Your mother asked us to tell you about what Eric meant to us personally.

To me, Eric was infinite creativity combined with unbending principle. He was the embodiment of the happy warrior, slogging it out in endless meetings and marches and picket lines and having a blast the whole time. His enthusiasm was contagious.

In difficult moments, when we weren’t winning, he gave me the sense that we really were, even if we couldn’t see it right now.

I especially remember his delight at having a little child. He knew your presence would change everything, and he was very happy about that.

With my best wishes,

Ted Kuster

(By “libertarian” here I mean the kind of ideology in which social relations, rights and obligations are held to arise fundamentally from the property relation. Which is problematic in itself, of course, but let’s accept that there are numbers of people for whom this makes some kind of intuitive sense.)

Everyone in any social system has to accept certain boundaries to their individual moral agency, called rules, laws, customs, traditions, expectations. The whole point of rules is to supersede individual choices, to restrict the range of possible individual choices. The tradeoff is that then you get a basis for living together, in some way, without having to fight to the death over every little thing.

The ground rules of capitalism, derived as they are from the property relation, require us to maximize profit (or, more commonly, our share of profit, i.e. wages). Everything we do is subordinated to that. It determines where we live, how we live, with whom we live, everything we do.

Have you noticed how common it is to hear people in business say “it’s out of my hands,” or “I had no choice?” We had to fire you all and move the firm to Tennessee, because costs are lower there, and we have to maximize profits. I know you need this job, but I have no choice, it’s for the good of the company.

The choices people make when they do business are moral choices. They affect the health and happiness of people. Capitalism requires us to imagine that the power to define those moral decisions rests with an abstract entity called “the market.” To participate, we have to give up our personal moral decision-making power and accept that someone else calls the shots. My boss, the CFO, supply and demand, the economy, whatever.

Employees too give up their moral agency when they accept capitalism. I work for a company that sells software to the Pentagon. I have no doubt that some aspect of our software is used for developing things like guidance systems for drone aircraft and other moral horrors. But doing this work is the only way I can meet my obligations to my family, to pay for a home and buy groceries. I have no choice, I regularly tell myself. I’ve given up a core piece of my individual moral agency to… to whom? Nobody in particular. A vast mass of total strangers whose moral choices have nothing to do with me. Sound familiar?

What capitalism actually does is to remove the power of moral decision from the individual and hand it over to the collective. What could possibly be more collective than a “market” –  that is, is the sum total of decisions made by strangers?

So three weeks ago in the middle of a soccer game, I got a feeling like someone had thrown a rock and hit me in the back of the lower leg. Turned out I had pulled one of those muscles that only reveal their central importance to your life when you hurt them. The calf muscle, when it goes out, does so abruptly, with a sensation that reminds you of a rubber band breaking. Your legs go out from under you, and you fall down and roll picturesquely across the lawn until your momentum dissipates. I had to have my friend Ian drive me home after the game because I couldn’t work the gas pedal. (Which was pretty interesting in itself, as Ian hadn’t driven a manual transmission for over a decade. My bullet-head muscles got a nice workout.)

Ice, elevation, etc. You don’t spend a lot of time sitting around when you have two active kids, but I tried to maximize that time. I skipped the next week’s soccer game and swam some laps instead. Yesterday I felt pretty good, so I wrapped the leg, hydrated myself to a comical degree, stretched, warmed up slowly, stretched, took a double dose of Ibuprofen, and stretched. I had a great game, the injured muscle feeling great, until, about halfway through the hour, the identical muscle in the other leg went pop. I did about three yards on the ground, a new personal best. The older injury is even better today — the game seems to have worked it out just enough. So I’m only limping on one side, not both.

This is a picture of me drawn by Seneca, who is in third grade. I really don’t look this good in real life.

Near the elephant farm we met a tour group of women from the Sree Narayana College, which is in Kerala. They were singing and clapping to pass the time. We joined in as best we could.

I got six clips of this before my battery burned out, of which this one is the silliest. You can see the rest here.

Last Friday we flew to Bangalore, where a driver was waiting to take us to a resort in the high coffee country at the other end of a 200-mile dirt track. On Saturday we hiked around, saw elephants, sampled the local nightlife. On the way back to Bangalore the following day, we got lost in some of the most beautiful farmland I have ever seen and I found myself wondering how bad it would be if we missed our return flight, really.

The high point of the trip, for me, was a chance encounter with a tour group from a women’s college in Kerala. They were sitting under a tree singing and clapping and carrying on, and they graciously let us catch some of it on video, which I’ll post here as soon as I figure out how.

I am 43 now, and I can attest that it’s pretty good.