The Dreamseller_ The Calling - Augusto Cury [79]
I thought: “What’s he saying? Doesn’t he know the audience he’s talking to?” I thought the dreamseller had no idea what he was saying. But he quickly threw my thinking into a tailspin.
He said that Karl Marx (1818–1883) had left his native land and gone to Paris, where he met Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). The two refined their ideas, joined socialist groups and initiated a lifelong collaboration. To them, the manner in which goods are produced and wealth distributed are the forces that shape all aspects of our lives: politics, law, morality and philosophy. Marx believed human history was governed by the laws of science and rejected all religious interpretations of nature and history. He thought these laws would help people, especially the working class, make their own history.
But this dream never materialized, he said. When a group of socialists seized power, they became ruthless, crushed their opponents, silenced dissenting voices, infringed on human rights and crushed the freedom they had preached. The working class did not construct its own history, rather, the ones in power wrote the history books. Religion was replaced by the cult of personality of those leaders.
“Their revolution was extreme,” he said. “Unlike them, my dream isn’t to destroy the ruling political system in order to rebuild it. I don’t believe in change from the outside. I believe in change that begins from within, a peaceful change in our ability to reason, to see, to critique, to interpret social phenomena and, especially, to reclaim pleasure. My dream lies within people.”
After he showed that he knew what he was talking about, he said that when Marx launched his ideas, the project failed not because the ruling class didn’t distribute income, but because they used political and financial power to oppress the working class. A small minority lived like princes while the majority lived like paupers.
Today, he said, this separation of the classes remained. Social inequalities hadn’t been eradicated. In fact, with the advent of globalization, the system had created a new class of exploited people: “You!” he emphasized again.
Again I thought, “But aren’t they the privileged ones? Don’t they live in the lap of luxury? How can they be called an exploited class—the proletarians of this millennium?”
But to ground his ideas, the dreamseller crushed a popular saying of ours:
“In past centuries, before the system developed, it took three generations for a family’s fortune to disappear. So the old saying held true: rich grandfather, lordly son, poor grandson. But these days that saying doesn’t hold up. A solid business can vanish in five years. A successful industry can be out of the market in a short time. Several fortunes over can be lost in a single generation.”
After that initial shock, the businessmen began to agree with this mysterious thinker.
“For your companies to survive, you can never stop competing. To stay ahead of the competition, you are forced to find ways to reinvent yourselves each year, each month each week.”
And he asked a basic question that everyone got wrong:
“Does the system crush companies that show weakness?”
Unanimously, they answered yes. But he said no.
“The system doesn’t crush the companies. It crushes their leaders.”
He saw that doctors, lawyers, engineers, journalists—people of all professions—were being crushed in the same way. These masters of finance began to realize they weren’t as rich as they thought. These proprietors of power began to understand they weren’t as strong as they imagined. Some in the audience were still skeptical. But the dreamseller loved skeptics. He could pin them down with the sharpness of his ideas. So he left no doubts:
“Ladies and gentlemen, the time of slavery has not been expunged from the pages of history but merely changed its form. I’m going to ask you some questions, and I want you to be completely honest. Anyone who isn’t will have to answer to his own conscience. Tell me: Who has migraines?”
People were a bit embarrassed, but one after