Reading Notes

The People of the Abyss

by Jack London

" her hat and jacket were found on the towing path by the Regent's Canal, and later her body was fished from the water. _Verdict: Suicide during temporary insanity_. Such verdicts are crimes against truth. The Law is a lie, and through it men lie most shamelessly. "

"Temporary insanity! Oh, these cursed phrases, these lies of language, under which people with meat in their bellies and whole shirts on their backs shelter themselves, and evade the responsibility of their brothers and sisters, empty of belly and without whole shirts on their backs."

It was a sane and calculated decision to end her life. A normal person put in her situation might make the same decision. It is not a 'temporary insanity' that drove her to suicide, but real inescapable destitution and the horror of her hopeless future that effected her decision. To dismiss it as her personal irrationality, and not a looming social problem is an unethical lie.

"Misfortune and misery are very potent in turning people's heads, and drive one person to the lunatic asylum, and another to the morgue or the gallows. When the thing happens, and the father and husband, for all of his love for wife and children and his willingness to work, can get no work to do, it is a simple matter for his reason to totter and the light within his brain go out."

It's not a mental disease that causes this type of insanity. It's a physical state of deprivation.

"They said they had two children; when they got possession it turned out that they had four. After a while a fifth appeared, and the landlord gave them notice to quit. They paid no attention to it. Then the sanitary inspector who has to wink at the law so often, came in and threatened my friend with legal proceedings. He pleaded that he could not get them out. They pleaded that nobody would have them with so many children at a rental within their means, which is one of the commonest complaints of the poor, by-the-bye. What was to be done? The landlord was between two millstones. Finally he applied to the magistrate, who sent up an officer to inquire into the case. Since that time about twenty days have elapsed, and nothing has yet been done. Is this a singular case? By no means; it is quite common."

This account of housing sets up the following passage.

"In London the slaughter of the innocents goes on on a scale more stupendous than any before in the history of the world. And equally stupendous is the callousness of the people who believe in Christ, acknowledge God, and go to church regularly on Sunday. For the rest of the week they riot about on the rents and profits which come to them from the East End stained with the blood of the children. Also, at times, so peculiarly are they made, they will take half a million of these rents and profits and send it away to educate the black boys of the Soudan."

The church charity workers give facing front to look good, behind the back they fully participate in a society that is still robbing and killing the poor.

"The unfit and the unneeded! The miserable and despised and forgotten, dying in the social shambles. The progeny of prostitution--of the prostitution of men and women and children, of flesh and blood, and sparkle and spirit; in brief, the prostitution of labour. If this is the best that civilisation can do for the human, then give us howling and naked savagery. Far better to be a people of the wilderness and desert, of the cave and the squatting-place, than to be a people of the machine and the Abyss"

Civilization is a widespread diluted establishment of whores.

On alcohol: "It is unhealthy. Certainly it is, but everything else about their lives is unhealthy, while this brings the oblivion that nothing else in their lives can bring. It even exalts them, and makes them feel that they are finer and better, though at the same time it drags them down and makes them more beastly than ever. For the unfortunate man or woman, it is a race between miseries that ends with death. It is of no avail to preach temperance and teetotalism to these people. The drink habit may be the cause of many miseries; but it is, in turn, the effect of other and prior miseries. The temperance advocates may preach their hearts out over the evils of drink, but until the evils that cause people to drink are abolished, drink and its evils will remain."

Vice kills. But when your existence is a miserable living death, with no hope of upward movement... the downward direction soothed by drink seems preferable. Punishing the vices without alleviating reality is simply torture.

"These people who try to help! Their college settlements, missions, charities, and what not, are failures. In the nature of things they cannot but be failures. They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived. They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk. They do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the East End as teachers and savants. They do not understand the simple sociology of Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp of social redeemers." 

The West End is where the better offs come from. They don't understand their own world, much less the world of their charitees. They meddle their hands in the 'unfortunate's' affairs for the sake of being helpers, rather than to re-organize and balance the social order to allow these people fair access to sustainable life.

"This violet-maker handles each flower four times, 576 handlings for three farthings, and in the day she handles the flowers 6912 times for a wage of ninepence. She is being robbed. Somebody is on her back, and a yearning for the Beautiful and True and Good will not lighten her burden. They do nothing for her, these dabblers; and what they do not do for the mother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that they have done for the child in the day."

It's like erecting a building in a rapid stream, for the sake of admiring one's own work. A construction that collapses and washes away when you turn your back and head home. You got to dam up that flow of water if you want these poor to have a tenable assistance for life, but nope, that flow is where your profits are to be made. So you prop up these sham houses against the rushing water, so what's before your eyes is pleasant and justification for your social system. Not laying the groundwork to tear down your profits so that others have basic standard of living. Just fixing the view before your eyes, temporarily, everywhere you look so you are fooled that the problem is not your own creation, but an eternal evil against which you have buttressed protection in the name of the poor.

"And one and all, they join in teaching a fundamental lie. They do not know it is a lie, but their ignorance does not make it more of a truth. And the lie they preach is "thrift." "

The lie that your poverty is due to your extravagance. LOL. That you earn as livable and disposable an income as the well-to-do man, and you have numb skull-ed it all away, not being as sensible and inclined to spend your extra money as the Netflix, social drinker, who only goes out nights once a week.

"To be thrifty means for a worker to spend less than his income--in other words, to live on less. This is equivalent to a lowering of the standard of living. In the competition for a chance to work, the man with a lower standard of living will underbid the man with a higher standard. And a small group of such thrifty workers in any overcrowded industry will permanently lower the wages of that industry.

And the thrifty ones will no longer be thrifty, for their income will have been reduced till it balances their expenditure. In short, thrift negates thrift. If every worker in England should heed the preachers of thrift and cut expenditure in half, the condition of there being more men to work than there is work to do would swiftly cut wages in half.

And then none of the workers of England would be thrifty, for they would be living up to their diminished incomes. The short-sighted thrift-preachers would naturally be astounded at the outcome. The measure of their failure would be precisely the measure of the success of their propaganda. "

Cancel your gym memberships, (ironically, started to save money by staying fit!), skip the Starbucks in the morning, eat out less often, yada yada yada. Money saving tips, lazily designed for people who are exorbitantly wasteful to begin with, are meaningless to the poor. If they had that extra money to spend, they wouldn't be poor.

"If Civilisation has increased the producing power of the average man, why has it not bettered the lot of the average man_? There can be one answer only--MISMANAGEMENT. Civilisation has made possible all manner of creature comforts and heart's delights. In these the average Englishman does not participate. If he shall be forever unable to participate, then Civilisation falls. "

"_Civilisation must be compelled to better the lot of the average men_."

"If the 400,000 English gentlemen, "of no occupation," according to their own statement in the Census of 1881, are unprofitable, do away with them. Set them to work ploughing game preserves and planting potatoes. "

"In short, society must be reorganised, and a capable management put at the head. That the present management is incapable, there can be no discussion. It has drained the United Kingdom of its life-blood. It has enfeebled the stay-at-home folk till they are unable longer to struggle in the van of the competing nations. It has built up a West End and an East End as large as the Kingdom is large, in which one end is riotous and rotten, the other end sickly and underfed."

Over 120 years ago, this was the assessment of the once great empire of England. The great American Empire is following in his Daddy's footsteps.

"It is inevitable that this management, which has grossly and criminally mismanaged, shall be swept away. Not only has it been wasteful and inefficient, but it has misappropriated the funds. Every worn-out, pasty- faced pauper, every blind man, every prison babe, every man, woman, and child whose belly is gnawing with hunger pangs, is hungry because the funds have been misappropriated by the management."

"Nor can one member of this managing class plead not guilty before the judgment bar of Man. "The living in their houses, and in their graves the dead," are challenged by every babe that dies of innutrition, by every girl that flees the sweater's den to the nightly promenade of Piccadilly, by every worked-out toiler that plunges into the canal. The food this managing class eats, the wine it drinks, the shows it makes, and the fine clothes it wears, are challenged by eight million mouths which have never had enough to fill them, and by twice eight million bodies which have never been sufficiently clothed and housed."

I can't stand the self-serving, myopic attitude of excessively wealthy people who say, 'I worked hard all my life for the advantages and material wealth I possess, therefore I deserve it.' And, 'The poor are lazy and want everything handed to them, instead of going out and taking it themselves." They think their unfair, disproportionate, and excessive indulgences are appropriate and rightly misused. The code they hold themselves to is all about entitlement, none about responsibility. What about the multitudes who also work hard their entire lives with no hope of attaining basic living needs? Is their misery likewise deserved?

Not to mention that 'hard work' is a subjective, self-flattering assessment and likely, over-riden by the series of unethical and inequitable gains to power that precipitated gains of wealth. 'Hard work' to undercut your co-workers, sabotage your competitors, and claim credit of your workhorse underlings. The innocuous hard worker who keeps his head down and breaks his back at labor is not the one bringing home the lion's share of the company's earnings.

So no, all your nice shiny things aren't just because you 'worked hard', fucking asshole. You treat people around you like they are too stupid and lazy, otherwise they too could have everything you have. When in reality, one out of a hundred gets the nice position, because there is only one position available and you shoved everyone in your way down so you could take it from some other asshole, or maybe from a decent honest man who actually deserved it.