For The Financial Crisis

I don’t understand the nature of money, but one thing is clear to me: the urge to acquire and hoard money, even when it’s a miserly urge, it is related to the will to live and survive. I once heard a speaker about Marxism at Columbia at the start of the financial crisis describe the infinitely devious raw energy and ingenuity of capitalism, how nothing can stop it always finding new ways to generate itself.

In that sense it’s very different from love, which, even as it leads to procreation, is more closely related to death. Not surprisingly, I suppose, because, procreation is a way of avoiding death. Passionate love in particular, as Aldous Huxley I think put it somewhere in Brave New World, is about a desire to merge, about disappearing as an entity, which is a kind of death.

People kill themselves for love; but they kill other people for money, which I think proves the point.

I began to think about this while reading J. M. Coetzee’s latest book, called Summertime. In it, a woman in it says of her husband:

“He ran his life according to principles, whereas I was a pragmatist. Pragmatism always beats principles; that is just the way things are. The universe moves, the ground changes under our fee; principles are always a step behind. Principles are the stuff of comedy. Comedy is what you get when principles bump into reality.”

This would make a good epitaph for the good intentions arising out of current crisis.

For Attempts To Persuade People Of The Existence of God

You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into — Anon.

For Attempt To Persuade People of the NonExistence of God

You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into — Anon.