Contention is a Luxury Good

Contention is a luxury good.

Everyone’s heard of the idea of prosperity making people fat and happy and then to their decline. Everyone knows the fat and happy luxuries have to be discarded when hard time comes.  But I think everyone has the idea that those luxury goods are whee! spree I-feel-free doing-nice-things-for-me goods.  I normally do.  My associations with getting lean for hard times ahead are more beans and rice and barely nudging the temperature controls and backing off on trips to green mountain valleys, on foreign vacation, on new electronics.  The cars look less new and shiny, the swimming pool isn’t installed in the backyard.

The big surprise to me is how many of our luxury goods are just worthless, ugly, and disgusting. How many civilizations on the downslope after glory years see they frittered away their greatness on nothing. On narcissistic witch hunts, on regulations and litigation, activism and ngos, and a million greedy grabbers all fighting each other like the calico cat to get their hand in the pot.. Some grasshoppers spend the summer singing and dancing, some grasshoppers the summer chiding each other.  What if all the rococo you managed in your flourishing years were the rococo of org charts?

Chart of relationships among project stakeholders, simplified [yes, I realize this is not Rococo]

Some luxuries are the Golden Days of Summer. You leave them behind with longing memories. No one who has not known the ancient regime knows what is le douceur de vivre.  And maybe even monuments are left behind make the future more beautiful and more glorious.  The folly of the pyramids at least produces pyramids.

Some luxuries are nothing. You use them.  When they’re left behind they are nothing.   Fashions.  Status and positional Goods.  You did not even regret them,  there is nothing to regret.

Some luxuries are poison.  The lotos eaters, but instead of dreamy happiness they writhe in misery as they take more of the pungent reeking bile that is killing them.

The story of David and Michal really ripped me up. I believe the sad family dynamics we see around us are just exactly those poisonous luxuries. The constantly renegotiated and relitigated power dynamics. The unclear roles. The contention.  The misery. The self obsessive emotional distress. The little collection of techniques and psychology books. Feminism.  Man caves and checked out fathers who defer to their wives.  Shrugging off the burdens.  These are all the luxuries of the good times. People are sometimes strangely nostalgic for the hard times because they miss being in health.  The luxuries they have are sickness and unhappiness.

I believe there are virtues to be learned in the trials. Notwithstanding mostly we need the trials just to get rid of the loathsome parasites we spent a good times on.  Otherwise, like any other high spending on luxury when you are broke, you will go under.

I believe if a man could come out of the trials to spend his new prosperity and time and ability on only beauty and glory and intelligence and love he would go from strength to strength and the cycle of the world would be broken and he would never look back.

The Lord squeezes the bitterness from me
He makes the vileness to go out from me

Blessed is the Lord