[lbo-talk] Conflict is Good

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Fri Oct 24 08:47:40 PDT 2003


From: BklynMagus

Or to look through the other end of the telescope: a society that no longer enshrines individual desire as a good.

Individuals will compete so long as they continue to believe in a model of human nature that accepts the proposition of the discrete individual (necessary for housing the soul). Such an individual is defined as a matrix of desires; the goal of this individual is the satisfaction of those desires: a bigger tv set, an extra week of vacation, living in a more spacious house, etc. We are successful when our desires are met and failures when they are not. Success is enhanced when the desire successfully filled is for an obscure/scarce/luxury item/object. The result of this bizarre misapprehension of reality is that we manufacture scarcity, conflict and competition.

To paraphrase Descartes, we live in a society where the motto is "I want, therefore I am."

My own corollary: "The more I want, the more I am."

^^^^^^^

CB: I can see aiming to abolish greed, greed being ever expanding wants with gross indifference to others as a virtue.

I think the individual has an objective existence. There is no location of the social except in objective individuals. And "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die" remains a valid imperative. So, I can see modulating individual desire to the historically concrete, economic potential and coexisting desires of others, but not rendering individual desire as no good at all.



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