The Road

As the novelty of speeding on Bear’s contraption faded, it gave way to another feeling, which more closely resembled impatience.  When he had first left New York, Jon had been overjoyed to get picked up and to have gone west from the city.  He, like everyone he knew, had spent his entire life on the eastern seaboard, not because he was forbidden from going west—as a point of fact, there was no such prohibition—but because there was no urgent need to, and the Party dictated what constituted an urgent need for doing anything and deployed its resources, which included its people, accordingly.  In Jon’s case, this meant that he was recruited to go into regulation based on his verbal ability, which skill was made manifest to the Party through the bi-yearly tests proctored by some bored-looking, low-ranking Party member.  He or she (the Party member) would pace great halls in which children sat taking tests and call out the time remaining.  The tests had stressed Jon to no end, but his scores were commendable, and he owed to his having succeeded in taking them his present occupation.

By coincidence, or perhaps not, the regulatory world had always enticed him, and when he was called in to speak with his dean and was informed of the fact that his major and specialty had been chosen for him, he had not viewed the conversation as a negotiation, but rather saw it for what it was: a directive.  It had not, at the time, struck him as in any way unfair that he should be denied a say in what he did for work or in the academic fields he should pursue while in school.  The Party defined the issues to be addressed, defined the public good and the relation between whatever issues it found relevant and the interests of the public, and arranged itself to meet those issues.  

In thinking of the Party, thought Jon, it was useful to conceive of an octopus; as a single entity which was indistinguishable from the sum of its parts except that in being constituted as a whole, it could derive whatever utility was contained in a single arm, before the arm could be severed, with minimal detriment to the whole.  There were always new members waiting in the wings, happy to serve as an appendage to an undefined and unbounded power when other arms thought to disobey.  He wondered, too, what happened to those who did disobey.  He was startled to recall that he had had a similar thought recently, not fourteen months ago, and he remembered his thought process—though now his conclusions seemed alien to him, as though it was another person who had been occupying his mind.  He had always prided himself in being rational—and thought he likely had been, then, too—but perhaps his ideas were less well-reasoned than he gave himself credit for.  

On the other hand, perhaps he was too adept at being rational.  In his adult life, he had consciously set his mind to consider the world around him; however, he had done so presupposing the simple fact that policies that the Party or the Leadership wanted to be enacted would be enacted—and that the extent to which such policies seemed sensical, productive, or even feasible was not for him to evaluate.  Instead, he evaluated policies which would be put into place whether or not they were ideas that he would expressly come up with, and he made peace with them by rationalizing away whatever aspects of them he deemed to be particularly unsavory.  Sometimes, he was even aware that he was doing it.  

He thought in particular of a night last year after the Party had excitedly announced that all businesses would need certain permits in order to operate.  This was, of course, so that the government could determine how well they were operating and to make sure that their operation was in line with the overarching goals of the Leadership.  This was widely considered—both in the news and in the social circle of which Jon was a part—to have been a brilliant move, and one which no doubt would ensure the protection of private enterprise and a functioning economy for decades to come.  

On this night, he was attending a small work event—in attendance were the five members of Jon’s team, his direct superior at the time, and one of Jon’s underlings and her friends.  It was clear that Jon’s boss had had a lot to drink, and nearly everything she said was couched as some grand pronouncement, to be taken seriously and heeded as the advice and recommendation of one of the foremost regulators in the country (which, in all fairness, she was).  Her tone was in keeping with her position, but the substance of what she was saying struck Jon as almost impossibly lacking.  

She was, if Jon remembered correctly, opining on the condition of the country writ large and the erosion of corporate competition.  And she held court while the group sat at two booths adjacent to one another.  Jon’s underling and her friends were leaning in, paying rapt attention to Jon’s boss as she drunkenly waxed poetic on an eclectic array of subjects; she frenetically hopped from one to the other to the next, peppering in the odd self-aggrandizing comment. (This was entirely unnecessary because everyone present was well aware—through daily contact with the woman—of precisely how important and well-paid she (a) thought she was and (b) was in reality.  Moreover, they were in the unique position of evaluating the discrepancy between (a) and (b).)

Jon wracked his brain, trying to remember the details of the conversation, but ultimately gave up, instead fixating on her (his boss’s) message, which could be distilled to:  the economy is a massive system of trade in which people sell their goods or services for other goods and services which they cannot otherwise get for themselves.  In this respect—her premise—Jon could agree with the woman now as he did, then.  The economy did, and does, function in such a way.  

From there, she tried to describe wealth, and this is where, in Jon’s opinion, she started to show exactly how much she’d had to drink:  

She saw wealth as changeable, as non-static; it stood to reason that, in her view, money was won or lost as a sort of game, the rules of which, in the absence of government, would not exist.  But every game must, she said, function within the confines of rules.  These rules force people to play a certain way, which had the effect of determining a winner and a loser in the context of the rules of that specific game.  In soccer, a player scores by using his or her feet to propel a ball into a net.  The use of one’s hands would greatly benefit the individual in terms of getting the ball into the net but would violate the rules of the game and would therefore not count as a ‘goal.’  So, too, according to her, was this the case with respect to the economy.  Every single person who sets out to make money tacitly accepts that making money is their ‘goal.’  To varying degrees, people are willing to sacrifice moral or social considerations in the pursuit of this goal if it benefits them.  

And Jon tepidly agreed with this too, both when he first heard her characterize the economy in this manner, and now, when he was reflecting upon the woman’s words with the benefit of hindsight.

She went on:  assuming that people work to further their own self-interest (and this self-interest can be reduced to making money) then it was absolutely the case that people would lie, steal, cheat, or do whatever they desired in pursuit of gaining wealth (their goal).  If their pursuit of their own self-interest conflicted with the stated aims of the Party or the Leadership—which, of course, stood on the side of the common good and acting on behalf of the many as opposed to the one—then it was absolutely within the system of rights vested in those entities to intervene and instill a set of rules and regulations.  At this, the woman had drunkenly smiled and put her arm around Jon and another member of Jon’s team seated opposite him and had whispered conspiratorially to the two of them that this—“this” being the lying, cheating, and the laundry list of naughty things people do in order to get money—was where their firm figured into the equation.  

She had left it at that, and the remainder of Jon’s party seemed to accept her logic as proceeding reasonably and being the unimpeachable dogma of the party.  But Jon had been troubled by her words, because he had heard a television pundit give his own opinion on the new Leadership policies, and he justified its effects by way of entirely unconnected logic.  He had proposed that the economy was akin to the country’s treasury.  He had suggested that, since the economy is the monetary extension of the government, it is not a question of right that the government should intervene in its operation, since it is not intervention, and the government does not need a warrant or mandate from the people to do whatever it wants with respect to its own money.  The only “right” that the television analyst referenced was the right of ownership, which he implicitly asserted the government can exercise over the economy, its property.  
 

As the party dispersed, going their separate ways before curfew was called (and it was no longer proper to be on the streets), Jon sat in the booth and finished his drink, which he suspected had been watered down by the bar attendant—who, upon seeing the state of Jon’s boss, had been pouring increasingly weak drinks throughout the night for their group.

 

He swirled the drink with one hand as he looked at nothing in particular, wondering how these two people (his boss and the pundit) could give fine-sounded grounds for the new Party policy based on two completely distinct definitions of the economy and completely separate conceptions of the role of government, the role of the people, and the intersection and relationship of the two.  Jon had then approached a thought which felt dangerous to him, then, and which he stowed within the darker recesses of his mind:  Is all of this bullshit?  
 

The thought still frightened him.  
 

He was far more comfortable, now, however, articulating his own interpretation of the government and the economy.  
Yes, his boss was correct that the economy was a massive animal responsive to individuals and groups trading for their own benefit.  She was wrong, however, that the animal needed to be tamed by the government because it lacked ‘rules.’

 

A sport is a sport because it has rules, but everything is beholden to a set of regulations, whether or not these rules are then dutifully transcribed and codified as law.  The economy is a system of trade and those who venture therein are aware that everything traded has a certain value, which they bear in mind in making their trades.  A trade is ‘fair’ when two consenting parties agree to it and when there is sufficient information to value the goods or services being traded.

 

That the Leadership should intervene is not a given, and such intervention does not necessarily confer a greater degree of fairness, leaving aside the question of whether the economy is, should be, or can be a system of fairness.  
 

And the matter of permitting, thought Jon, half-disgustedly.  How does that relate to the economy?  How does that further any sort of public interest?  Who benefits aside from the stakeholders within the Party and those who profit from the proceeds?  
 

Jon had only a hazy recollection of what exactly the permits were, but he knew they involved—aside from a ministerial stamp of approval, allowing the individual to operate his or her business—the Leadership saying, essentially, “this is what good or service you provide, these are the people who may purchase that good or service from you, and this is our ‘suggestion’ as to how much your good or service may be worth to them.”  
 

Jon shook his head free of the memory and the corresponding feelings of sadness and something akin to claustrophobia that the memory seemed to engender in him.  He made a concerted effort to focus on the wind in his face, the grass blowing in the breeze, and the receding forest in the background, the edge of which, as he turned back, he could now barely make out.  These sensations were real, they were his to experience, and he was experiencing them now.  

As a rush of sour-smelling air invaded his nostrils, he turned away from the forest and settled himself into his seat so that he was looking ahead, a bead of newfound power seeming to grow inside him as he surveyed the empty land on all sides. 
The air shimmered over the path due to a low-lying haze, through which mirage he found it still fairly easy to see.  As he watched the landscape bend and give way to him and his progress, he was afforded a view of something more than mere prairie and open space.  In the distance (and if he strained his eyes), he could discern a looming, undulating protuberance lying black over the horizon.  

From behind, he heard Bear clear his throat and growl, “Chicago.”