To the Editor:
I was very affected to learn that Qwest Communications International closed its facility and now nearly 200 workers have to worry about paying for food, rent and health care for themselves and their families.
And I want your readers to know how this situation can change. I am learning now, from Aesthetic Realism, the kind education founded by Eli Siegel and taught in New York City, what justice to people is.
In 1970, in a series of groundbreaking lectures published in Goodbye Profit System: Update (New York, Definition Press), Mr. Siegel explained that the world has come to a point at which an economic system based on ill will, which has made for such greed and poverty and ordinary, everyday injustice to the lives of countless people, had failed and would never recover. He stated, “What is being shown is that without good will, the toughest, most inconsiderate of activities, economics, cannot do so well…The world has now come to such a geographic or historic state (that) ethics must be honored for production and distribution in the world to go well.”
Today, Americans are daily bombarded with reports of the “booming” economy. However, so many of these same people have to hold two or three lower-paying jobs per family just to keep afloat. Millions of Americans are terrified to get sick – or for their elderly relatives to get sick – because they have no health insurance or can’t afford it.
There has been and is now a furious attempt to save the profit system through the use of cheap labor in other countries. And the only way big profits can be made by a few individuals is through making sure people throughout the world are poor. Owners cannot make profit if people live decently and with dignity.
In her commentary to the international periodical, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism Ellen Reiss stated, “Mr. Siegel has shown that profit economics has been based on a purpose completely antithetical to the very purpose of every person’s life. The purpose of our life is to like the world into which we were born, to make it stronger and be made stronger by it.”
This is good will as only Aesthetic Realism explains it and Miss Reiss also describes what people will feel when good will is the basis of economics. She says, in part, “This person – working at a computer or in a field, at a school, in a factory, in a restaurant kitchen – is someone whom we, the people of America, see as adding to the kindness and beauty of the world. He is strengthening the lives of other people; he is giving them something they need, and they are grateful…And his job belongs to him; what is earned by what he produces comes to him – is not robbed from him by someone who didn’t work for it.”
We will have an economy that is strong, efficient and fair to every person when people everywhere ask and answer this question, by Mr. Siegel: “What does a person deserve by being a person?”