Milk Milk Lemonade

July 8th, 2024

What if we encouraged children to be kind and caring instead of conditioning them to be shrewd business-people?

I thought about this as we drove past a 50-cent lemonade stand the other day.

I can usually have good conversations and constructive arguments with people, except when they’ve been brainwashed about a few specific subjects. These topics include a) guns, b) religion, c) politics, and d) capitalism. (Don’t @ me.)

Since our brains are dropped into a socially-approved solution so early in life, most people can’t identify the rinse (and that includes me; I do a lot of reading, introspection, evaluation, and self-improvement every day, and I’m still a fucking idiot). Not being able to recognize our biases makes us useless when trying to update systems or crumple them up and draw new ones entirely. We (literally) can’t imagine any other way.

I kept thinking about the lesson of the lemonade stand.

Let’s consider socialism (stop shouting, just keep reading for another minute). By consider, I mean think about it in a normal micro-setting instead of the macro.

Ben Burgis writes brilliantly about G.A. Cohen’s book “Why Not Socialism?”:

“Cohen asks the reader to think about a group of friends going on a camping trip together. He doesn’t describe anything out of the ordinary. The friends find a site and set up a tent. Some of them fish, some of them cook, they all go on hikes, and so on.

“What Cohen wants the reader to notice is that the way this trip is run looks a lot like how socialists think society should be run. The pots and pans and fishing poles and soccer balls, for example, are treated as collective property — even if they belong to individual campers. When the fish are caught and cooked, everyone gets to partake equally of the result of the collective effort, free of charge. Cohen’s hypothetical campers act this way not because of anything especially noble about them, but because this is how any group of friends would act on a camping trip.

“To make the point more sharply, he invites us to imagine a far less normal camping trip — one that’s run according to the principles of a capitalist market economy. One of the campers (Sylvia) discovers an apple tree. When she comes back to tell the others, they’re excited that they’ll all be able to enjoy apple sauces, apple pie, and apple strudel. Certainly they can, Sylvia confirms — ‘provided, of course . . . that you reduce my labor burden, and/or provide me with more room in the tent, and/or with more bacon at breakfast.’

“Another camper, Harry, is very good at fishing, and so in exchange for his services he demands that he be allowed to dine exclusively on perch instead of the mixture of perch and catfish everyone else is eating. Another, Morgan, lays claim to a pond with especially good fish because he claims that his grandfather dug and stocked it with those fish on another camping trip decades ago.

“No normal person, Cohen notes, would tolerate such behavior. They would insist on what he calls a ‘socialist way of life.’ Why, then, shouldn’t we want to organize an entire economy around the same principles?”

It’s an eye-opening comparison. I could appeal to the religious and spiritual by invoking Jesus here, but to be honest, I think most people do want to teach our children compassion and empathy.

So why do we encourage them to set up a table and provide drink (and sometimes snacks!) to others on a sweltering day and charge those people for these basic necessities?

“To teach them a lesson,” you say.

Right. So what’s the lesson?

These are children. Hopefully, they are in a rent-free situation where their needs are being met, and they’re in a place where they can simply share with others.

We wonder where capitalism gets its power and we hand down lessons, willingly, that consolidate it. We work so hard because our parents told us we’re worthless unless people pay us for our labor, and guess where they got that reliable information from?

We wonder where the current narcissism comes from, and the lack of compassion and loss of service and unwillingness to help others. That’s our creed, baby. Hustle. Take what’s yours. There isn’t enough. There’s never enough.

If me suggesting that kids should give away free lemonade on a hot summer day (in this economy!) raises your blood pressure even slightly, maybe consider why.

Maybe you’re just thirsty for something more. Something you’ve been convinced you, and everybody else, simply doesn’t deserve.