David McRaney  |  Journalist

Rage against the selling out machine

I love to hear people tell me  someone has “sold out.”

Sometimes it is a celebrity or a band and sometimes it is a politician or an artist, but the idea is always the same. Somehow, this person has decided making money is more important than whatever their mission in life used to be.

All of that is well and good. I hate to see art and politics circling the drain as much as anyone. But, what bothers me is when people claim they are not going to go to school or get a job because they do not want to “sell out.”

Before you start fretting about selling out to the machine, there are a few key points to remember.

The idea of selling out, becoming something you are not to obtain security, suggests we are our jobs. We are not.

Einstein was a patent clerk for almost 15 years. Bill Hicks worked in a shoe store. Gandhi was a lawyer. These manifestations of labor are necessary evils to obtain a greater good. Eventually, all these examples established themselves and broke away.

Another important lesson in cheating the system comes from the fact that most of our great philosophers, thinkers, scientists, artists and writers came from rich families. Socrates, Edison, Hemming-way, Dali and everyone before them usually did not have to worry about working, thus they had time to develop the things they fancied.

It is also important to remember America is a capitalist republic where the democratic process is handled through representatives and a complicated bureaucracy.

The whole system is based on cash. To live here, in this time, we must submit to the machine if we are ever to subdue it at any level. In this new era, people who do not buy into the conformity of modern society can simultaneously earn enough money to feed, clothe and shelter themselves while also educating themselves and exploring free thought.

We can be peons to the upper classes, all the while constructing selves who are strong and willing to speak out. None of us want to work a job we hate till our lungs are filled with tumors and the only solace left to our frail and cracking bodies is the clever banter of Regis and Kelly. But, in a capitalist society, the only way out of that hell is to get up and fight the system by abusing it.

Occasionally, someone will strike it rich, but the chances of winning the lottery are usually far less than getting killed in a car wreck on the way to buy the tickets.

The people with wealth accumulated it over several generations, and for a lot of us, myself included, the first generation in that process will have to be mine.

I doubt I will ever be affluent enough to notice, and that’s fine. I realize that, as a flesh and blood human being, everything I do in this lifetime is transient.

Selling out does not have anything to do with working for a living, at least not by

my definition. For me, selling out means believing everything the government says, letting peers and the media tell you what to think and choosing money over those you love until one day you turn around and you are too old to change anything.

Originally published in The Student Printz on April 7, 2005