This is a subject that has been on my mind for a while now : the idea that talented people feel that they should not have to work for a living. That instead they should let us plebs figure out how to produce stuff and create wealth, so that they can take a cut and dedicate their time to exercising their talent for higher activities, be it art, science, etc. I call it Apollo's complex.
As I said I've been thinking about it for a while now, but I've only recently decided that I should really try to write about it after seeing this video :
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKANUMmXG_g
The attitude of this math professor in this video illustrates quite well what I want to describe. I think I encountered that attitude quite a few times, even IRL, for instance when talking with a guy who was whining about the huge salaries of soccer players. He was saying that it was not acceptable that an athlete was earning so much more than say a doctor. I, for one, thought that at least a soccer player does not steal anyone's money. I mean his salary does not come from taxes. To me that was the most important factor, but not for him. To him, the kind of work someone does should have an objective value, one that should not be determined by any market.
This leads me to the other source of media that motivated me to tackle this subject : soviet movies.
Lately I've been trying to learn Russian, so naturally as I was looking for Russian movies to watch, I was driven towards the Soviet ones. I'm not a big fan of communism, to put it mildly, but I've made the effort to watch these movies anyway. I was kind of surprised : life under USSR, at least as it was depicted in soviet movies, did not seem so different than life in the West. In particular, there was very much a class division between people. People had jobs, earned a salary and crucially, these salaries very much depended on the profession. Like in the first movie I watched, a very famous comedy in Russia, one of the characters is a surgeon and the other a teacher. At some point the surgeon alludes about how he earns much more than the teacher. I think that's the only point in the movie where they talk about salaries, but it immediately picked my curiosity. I thought "oh yeah, how did that use to work in the USSR?".
At that point I thought that salaries were just decided by the State somehow, and they had decided that surgeons were much more important than teachers.
Anyway, an other interesting movie in that matter was this one :
View: https://youtu.be/X7GuhjGZ-xs
Again, when watching this movie I was surprised how little different soviet society seemed at least in appearance. In particular, there were very well-off people, the so-called nomenklatura, and in fact a major aspect of the plot is young women trying to seduce members of the nomenklatura to eventually marry them.
So in the movie the two main female characters invite members of this high society : scientists, artists, athletes and even ... poets. Yes, even poets. Because in Soviet Russia, poets were a serious profession, and apparently they "earned" quite a lot of money.
This idea of poets being paid by the State, I had heard it before :
View: https://youtu.be/n30zO0ABFqc?t=2836
I highlighted the two mentions of poetry. When I first heard that I thought it was odd, but I didn't think much of it. When later on I heard this idea again in the soviet movie mentioned above, it occurred to me that poetry might be some kind of a litmus test for a truly socialist regime : when there is such a thing as State-funded poetry, you know you are for sure in a socialist country.
Yet, above all I realized that I was mistaken about what communism, socialism or whatever. It was not so much about the ownership of capital from individuals, as again as I said when watching soviet movies I realized that there were definitely people owning much more than others. I started to think that maybe, just maybe, the real goal was to control who, that is what kind of person, can own wealth.
"To each according to his abilities", is a saying often heard in the left. But abilities to do what? Certainly not to earn money, otherwise the system would not make sense : why testing someone abilities to make money if it's to decide how much to pay him? If he can make money, just let him do so. The proof will be in the pudding.
No, the point is to make sure that certain abilities, which are deemed more valuable, dare I say more noble, are rewarded more than others that are deemed disgraceful, vile or menial. Like a mathematics professor versus a fast-food restaurant manager, as in the first video above.
Science, art, sport... all represent an ideal of what mankind can achieve, and naturally mankind wants to reward such activities, even if they do not translate into economic activity. A poet for instance produces something beautiful, sure, but also something that can not easily be sold : people can learn poems by heart and thus share them for free.
That's why I call it Apollo's complex. Apollo is the god of music, poetry and light. He brings knowledge and beauty. He is often associated with the Sun, which provides its light and warmth for free. The thing about Apollo is that what he produces can be shared. Knowledge is hard to create, but easy to distribute. You know how something seems clear once it was explained to you? That's what the symbolism of the light is : what you see was there all along, but you didn't know it was there until someone shone a light upon it.
So we should be grateful to Apollo. The question is : how much grateful? And what do we do to people who refuse to give him anything? Poetry is a fine art, but I'm not ok to pay taxes to pay a poet's salary. I'm sure some people would think the same about mathematicians. At the extreme, should scientists and artists be allowed to pretty much enslave all other human beings, those who have no intellectual talent ? It very much seems to me that this is what communism really is about. And, dare I say, the direction towards which our so-called "elites" currently want to lead the World.
As I said I've been thinking about it for a while now, but I've only recently decided that I should really try to write about it after seeing this video :
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKANUMmXG_g
The attitude of this math professor in this video illustrates quite well what I want to describe. I think I encountered that attitude quite a few times, even IRL, for instance when talking with a guy who was whining about the huge salaries of soccer players. He was saying that it was not acceptable that an athlete was earning so much more than say a doctor. I, for one, thought that at least a soccer player does not steal anyone's money. I mean his salary does not come from taxes. To me that was the most important factor, but not for him. To him, the kind of work someone does should have an objective value, one that should not be determined by any market.
This leads me to the other source of media that motivated me to tackle this subject : soviet movies.
Lately I've been trying to learn Russian, so naturally as I was looking for Russian movies to watch, I was driven towards the Soviet ones. I'm not a big fan of communism, to put it mildly, but I've made the effort to watch these movies anyway. I was kind of surprised : life under USSR, at least as it was depicted in soviet movies, did not seem so different than life in the West. In particular, there was very much a class division between people. People had jobs, earned a salary and crucially, these salaries very much depended on the profession. Like in the first movie I watched, a very famous comedy in Russia, one of the characters is a surgeon and the other a teacher. At some point the surgeon alludes about how he earns much more than the teacher. I think that's the only point in the movie where they talk about salaries, but it immediately picked my curiosity. I thought "oh yeah, how did that use to work in the USSR?".
At that point I thought that salaries were just decided by the State somehow, and they had decided that surgeons were much more important than teachers.
Anyway, an other interesting movie in that matter was this one :
View: https://youtu.be/X7GuhjGZ-xs
Again, when watching this movie I was surprised how little different soviet society seemed at least in appearance. In particular, there were very well-off people, the so-called nomenklatura, and in fact a major aspect of the plot is young women trying to seduce members of the nomenklatura to eventually marry them.
So in the movie the two main female characters invite members of this high society : scientists, artists, athletes and even ... poets. Yes, even poets. Because in Soviet Russia, poets were a serious profession, and apparently they "earned" quite a lot of money.
This idea of poets being paid by the State, I had heard it before :
View: https://youtu.be/n30zO0ABFqc?t=2836
I highlighted the two mentions of poetry. When I first heard that I thought it was odd, but I didn't think much of it. When later on I heard this idea again in the soviet movie mentioned above, it occurred to me that poetry might be some kind of a litmus test for a truly socialist regime : when there is such a thing as State-funded poetry, you know you are for sure in a socialist country.
Yet, above all I realized that I was mistaken about what communism, socialism or whatever. It was not so much about the ownership of capital from individuals, as again as I said when watching soviet movies I realized that there were definitely people owning much more than others. I started to think that maybe, just maybe, the real goal was to control who, that is what kind of person, can own wealth.
"To each according to his abilities", is a saying often heard in the left. But abilities to do what? Certainly not to earn money, otherwise the system would not make sense : why testing someone abilities to make money if it's to decide how much to pay him? If he can make money, just let him do so. The proof will be in the pudding.
No, the point is to make sure that certain abilities, which are deemed more valuable, dare I say more noble, are rewarded more than others that are deemed disgraceful, vile or menial. Like a mathematics professor versus a fast-food restaurant manager, as in the first video above.
Science, art, sport... all represent an ideal of what mankind can achieve, and naturally mankind wants to reward such activities, even if they do not translate into economic activity. A poet for instance produces something beautiful, sure, but also something that can not easily be sold : people can learn poems by heart and thus share them for free.
That's why I call it Apollo's complex. Apollo is the god of music, poetry and light. He brings knowledge and beauty. He is often associated with the Sun, which provides its light and warmth for free. The thing about Apollo is that what he produces can be shared. Knowledge is hard to create, but easy to distribute. You know how something seems clear once it was explained to you? That's what the symbolism of the light is : what you see was there all along, but you didn't know it was there until someone shone a light upon it.
So we should be grateful to Apollo. The question is : how much grateful? And what do we do to people who refuse to give him anything? Poetry is a fine art, but I'm not ok to pay taxes to pay a poet's salary. I'm sure some people would think the same about mathematicians. At the extreme, should scientists and artists be allowed to pretty much enslave all other human beings, those who have no intellectual talent ? It very much seems to me that this is what communism really is about. And, dare I say, the direction towards which our so-called "elites" currently want to lead the World.
