A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. –Saul Bellow
Good day Gentle Reader. Today I will conclude our brief exploration of ‘The Grand Illusion’ by briefly exploring the second premise: the pursuit of individual egoism (think: being self-centered) leads to harmony and peace and growth in everyone’s welfare.
Consider that being an egoist refers not only to my behavior but to my character. Being an egoist means that ‘I’ want everything for myself, that possessing not sharing, gives me pleasure; thus I must become greedy because if my aim is having, I am more the more I have.
My hunger to have is insatiable – thus I can never be satisfied; there is no end to my desires. I am envious of those who have more than I do and I am afraid of those who have less. On the other hand, I strive to repress these feelings in order to represent myself to myself and to others as the rational, sincere and kind person that I pretend to be (and that others who are like me are also pretending to be).
Consider, Gentle Reader that this passing for having inevitably leads to class warfare. The pretense of the communists, for example, is that their system will end class struggle by abolishing classes continues to be fiction; their system, like ours, is based upon the principle of unlimited consumption as the goal of living. As long as everyone wants to have more, there must be formations of classes, there must be class war and, thus, there will be international war. Greed and Peace preclude each other.
Up until the mid-1700s economic behavior remained ‘human’ behavior and, hence, was subject to the values of humanistic ethics. Beginning in the late 1700s capitalism underwent a radical change – a fundamental change, a transformational change; economic behavior became separate from ethics and human values. Economic behavior became rooted in the mechanical metaphor – the machine metaphor.
This economic machine was supposed to be an entity independent of human needs. The human metaphor suffered as the machine/mechanical metaphor expanded and grew and became our dominant Cultural Metaphor.
The development of this metaphor and of this economic system was no longer motivated by the question: What is good for us human beings? The motivating question became (and still is): What is good for the growth of the system? We humans were told – continue to be told – that what is good for the system is good for us human beings.
This illusion was enhanced by another illusion: the qualities that this system required – egotism, selfishness/hedonism and greed – were innate in us human beings; they are part of our very nature. Thus, both the system and our ‘nature’ fostered them. Thus, they are virtues not vices AND they are necessary for our very survival.
Today, people continue to be attracted to the mechanical metaphor and since the 1940s to the banking metaphor and to the technological metaphor and thus to the grand illusion. These inhuman, life-less, metaphors continue to support the grand illusion and they also continue to be the pathway to our own destruction.
Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth. –Ludwig Borne
Searcher-Seeker 