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Hello World, McGuffins, and Little Wooden Bridges [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-09-08  

I was going to be a lawyer.

It was a dream that never really died. When I was eight, I was going to be Perry Mason and free the unjustly convicted. When I was an early teen, I was going to argue in front of the Supreme Cout. When I was heading off to college, I was going to be a labor lawyer. I even took the PSAT mid-career and did well enough to get enough law school brochures to paper my whole house. But it was never to be.

I have always written. Ever since I could remember, I told stories on paper. Badly, probably — certainly no one has ever paid me for the privilege. But I also grew up poor, often very poor, especially after my parents’ divorce. Writing, whether it was journalism or fiction, would not pay for an upper middle-class lifestyle (academia was not even a consideration for me. My family had not sent people to college before — college was a goal for us as means of bettering our financial situations. That one could spend one’s life in study was not a path I knew existed.) Lawyers? Lawyers made money.

But then I attended an engineering school, where they made me take an introductory engineering course. You did little mechanical tasks — including building little wooden bridges to take weight. Mine was not good, though it did explode rather spectacularly upon failure. The C+ I got was probably generous. Building it was a blast, though. It was as creative as writing, and a lot more immediate. I switched to electrical engineering, where I discovered programming.

Programming was even closer to writing. You took a problem, your own imagination, and a language and created a solution. The first time you get “Hello, world.” to appear on a screen, the traditional tutorial for every programming language I have run across, you feel the same rush of creativity as when you first made a story come together.

All right, so what is the point of this little biographical indulgence? Creativity is the heart of what makes us humans. Other creatures use tools, but we are the only ones we know of that shape the world around us to create those tools. We are the only ones that look at a rock and see an axe for chopping wood, or other animals, inside it. In the same way, we are the only ones that look at slab of marble and see a statue or gaze into the night sky and feel compelled to make up a story about the wolf eating the moon. Creativity, stories, are what make us human.

Our economy is no longer built around that kind of creativity. It is built on exploitation and rent seeking, not on rewarding people who make things. Not on fostering connection and creativity. Our economy, and thus our society, is designed to isolate and immiserate. Part of the reason we have seen so many strikes in so many seemingly unrelated areas of the economy this summer is that the powers that be simply do not respect the idea of a job well done. It is unsurprising that such disrespect eventually garnered a response.

When I was putting the final touches the novel I just sent out on query (wish me luck) I realized that a Mcguffin I introduced as a throwaway device in an earlier scene as a device to get one character to trust another slightly more than they did was the perfect device to use at the climax, both plot-wise and thematically. Those moments of creative serendipity, when my subconscious and conscious work come together, are one of the reasons I still write even though it is very unlikely I will ever be published. We would all be better off if we reoriented our economy away from rewarding rent seeking and back toward rewarding creativity and production.

Those are what make us human, after all. And a society that reinforces our humanity has to be better than one that does not.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/8/2192110/-Hello-World-McGuffins-and-Little-Wooden-Bridges

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