Eighteen wheeler — V. Oath

If a gaggle of mathematicians cannot count balls up to two without being perplexed,
is it any surprise that most of us have difficulty telling
if ten billion is more than a hundred million,
—and, therefore, find it hard to comprehend or care about that
a bezos’s personal yacht, Koru, with its own smaller support yacht,
could have paid for food stamps for more than one hundred thousand people over an entire year?
Do I digress again?
Don’t we have people to do the counting for us so we don’t have to?
We have just yesterday evolved as monkeys counting coconuts.
Maybe we can count zeroes also, sure,
but get often confused after the number of zeroes reaches “this many”.
And we want to trust, oh, how we want to trust,
someone else to do the counting for us.
After all, they can’t all be working for worldbreakers, can they?

But those that understand who would win
in a race between
    Itô vs Stratonovitch
seem not to be interested in telling everyone how the game is rigged,
but to rig the game to exhaustion in their own favor
every literal millisecond of every hour of every day,
    trading options
back and forth as if it has nothing to do
with actual lives working actual jobs to keep actual homes,
until your ordinary life
and the eight billion other lives like yours
and their total earnings that pay for
bread and water and bed and book
—the sum total of humanity’s collective toil—
becomes a mere
    three percent
of the total exchange of wealth back and forth,
siphoned and squeezed further at each passing
between the little mammons that learned to count faster than you,
as we starve and war over the scraps of this three-percent-slice.

Is it anti-intellectualism to suggest that with intellect shall come
a responsibility toward kindness?
That the learned have a yet greater responsibility than most.
That mere Reason without Empathy is simply cruel,
just as how Empathy without Reason is blind
and, therefore, often worse than useless.
‘But aren’t those that create our economic systems just doing their jobs?’
Yet that could have been said of any cruelty in our histories.
Every pogrom ever conceived had willing engineers ‘just doing their jobs’
and it is no different for this one
as it removes dignity from many to give privilege to few.

Instead, new short cuts are invented every day
for parasites to feed on slower parasites
in this shared confabulation of extreme parasitism,
which assigns value to everything but a life.
And now an entire New York City’s worth of electricity and pollution
is used by those who build imaginary
    crypts of coins
to hold wealth and power
over those who won’t.
Even art itself is shrouded now by the same empretzelment of numbers
so the haves can deny it to the have-nots.
After all, why make music or write a novel or create a painting
for the penniless millions
when you can instead sell it to one billionaire
so that he can lock it away in his—almost always his—digital vault?
It was never merely about having more,
it is always about the disdain of denial to others.
What art, instead of breaking chains, is deliberately
    chained to a block
by its creator for it to be sold to the chain maker!
Would it have been Guernica still, if the same thing were painted
for glorifying the manufacturers of messerschmitt
or sold exclusively to ernst heinkel for his private use!

Perhaps we shall all share in the same oath,
conceived by physicians who perceived a sacred responsibility in having power
    directly
over someone’s life or death.
Perhaps more than two millennia after,
we can conceive of being responsible for lives we
    indirectly
affect, yet with no smaller consequences.

It is not complicated.
The idea had been straightforward from the beginning:

    I shall do no harm.

No ifs, no buts, no tribal exclusions.
No excuses made when commanded otherwise by power or wealth.
We had always been able to tell right from wrong,
when we had the courage to face the consequences of our choices.
The rest of us just have two and a half millenia of conscience to catch up on.

Perhaps we shall start with physicists, since it was us first who broke the world.

But perhaps above everyone else

    economists ought to have a Hippocratic Oath

as many have suggested, since they affect the most lives most thoroughly.

An imposed oath is useless,
but a freely offered oath is sacred,
especially in silence,
to no one but the self,
where the deepest witness lies, godless, to decide who we have been and who we are.

Melih Sener

“Eighteen Wheeler” consists of five parts:
1. Eighteen wheeler — I. Innumeracy
2. Eighteen wheeler — II. Confabulation
3. Eighteen wheeler — III. Induction
4. Eighteen wheeler — IV. Dice
5. Eighteen wheeler — V. Oath
(… well, fine, and also something about carrots.)