The Dreamseller: The Calling (26 page)

“You’re today’s proletarians,” he said.

I thought: “What’s he saying? Doesn’t he know the audience he’s talking to?” I thought the dreamseller had no idea what he was saying. But he quickly threw my thinking into a tailspin.

He said that Karl Marx (1818–1883) had left his native land and gone to Paris, where he met Friedrich Engels (1820–1895).
The two refined their ideas, joined socialist groups and initiated a lifelong collaboration. To them, the manner in which goods are produced and wealth distributed are the forces that shape all aspects of our lives: politics, law, morality and philosophy. Marx believed human history was governed by the laws of science and rejected all religious interpretations of nature and history. He thought these laws would help people, especially the working class, make their own history.

But this dream never materialized, he said. When a group of socialists seized power, they became ruthless, crushed their opponents, silenced dissenting voices, infringed on human rights and crushed the freedom they had preached. The working class did not construct its own history, rather, the ones in power wrote the history books. Religion was replaced by the cult of personality of those leaders.

“Their revolution was extreme,” he said. “Unlike them, my dream isn’t to destroy the ruling political system in order to rebuild it. I don’t believe in change from the outside. I believe in change that begins from within, a peaceful change in our ability to reason, to see, to critique, to interpret social phenomena and, especially, to reclaim pleasure. My dream lies within people.”

After he showed that he knew what he was talking about, he said that when Marx launched his ideas, the project failed not because the ruling class didn’t distribute income, but because they used political and financial power to oppress the working class. A small minority lived like princes while the majority lived like paupers.

Today, he said, this separation of the classes remained. Social inequalities hadn’t been eradicated. In fact, with the advent of globalization, the system had created a new class of exploited people: “You!” he emphasized again.

Again I thought, “But aren’t they the privileged ones? Don’t
they live in the lap of luxury? How can they be called an exploited class—the proletarians of this millennium?”

But to ground his ideas, the dreamseller crushed a popular saying of ours:

“In past centuries, before the system developed, it took three generations for a family’s fortune to disappear. So the old saying held true: rich grandfather, lordly son, poor grandson. But these days that saying doesn’t hold up. A solid business can vanish in five years. A successful industry can be out of the market in a short time. Several fortunes over can be lost in a single generation.”

After that initial shock, the businessmen began to agree with this mysterious thinker.

“For your companies to survive, you can never stop competing. To stay ahead of the competition, you are forced to find ways to reinvent yourselves each year, each month each week.”

And he asked a basic question that everyone got wrong:

“Does the system crush companies that show weakness?”

Unanimously, they answered yes. But he said no.

“The system doesn’t crush the
companies
. It crushes their
leaders
.”

He saw that doctors, lawyers, engineers, journalists—people of all professions—were being crushed in the same way. These masters of finance began to realize they weren’t as rich as they thought. These proprietors of power began to understand they weren’t as strong as they imagined. Some in the audience were still skeptical. But the dreamseller loved skeptics. He could pin them down with the sharpness of his ideas. So he left no doubts:

“Ladies and gentlemen, the time of slavery has not been expunged from the pages of history but merely changed its form. I’m going to ask you some questions, and I want you to be completely honest. Anyone who isn’t will have to answer to his own conscience. Tell me: Who has migraines?”

People were a bit embarrassed, but one after the other they raised their hands.

“Who has muscle aches?” Again, the vast majority raised their hands, this time more quickly.

Then he began asking countless other questions:

“Who wakes up fatigued? Whose hair is falling out? Who feels his mind is always racing? Who worries about problems that have yet to happen? Who feels like he’s always hanging by a thread? Who loses his temper over the tiniest of problems? Who has wildly fluctuating emotions—calm one minute and explosive the next? Who’s afraid of what the future will hold?”

Most never lowered their hands. They had all the symptoms. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I rubbed my eyes and asked myself, “Aren’t these society’s elite? How can their quality of life be this terrible? Aren’t they the ones who drink the best wines and champagnes? Don’t they dine at the best restaurants? Why are they so gravely stressed?” I was shaken.

My mind wouldn’t reconcile the two images. The rich traveled in luxury cars, but they were paralyzed by their stress. They would go to their beach houses, but their emotions didn’t surf the waves of pleasure. They slept on soft mattresses but lacked the mental comfort to sleep at night. They wore the finest suits but stood naked against the worries in their lives.

“What insanity!” I thought. “Where is the happiness the system promised these people who’ve reached the top of their professions? Where is the peace for those who’ve accumulated riches? Where is the reward for competence? They take out insurance on their homes, their lives, their businesses, even against kidnapping. So how can they be so insecure?” The system, it turned out, crushed its leaders.

T
HE DREAMSELLER’S QUESTIONS IN RECOLETA CEMETERY
sent our heads spinning. I had attacked the business elite for years on end in my classroom, but I realized I needed to reexamine a few concepts. I began to understand that the system betrayed everyone, especially those who nurtured it most. It even affected celebrities, not just because they lost their private lives but because their success was fleeting. In this society, it was easy to become insignificant overnight.

In the name of competition, the system sucked out their last drop of mental energy. They expended more energy than many manual laborers, and were constantly fatigued from an overload of thinking. They were victors, but they didn’t carry away the ultimate prize.

The stress was even greater for companies who specialized in production. There was an international price war, distorted by government subsidies that contaminated the value of products, and could crush companies on the other side of the globe. Now, add in the taxes on products coming in and out of the country, the disparity of wages paid to workers in different countries and the fact that some firms lowered their prices below the cost of production to corner the market. Survival was a hellish art.

It took its toll on everyone involved. Thirty-five percent of them had heart problems or were hypertensive. Fifteen percent had cancer, and some of those wouldn’t live to see the New Year. Thirty percent suffered depression. Ten percent had panic attacks. Sixty percent had marital problems. Ninety-five percent exhibited three or more mental problems and most of those had as many as ten different mental issues.

Yes, the proletariat were still being exploited across the globe. But in developed and emerging societies, where labor laws were just and human rights were respected, the ones who were exploited were the those engaged in intense intellectual work, like managers, directors, business magnates, professionals, professors, journalists.

The oppression was so devastating that many executives took their problems home with them, even on vacation. Workers who had a decent salary but weren’t in a position of leadership or management had time for friends, food, relaxation on weekends. They could go to bed and wake up without being suffocated by worry. But for the business leaders those simple pleasures were luxuries. In the best sense of the word, “the serfs lived better than the feudal lord.”

It was then that I understood why the dreamseller said that success is harder to deal with than failure: The danger of success is that one can become a perpetual-motion machine. Marx and Engels would spin in their graves if they knew that the final stage of capitalism would attain the socialist dream: It would tax the elite more than the workers—physically, anyway.

Although there were exceptions. The problem for the working class was consumption: the compulsion to buy, to use credit cards, to live beyond their means. Capitalism, it turned out, made workers king and exploited the minds of those in power.

The interesting thing is that there were no statistics to tell us about this new group of exploited workers. They were
apparently strong, self-sufficient demigods who needed no help, much less dreams. But they were not beings without borders; they were enslaved to this way of thinking. Aside from an annual medical checkup, nothing was done for them.

It was clear the dreamseller knew what he was talking about and to whom he was speaking, after all. But we didn’t understand how he could know that. How could this ragged nomad possess that information? What kind of person is this who moves with equal ease among paupers and millionaires? Where does he come from?

Bartholomew couldn’t keep quiet any longer after seeing these giants of industry admit their frailties. He raised his hand and told the dreamseller:

“Chief, these guys are in bad shape! But I think we can help them.”

It was the first time in modern history that someone so poor had called members of the financial elite paupers. It was the first time that a proletarian felt richer than society’s millionaires. His utterance was so spontaneous that what had been tragic turned suddenly comical. The participants looked at one another and broke out in broad smiles. They needed to buy lots of dreams if they wanted to regain their mental health.

As if the night didn’t hold enough surprises, another one arose in that darkened cemetery. Suddenly, from inside a tomb about fifty feet away, a terrifying figure with an old white coat over its head emerged with a horrifying cry: “I am death! And I have come for you!”

Even the dreamseller was startled. And for the first time in my life, I truly believed in ghosts. Our hearts jumped up in our throats, and reason completely leaped out of our bodies. Some started to run for the gates, but the ghost laughed and laughed.

“Take it easy, folks. Calm down! Why so nervous? Sooner or later we’ll all be sleeping in a place like this,” it said.

The figure removed the coat from his head. It was that Bartholomew’s worst half, Barnabas. Those two managed to make a joke wherever they were, even in a cemetery.

Every time we reached the heights of seriousness, they plunged us into wild laughter. They spoiled everything. If in the past, had they been students of mine, I’d surely have expelled them. But fortunately for them, they had found a patient teacher in the dreamseller. I didn’t understand how he managed to love those two degenerates.

Seeing that the audience was still tense, Barnabas took a chocolate bar from his pocket, bit into it, and started in on a story of his own.

“I used to come to this cemetery drunk and depressed for a little self-therapy. Since the living seldom spoke to me because they thought I was drunk or crazy, and the ones who did speak to me insulted me or offered me fortune cookie advice, I’d come here to talk to the dead. Here, I could cry about my mistakes. Here, I could allow myself to be frustrated, a man who wanted to start all over, but I always failed. Here, I confessed that I felt like human refuse. Here, I asked God’s forgiveness for everything: For my many drunken binges. For the ‘one for the road’ that left me sleeping in the park. For abandoning my family. I never had a dead person complain about my foolishness.”

The businessmen were moved by Barnabas’s sincerity and his willingness to share his feelings, characteristics rarely seen in their circles. They desperately needed to open up but wouldn’t dare show weakness. They couldn’t be human.

Hearing Barnabas confess his woes, Bartholomew took the stage again. He embraced the other man and tried to console him as only Bartholomew could.

“Don’t cry, Mayor. My problems are bigger than yours. I’m immoral.”

“No, mine are worse. I’m a pervert,” Barnabas stated in a louder voice.

“No, my mistakes are too many to count. I’m a scoundrel,” Bartholomew said in a still louder tone.

“No, no, you don’t really know me. I’m completely depraved . . .”

Amazingly, they started arguing about which one was worse. The businessmen had never seen anything like it. They only ever saw people bragging about who was better. We wanted to break it up, but we were afraid of making a bigger scene. And to show he really was the worst of them, Bartholomew lost his patience and said:

“I’m corrupt, dishonest, a liar, I don’t keep my word, I don’t pay my bills, I covet my neighbor’s wife. I’ve even stolen your wallet when you were drunk . . .”