The Battle for consumer justice is the struggle for human contentment. Where economic standards are questioned new ones will arise. The question is, which standards are we to keep and which are to be left behind?
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Pilgrimage into 21st century enlightenment & freedom.
Since my book's publication of March, 1999, there have been endless questions. Why, for instance, continue the battle with Starbucks, what does it mean? Or, what does the book, which is a summer camping trip whose excursion leads to a joining of Eastern spiritual enlightenment in Western culture, have to say about the erosion of consumer based values in America?
The Starbucks battle materialized during the writing of the final draft of Balance at Middlefork, a project which took over twenty years to complete. This was a book written very differently from anything that had come before. At last everything was set for publication. It wasn't until months later that a friend suggested I rewrite the book to include the exploits of the Starbucks case. That seemed unrealistic. The book, after all, was an end product of a long process of exploration and struggle with the question of human contentment. Is it possible to live in a condition of Eastern enlightenment in a Western culture who's scientific and technological values seem to pull away from the very experience of indeterminacy that is the content of spiritual enlightenment? At best, the Starbucks battle had little relation to a spiritual journey toward enlightenment and human freedom.
The book is autobiographical and is based on a summer camping trip in which missing pieces come together in a life-long quest to better understand the relation between enlightenment and freedom, and what exactly freedom means in this 21st century culture of massive change and shifting of cultural values. This was an unexpected but tremendous breakthrough. Both characters in this book are facing long running conditions of personal failure and aren't sure how to face things. The main character's best friend is coming to terms with his own isolation from society as he laments the years spent raising an alcoholic woman's children, at the end only to be abandoned. A sort of strange dialogue surfaces between the philosophical narration: A plain spoken truth with allegorical meanings. Both characters sit by the river and recount the experiences of cigar smoking, camping adventures and their own friendship. All of which parallels and keeps up with the narrator's ideas on freedom. The book seems to operate on contrasts and insists that proper thought produces proper action. Only to be completely true to the idea would mean rewriting the book to include the Starbucks incident.
To think a moral battle is to fight one. So Starbucks got written in, right where it belongs: within a conceptual system the book sets up that handles two different kinds of freedom. This system allows the freedom of Eastern enlightenment to harmoniously co-exist within the evolving freedom of Western cultural--scientific values. Eastern enlightenment is a letting go of all distinctions, all things, all patterns and systems. The book talks about "Quality". Simply said, "Quality" is the process of enlightenment. Western enlightenment comes in the freedom obtained through the organizing principle of science and technology. Both freedoms are real, both are valid.
Economic freedom is part of the organizing principle of social values, thus the relevance and importance of the Starbuck battle. It's about action and economic freedom and how change is the most important element of economic theory. In fact, change is the on-going condition of freedom within theory itself. We're in times where huge economic growth toward merger mania and corporate monopolies have resulted in shifts away from consumer based values. Sooner or later society must recognize and correct the problem. It is not the case, however, that mere recognition of the economic value problem implies some better theoretic solution. Quite the contrary. The problem must be recognized and examined with an eye on the inadequate economic assumptions which led to the problem. These problematic values are the traditional and somewhat naive laissez-faire beliefs in a self regulating economy with its unbridled economic forces run rampant. By constructing a better theory of economic values, and only then, may such a new theory guide the interactive relations in the marketplace. If the economic theories of the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain are themselves the simplistic and erroneous product of economic principles of relations that are inadequate to the society that embraces them, then practical economic values suffer. As do consumers and big business. Economic evolution is as inevitable as human evolution. It is unstoppable. The only way ahead is to provide theoretic guidelines by which differing levels of freedom may peaceably evolve, rather than dominate and overcome society and the freedom to think new things. Such ethical action is possible only through the education and exchange of new ideas for the old.
The book's central characters share a story of compassion and friendship, differences and understanding. The main character's struggle with the difficulties of growing up gay in 21st century Americana becomes the metaphor for the cultural struggle toward human equality and how it may be achieved in society. The book's humor is a coping mechanism used by the main character to survive the pain of his own existence. Toward the book's end he realizes that no matter how witty the humor, there's no longer any hiding from the haunting of his own life's failings. There, in the mid-summer heat of the Yosemite Valley floor comes a new perspective to the traditional Western tendency which regards failure as a neccessary evil. Through this emerges the spiritually grounded synthesis of the book's emotionally compelling conclusion.
--Jeremy L. Dorosin
