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Animal Spirits

The interesting excerpt below is from a 1950s letter from Normal Mailer to William Styron.

“I didn’t write[The] Naked [and the Dead] because I wanted to say war was horrible, or that history is complex, resistant, and almost inscrutable, or because I wanted to say that the coming battle between the naked fanatics and the dead mass was approaching, but because really what I wanted to say was, “Look at me, Norman Mailer, I’m alive, I’m a genius, I want people to know that; I’m a cripple, I want to hide that,” and so forth.”

This is what political theory and capitalism in particular have to deal with: how to regulate so as to take advantage of the upside and limit the downside of this attitude.

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