unsentimental, non-empathetics.”

“That’s GOOD, in one sense, because we are a Christian-based society. On the other hand many of our writers have opinions contrary to many of what they see as a liberalizing agenda on our morals and social ethics that allow for the degradation and  the degeneration you allude to in your paper. ‘Do unto others..’ shouldn’t become ‘enable unto others’, Henry added.

Will smiled at Henry. Will’s eyes glowed a tolerant acceptance of Henry’s barely muted passion.

Gelding continued his train of thought, “Yes. The tension dynamic between those who capitalize off the contributorily learned negligence of the many is what my paper is describing. I go even further by saying that the effects are a permanent subclass that is a resource for those on the upper end of the ‘food chain’”.

“Why should those on the upper end be penalized for legal and ethical behavior that brings wealth?”, Henry asserted.

Gelding smiled, adding, “Particularly, when the contributory-negligent inefficiencies are the conscious and willful attention and choice of those on the lower end”.

Will commented, “I see why your paper was recommended to us. Are you a conservative voter?”

“Actually, I am an independent voter. I’m more convinced now that social programs, such as education, food stamps, and housing are band-aid triage, at best. A more general industrial training program carried by the private sector with local, state, and federal enablement MIGHT provide a context for superficial, ‘putting lipstick on a pig’ remedies. My thesis is that sensory-oriented distractions that arise from the profitability on predispositions of the economic subclasses are themselves as much of a drag on productivity and profit because of the missed opportunity cost of the diverted energy to and by these cognitive distractions. This opportunity costs is as great a drag as taxes, regulations, inflation, and deflation-all of which are derived from the social and political activities of enabling deference to ‘the general welfare’ of the subclasses”.

“Mr Gelding, as your presence here presumes, we are interested in making an offer to give your paper a broad publication. On top of that, our patrons have expressed to have you as a contract fellow on their payroll for your acceptance of our publishing offer. I will give you the papers for you to review (and hopefully sign), if you are agreeable. How’s that?”

Ron smiled. He felt psychologically emancipated from academia by Henry Jackson’s offer. “Sounds very fair, Mr. Jackson.”

“Call me ‘Henry’. No need for formalities amongst ‘brothers of agreement’, even if this is a business transaction!”

Henry rose from his chair next to Gelding to shake Ron’s chair. Will reached for the envelope which held the packet for the publishing agreement, and rose to reach across the table to give it to Gelding.

Ron rose to acknowledge both men’s gestures and the end of the meeting.

As Ron walked out of the Providence building to wait on the steps for Will, who would be taking him to his lodgings for the night, he thought about the providence of this meeting and its consequences. In a few weeks he’d start receiving revenue that would supplement to replace his university salary. “GOOD!”, he thought. They were a bunch of preening, peacock mandarins who were as hypocritical as they were herd-thinkers of consensual correctness. Their correctness had more to do with the opportunism of academic politics, than any of the social moralities they extorted upon each other’s faux pas’s.

Within a week, Gelding had one of the contract-law professors he knew from ‘Happy Hour’ to do him the service of reviewing the contract. Gelding sent it off to East St. Louis.

Two months later, the ‘Objectivist Voice’ came out with Geldings paper as one of its featured articles, retitled ‘Democracy of the Few’. It caught the attention of the advocacy talk-radio and talking head TV pimps, and Ron was asked to appear as a guest or panelist so these pimps could promote their similar or contrary views.The expected brick-bats and plaudits came Geldings way. He had become a pariah in his department at the university. Ron shrugged that social discomfort off with the increased deposits from speaking events and guest appearances on radio and television advocacy programs.


On one nationally syndicated radio program, the host asked, “Ron, aren’t you saying that our country is becoming a balkanized caste of the operationally functional and dysfunctional?”

“In ways, very much so. The ingrained habits and practices of families and communities have so degraded any optimizing discernment that the populations are making poor decisions on top of poor presumptions of their cultural milieu. The resulting behaviors tend to socially dysfunctional behavior to the point of the criminal justice intervention. Either by this explicit path of civic self-nullification, or the more insidious effects of slow degradation and degeneration of the quality of cognitive acuity and discernment, a less engaged, and more politically and commercially manipulable population demographic is being established.”

The host of the show followed with, “Their political choices would be as flawed and manipulable as their personal lives are degraded and degenerative. What type of policy could be made from such a poor quality of majority public consensus?”

A days later, on a late night political satirist program, the host asked, “Your writing and some of your public statements are implying that popular democratic rule by the many may be becoming as dysfunctional a paradigm as the dysfunctionalities you are describing of the lives of the subclass you have documented. Am I right?”

“I’m not going that far. But democratic politics, with a small ‘d’, will be less that of an optimally enlightened ideal, and more the reflection of the contemporary passions of the day. This would be so whether EITHER the subclasses or the upper classes have their prerogative of leverage, since one will have a very, narrowed mercantile, self-serving view of common welfare, while the other class’ view will be a mixture of manipulated, self-indulgences. Judging by how the electoral make-up expresses itself, democracy as a civic politic would become the civic bottleneck or no-man’s land over which few social agreements could be achieved. Instead tribal, local to  virtual institutional and informal interests groups will have their own ‘collectives’ and syndicates of authority outside the reach of governmental authority.”

Had Ronald Gelding become a whore of rhetoric. He thought to himself, “At least I have consistent coherent convictions about my declarations. I am not like the false concerned citizens doing political cause advocacy as actors being paid for a role which may be alien to their mundane thoughts. He wasn’t like some professional actors and entertainers whose roles are Pied-Piper ego illusions for the gullible and naive.”

The patrons who gave Providence the investment money were true to Geldings description. Though they were a part of this dynamic, they were at the top of the feeders-scavengers. Artisans, such as Ron; technicians who ran their varied facilities; were convenient pieces on their chess-monopoly boards of commerce. Gelding and others were precipitates who generated phenomena, from which they could filter for their own aggrandizement. The ‘Rons of the world’ stirred the pot and allowed by the centrifugal or centripetal effects of their actions for other resources to be identified, mined, and utilized. were quantified to dollars and cents. The wealth gained was the motivating drive, the discipline of the computations’ efficiencies were the determiner of the decisions. The world was their plantation. There was really no conspiracy as the more abstract thinkers of the ‘subs’ liked to argue. They distrusted each other as much as the masses distrusted them, for they KNEW that the ONLY bonding that existed was the ways for their enhanced options of wide latitudinal prerogatives. Though discoveries that would spring from the subclasses like mushrooms of the spring negated a total Hobbesian zero-sum game of life, to not be distracted or diverted by frivolities of ego-indulgence kept them the better of the social and cultural predators of the times. If an innovative genius from the masses presented a resource of utility, they would pounce on it as readily with the affability of a favorite aunt or uncle, but unlike the aunt or uncle there was no sentiment beyond the whimsy of the ecstatic benefit to them.

Ron knew this. He had found his emotional comfort niche in this new and better status of creature comforts and trappings. The world might be going to Hell in a handbasket. But, “..didn’t I try to contribute with my paper, and get buried in the mandarin parochialisms of the day, which dismissed and disparaged my efforts?” He knew his new paymasters were pimps and he was a whore doing tricks for the ‘Johns and Jane’s’ who bought into his thesis. Ron admitted to himself that just like that degraded and degenerating subclass, he too just desired some sensory anesthetic to the cultural cacophony and circus. If he no longer engaged his cognitive powers to the optimal use his paper had, also, inferred, it was just one more unnoticed ‘tree falling in the grove’ of the self-absorbed forest of human consciousness.

The masses, down on the feeders chain of scavenging, lived on in their own circles of satiated-striving sentiments.  The degree of bonding of those circles were proportional to the degree of coherent, consistent, organized practice. For carnal satiation in a consumer-fed culture the practice could be pretty slack, since the technicians of product growth, marketing and distribution kept the tangible and intangible appetites whetted to the feasibilities of consumption. There were plenty of distractions and diversions to lure the predisposed from the disciplines of efficiencies for the feelings of visceral affirmation that had become the primary measure for their personal validation. The mass populations are so fragmented into their varied distractions that revolutionary thought that galvanized the the French ‘paysans’ to storm the Bastille or even the mercantile Americans to form a rebellious confederacy is a logistical hurdle which only money or mystical, rhetorical enchantment could fertilize. A loss of niche indulgences, from TV shows to athletic events would draw a greater social hue and cry for action than any political malfeasance below treasonous abuse of the populations.

Henry was glad to have the propagation of his cultural views through his publishing house. Will was glad to have the lucrative profit and funding, because of that propagation. Providence was the interlocutor with its writers and authors being the avatars for the money from those who were seeking the rhetorical enchanters to polarize the amorphous demographic into its rabid, partisan niches of sensory comfort.

In the end, micro-bread and circuses, tangible and intangible, kept the masses carnally and viscerally content enough so they were the willing fodder or pawns to be expended or moved for the effects which benefited the patrons who manipulated the inefficiencies of discernment by the masses.