Philia and Phobia

John Lanchester is absolutely my favorite writer on the kind of thing that he does. His specialty is making recondite financial goings-on intelligible to normal people, New Yorker style, but he doesn't get sucked into term paper mode by the material. The further from term paper mode the better for me.

Which is why I like to read about the arts and book reviews and such, because the writing is usually more open and aggressive and less detached. Fuck detachment. Detachment is an intimation of death. I'll get all I want when I'm dead. Detachment is an illusion and an attempted abdication of our humanity.

To be alive is to be involved and enmeshed in everything and responsible, which is a problem for some people, but it also means you're open to the visceral joy of existence even when you're not eating or having sex or stoned or standing in front of the money cannon when it goes off. These primal things are the crux. 

They're addicting for a reason. They're good. Access to these things is a right of birth, IMHO. Some people try to corral the stuff, or fence us away from it, more plausibly. Don't fence me in, buddy. I want my share of the goods. Lanchester shows how those certain people, financial types, want it all.

To the detriment of everyone, including themselves in the long run, and we're at fault for letting it happen. This is the horror and immorality of class and privilege, when one group gets all the goodies and the others vicariousness, an inverse schadenfreude, enjoying someone else's indulgence, usually with a tinge of envy.

I think this happens because people are programmed for deprivation, the assumption of limitation, and for lives that are a struggle and with death always looming and so on. Who knows. But the resources at our disposal are incomprehensible. The only real issue is distribution. Sharing. Equitableness.

We fail at this even in incredibly localized environments and tend to turn our more physically distant human relations into objects and kill them, presumably freeing up more resources for ourselves or at least preemptively protecting what we have. I believe in equity and sharing, even across species.

And I believe in owning our involvement in life. To take life for granted is sinfulness. You can't prove otherwise, so there. I'm a kind of existentialist universalist libertarian. There's a good article somewhere showing how the American version of libertarianism is bogus. I'll try to find it again and link to it.

Our libertarians are class warriors, the allies and compatriots of the financiers and speculators, but it's our sinfulness in not asserting and insisting on our human rights that is the problem. So read "Cityphilia" and "Cityphobia" by Lanchester and meet the smartest guys in the room.

It's an entire world economy based on the ENRON model and it's scary as hell.