Gustavs Klucis (Klutsis): The Development of Transportation:
An Important Task of the Five Year Plan, Poster, Print (1929)

"May we all experience the Grace that only achieving our own well-earned Irrelevance could ever provide."

From the earliest days of the Soviet Union, the Five Year Plan worked as a central focusing tool. It codified the aspirations of the ruling class, making them possible to describe and enforce. The government imported a small army of American engineers, each schooled in the so-called engineering science of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the self-proclaimed Father of Scientific Management. Employing techniques proposed and affected by Winslow's assistant, Henry Gantt, these engineers created plans to produce the most remarkable products. Whole industries were invented from scratch as the Soviets attempted to jump from feudalism into the modern world in a single great leap forward.

Most of these plans came to naught but the prosecution and execution of those Soviets who created them because they were naively drawn. The orange orchards proposed for Ukraine never produced a single orange, and not due to any lack of revolutionary fervor as the prosecuting proceedings pled, but simply due to the truth that oranges won't grow at that latitude. Those who failed were sentenced to lengthy jail terms, and most never regained their freedom. Those who began the planning process filled with promise became irrelevant to achieving further progress by the end, disqualified by their experience. I understand that the dominant myth remains that life must be a process of accumulating ever greater significance, that experience naturally translates into understanding, and understanding into a revered wisdom. There's little evidence that this was ever the case, even outside the admittedly zealous and desperate Soviet system.

It might be more reasonable to recognize that we work toward an Irrelevance instead. All those hard-learned lessons might be best thought of as exercise, perhaps producing personal diversion, but unlikely to produce anything longer-lived or more broadly applicable. Early on, it might seem likely that anyone might manage to change this world. A bright and upcoming anyone might stumble upon some revelation. Each individual's struggle to gain personal mastery might doubtless become the template for anybody's future similar struggle, but this world doesn't seem to work that benevolently. It becomes simple vanity to presume that one's personal experience might ever become broadly representative of everyone's effort.

Further, people tend to prefer to find their own way through and distrust instructions, even when lovingly assembled for everyone's own good. We seem bound and determined, let alone destined, to insist upon making our own mistakes and reinventing our own wheels, even when they won't be even remotely better than any others. Nobody's a king in his home country.

We might be better off if we could accept the way it seems to be and not rely so much on popular pipe dreams. The purpose of any life might be better characterized as Irrelevance rather than prominence, with extra points for humble execution and grateful appreciation. I have been noticing how much less I care about what I once called my life's work. Thanks to earlier career revelations, I truly believed that I had some better-quality advice to dispense. I even found a string of clients interested enough to pay me well to offer my advice. Many discovered their own revelations within that study, though everybody seemed to come to their own more personal conclusions about them. I realized over time that I was not really successfully transferring my realizations but serving instead as a medium within which my clients could find theirs. This was a fair trade, but it left me without a Body of Knowledge to pass on as my legacy. The best I can say about my career now is that you just had to be there to experience it. I had to be there, too.

As near as I can tell, most of whomever I was then remains there, near the point of delivery. I left my legacy near that point of delivery and carry little evidence of those experiences in my present. In my present, I catch myself boning up on my Irrelevance. I notice more skill emerging in every engagement. What I once could do without hardly even thinking now requires dredging up vestigial memories, the ones I, at best, barely half-remember. I often feel moved to employ the venerable Etm. appreviation, completing the thought with a casual, "and that shit," a sure sign of successfully encroaching Irrelevance.

With ample evidence, the deeper purpose of my life must be finally achieving this sacred Irrelevance. Despite my publishing history and long legacy of sharing my most profound, and even a few of my shallower, thoughts, I have not come close to successfully changing this world. I realize lately that I never really wanted to change this world, for such an act might merely make me responsible for the chaotic mess this world will always eventually seem to most. No, this world successfully side-stepped my most fervent attempts to change it, thank Heavens, and I'm well on my way toward my fitting legacy, Irrelevance. May we all experience the Grace that only achieving our own well-earned Irrelevance could ever provide.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz