Paul David Adkin's Blog, page 37

CAPITALIST DESIRE (PROHIBITION, PIRACY & DEBT)

The great capitalist lie is its myth of unlimited desires. That which capitalism calls the realisation of dreams. Society knows that desire cannot be given free rein, for if society has a function it is to organise the flows of desire by establishing limits to them; by adjudicating conflicts that arise.

Capitalist advertising cries out: “Fulfil yourselves! Make your dreams come true!” While at the same time, knowing full well that such a thing is impossible.

If capitalism is a desire-inducing machine, it is also the great fabricator of impossible illusions, of delusions. Success can be found, but it must always be conditioned by the relating of the impossible dream, and the paradox that the attainment of the desired-object makes that object no longer desirable.

The dynamics of capitalism depends on the fabrication of dreams and the constant stimulus of desires. It requires a society enslaved to the lust for acquisitions. Nevertheless, it must also know what the limits to those desires are. Limiting the desires it creates or exploits is also important for capitalism as it needs to control the balance of supply and demand in order to ensure that it always works in favour of capital.

A limited market benefits a corrupt or criminal system (e.g.: the USA in the 1930s). By limiting desire through laws of prohibition, an underground economy can become enormously profitable for they who dare. There is huge profit to be had for those who can control, in an underground way, that which has become illegitimate. Desire for the most potently desirable and addictive commodities: alcohol, drugs, sex, gaming, slaves and weapons, can produce unimaginable benefits for those with enough influence and muscle to traffic them from within the deeply privileged space of illegality.

Most of the above examples of prohibition were established along with the excuse that prohibition protects public health. Primitive economies are markets of exchange, but, even in the free market ideal of capitalism, it is not good to exchange goods that society deems insalubrious.

Nevertheless, our modern, complex economy has created other reasons for controlling the market. The legitimate dealers of desire need to be protected from the pirates. For the system, the acquisition of an object without an exchange of money is a threat to the very stability of the system itself.

However, in a super-surplus creating system in which consumers desire the acquisition of all, an anti-piracy discipline can only lead to a sense of frustration and constriction, because, the truth is, no-one has enough money yet to buy everything, and, we certainly can’t all of us ever have enough money to buy everything. Yet, the capitalism ideal is that we all should want to buy everything. When we walk into a supermarket, we want it all. And now! There are so many possibilities being offered, but nearly all of them just beyond our reach. The great capitalist carrot. But, how long can a system based on a perpetual temptation for us to reach out just a little bit further, to catch that which will never be caught, exist?

An article is made and it is reproduced in millions of copies so each and every one of us can have a copy if we can afford it. However, before we do buy these new mass-produced commodities, first of all we must ask ourselves if we can afford what we desire. With the stress of the cost of necessities (food, shelter, health, transport) taking up bigger and bigger portions of the daily pie of our income, the further reaching economy of completely unnecessary, but ardently desired, wishes starts to decline, even though the actual desires that have been created do not go away. Therefore, we can either: a) get a loan and go into debt in order to acquire everything we want that we think we deserve (if we can’t have these things why do we go to work every day?); or b) exchange the copiable commodities of our desires with others who have the same love of these commodities that are now available to us in a digital form that can be freely copied and exchanged. The latter of course is exchange without money, and that option is piracy. It is illegal.

Of course there is something paradoxical and essentially absurd in offering everything to everyone. It is a lie we believe because we have to. A diversion from our real condition which is one of debt.

Deleuze and Guattari talk of our debt inscription. An inscription drawn on us in every flag, in every national hymn and through every hero. Through the debt, the Oedipal debt, we have to the parents we must surpass. The debt of our self-image in the society, what we call our debt to ourselves, or our self-pride and self-esteem. But when life is a constant paying back, creativity becomes secretly restricted and real freedom does not exist at all.

Is this really the least worst of all systems?

HUMANITY’S ABSORPTION

Our social field is absorbed by civilisation, and most of that absorption is an unconscious one. The first realisation of the manipulation is usually a perception of how they are manipulated rather than how I am manipulated, and to what extent I am manipulated.

The problem with subjectivity is a question of degrees of programming. Hypocrisies are often expressions of the struggle between what one believes and what one is programmed to believe; between what we think we are and the way we have been indoctrinated to be.

Underneath all this, there may be a sense of displacement, a yearning for something lost, a feeling that something is missing – our humanity.

Humanity is so deeply lost to us now that we don’t even know that we’ve lost it.

Wealth: the Great Factory of Fear

The basis of culture lies in the acquisition of universal principles. Universal ideas inspire great art and they pull us out of the day to day to open much richer, deeper and more fulfilling life potentials.

History is studied as one of the humanities and, as such, it is also associated with universal principles of humanity. Nevertheless, the actual historical process, seen from the universal point of view, is a great mistake. Our historical process has been constantly pulling us away from universality and from humanity. It has been a contradictory process in which our only unification has come through a sense of opposition to other human beings.

Independence, in our historically constructed world, is won by adhering ourselves to a group of humans we can supposedly identify with, opposed to the rest of the human beings that we don’t identify with. What suffers in this process is the universal culture and our concept of humanity itself. Humanity becomes lost in the shallow, but very muddy waters that are created by so many fusing scissions.

Oppositions create alliances. Our enemies force us make friends with their enemies. Lack of harmony creates tension-full sub-harmonies. Fear becomes an impulse for living. Or, more than an impulse, it becomes the vital driving force of the dynamics of life. Social, political, economic life is all pushed along by fear. The fear of being invaded, of losing what you are, of the power to express yourself freely, of losing your language. A fear of losing your job, your means of paying bills or the fear of not getting enough to pay for your shelter and your food. A fear of becoming seriously ill, of losing your mind, of dying.

Threats come from without and within. Society seems to take responsibility for finding solutions to threats whilst exploiting the need for such solutions. Any legitimate power is sustained by an apparent need for solutions: solutions to apparent threats.

The greater the threat the more powerful Power can be. And Power with a capital P is Wealth with a capital W. Civilisation is plutocratic by nature: it works in favour of money, designed to make the wealthy wealthier. Threat is a necessary tool for Wealth. While Wealth drives civilisations, there will always be social and cultural stress.

Wealth itself is not decision-making, it is a greed for decision-making that pulls all resolutions through its hungry mouth. In order to get the fortunes it needs, Wealth must perpetuate fear. It must create necessities that only the power of Wealth can resolve.

Civilisation becomes an accumulation of massive-infrastructures, for in order to organise the masses, a massive organisation is essential, whether through private or public means. The Society is enslaved by all the necessities we can imagine to have our individual strings pulled. There is no better ally to the dictatorship of Wealth than fear-fantasised necessities. Fears manufacture necessities, but fear-made necessities are false-necessities.

A NEW HETEROTOPIA

We first published this entry in June, 2013. We’ve now revised it in order to give it more clarity and consistency with the larger picture of the philosophical thesis we’re developing …

Michel Foucault, wrestling with the problem of the crisis of space, and, subsequently, the idea of the real and imaginary in spatial terms, came up with the concept of heterotopia to describe a place that is real and unreal at the same time – as opposed to the Utopia which is imaginary only and does not exist.

In his essay Foucault lists the type of places that fit this dual-quality criterion, but we feel he stopped short in his conclusions. Foucault in a sense could not see the forest for the trees, for the fabric of our civilisation itself is heterotopic and, consequently, so is our human condition. We live a dual reality existence that embraces reality (that which can be found in a space) and the imaginary (that which exists in no space) at the same time. In a sense then, Foucault says nothing new, and nothing deeply profound. Nevertheless, we think it opens the door to perceiving the concept of Idealism from a new angle. As such, we would like to keep Foucault’s term but redefine it.

Heterotopia, for us, now becomes that which exists in a space that was conceived from non-space. Or, in other words, that which was brought into the physical world, born from an idea.

Civilisation, from the human point of view, is a thing edified from certain human fantasies in order to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of the few. Yet, at the same time, the demos, the people, or the civilian population, seen from civilisation’s point of view, is also a heterotopic construct. The demos is an ideated form of humanity that has emerged out of the desires of civilisation itself. The Power that runs civilisation began with its selfish-needs’ fantasy of what the human race could be used for, and turned them into a heterotopic reality. The imaginary once created of course solidifies and becomes more and more absolutely real with time, but, in its essence, it is always that which was born from imaginings.

To think of the people as something to be exploited for one’s own gain and for the maintenance of its own heterotopic mega-construction, is a depressing pessimism. Nevertheless, the fact that human reality is an imaginative construct also bears very positive seeds.

If a civilisation serving Power can be imagined and constructed from that idea, then so can a future civilisation serving the whole of humanity be construed and made real in space. The greater our technological capacity grows the deeper should be our faith in our ability to create any kind of reality we wish.

Nevertheless, such a belief seems to frighten us more than inspire us. We not only have dreams to build, we also have horrible recurring nightmares. The idea of crashing once more into a Quixotic impossibility, a new Third Reich or a new Communist hell of terror and bureaucracy, paralyses us. The idea of the collective dreams, our collective ego-projections of grandeur, terrify us.

To create our own Heterotopia we need to overcome this fear. Overcome the fear and then imagine the future.

To create the future, we need to imagine it first.

To create a purposeful future for humanity, we need to have an idea what human purpose is. What is the purpose of humanity?

Desire … and money

Deleuze and Guattari saw desire split, not between necessary and unnecessary desires, but between the desire for production and the desire for acquisition. For them the real revolutionary battle against capitalism had to take place by shifting the emphasis on desire away from mere acquisition to a less individualistic, more positive, creative desire for production.According to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus thesis, our desires have been geared in the direction of acquisitions since Plato’s dialectics made it the Ideal aim of desire: “From the moment that we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it primarily as lack.”

Subsequently we see lack where it did not exist, or a lack in which anything that is not in our grasp needs to be obtained. In this way the logical outcome of desire/acquisition is greed, and it also now becomes perceived as a positive element. How can greed be a vice or a sin, if it is the essential force behind all motivations?

In our anti-human civilisation desire has become desire for the acquisition of that which allows us make acquisitions. Or, in other words, the acquisition of money. All acquisitions become filtered through an accumulation of figures, because the money one has is nothing but a figure in a bank account. Reality flows in the world of these abstract figures. Not only does our dignity, self-esteem and gratifications depend on those figures, but even survival itself.

The world, they say, revolves around these figures. They represent hope – often encompassing all hope, and all desire. In the world of acquisition there is very little time for the production of anything which is not related to the figures that allow everything to operate. Greed is the most logical virtue in the acquisition-driven world. As that greed grows stronger, generosity diminishes. In the world of acquisitions the individual who would rather be productive in a creative rather than in an acquiring way is regarded as a parasite or a freak. Only a certain amount of money is necessary to ensure survival.

Survival is not enough for the citizens of the anti-human civilisation. We are also expected to desire possession, especially of that which is hard to get. Life must be seen as a lusting forward toward that which will give us plenty to show for it.

But what we have acquired is not as fulfilling as what we have created and produced. Because of this the acquisition-desire life can lead to spiritual dissatisfaction and emptiness. The Prozac society is born, where lack and the lust for acquisition is planned and organised. The whole basis of our civilisation is the struggle to make others want, need, and perhaps even lust after what we can offer them, and by so doing acquire an exchange of figures that will swell our own figures considerably. That is what we desire – a considerable swelling of figures.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, UMP, Minneapolis, 1983, p. 48

Adolescent Society and the Anti-Nihilistic Anti-Oedipus (a revolutionary statement)

Consumerism’s constant pressure on the pleasure button has fermented a nihilistic culture driven by a plutocratic system calling itself democracy. Our anti-human civilisation has embedded this nihilism with a deep, grass-roots pessimism. Modern life and its emphasis on individual fulfilment has fabricated a depressive tone with uninspired muscle.  Underneath the pristine glamour of the consumer society, lies the internal suffering of he or she who always wants more. Achievement is never enough – each acquisition creates or finds another lack that will open the doors toward another subjugation.

Psychologically we are an adolescent society, torn by narcissistic desires and paradoxical notions of conforming in rebellious ways. We hate the father-figures of power that govern us and will be quick to show our disdain for the present in the next elections, but, nevertheless, we are happy to receive the protection offered by that same parent without giving anything other than grudgingly back. The paternal power maintains its hold over us by creating our dreams and desires, but the Disneyworld factory of dreamworking is the system’s greatest instrument of repression. The anti-human civilisation can exert its power and control over all because the system tells the individual that he or she can also enjoy the same power. What the system promises each individual is the chance that they too can be a leader: a president or king of their own company, or at least a fascist parent.

Here we arrive at the same psychological root to the problem as Deleuze and Guattari: our society is Oedipal. We submit to power because we ourselves are dreaming of achieving that power. The message manifests itself in positive thinking “You can do it!”, “Yes, we can”, “Just do it” etc.. The Fisher King is waiting for you to take his place. Laius must succumb   to you eventually, no matter how cruel he is to you now, no matter how much he wills your destruction. You are destined to step into his shoes and become the King of Thebes and, “Everybody loves a winner.”

Deleuze and Guattari argued that to fight the system one first of all had to become anti-Oedipal and become an orphan (breaking family ties), an atheist (without beliefs), and a nomad (without ties to any particular region, state or culture). To that list we would like to add a but – but without submitting to nihilism.

So, in our terms, the revolutionary must learn to be an orphan, an atheist, a nomad and an anti-nihilist believer in necessities.

Of course there seems to be a contradiction here: how can an atheist – the non-believer – also be an anti-nihilist moralist redeemer, the kind, let’s say, who believes and who can distinguish between good and evil. In order to resolve this apparent contradiction we would need to analyse what belief and non-belief is, starting with the premise that the pure non-believer does not really exist and the second, seemingly absurd proposition that it is possible to believe and not-believe at the same time. Here we don’t have room for such an analysis but … meanwhile, let a quote from the anti-Oedipal Nietzsche act as post data …

Nietzsche believed, like us, that the future survival of humanity required “another sort of spirit than those we are likely to encounter in this age.” What he called “the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit who is pushed out of any position outside or beyond by his surging strength again and again, whose solitude will be misunderstood by the people as though it were a flight from reality – whereas it is just his way of being absorbed, buried and immersed in reality so that from it, when he emerges into the light again, he can return with redemption of this reality … This man from the future will redeem us, not just from the ideal held up till now, but also from those things which had to arise from it, from the great nausea, the will to nothingness, from nihilism, that stroke of midday and of great decision that makes the will free again, which gives its purpose and man his hope again, this Antichrist and anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness – he must come one day.”

Our redeemer must be Antichrist, Anti-Oedipus and Anti-Nihilist. The old edifice must be pulled right down to allow a new foundation of true, human reality to be laid. A foundation rooted in human purposiveness and a renewal of our necessary partnership with the world that is so important for our existence. Only from this completely new foundation will be able to reconstruct anything truly meaningful. Only from the ruins of our anti-human civilisation will be able to build the Human one.

SEE Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Ibid

Foucault’s manual for Anti-Fascism (with some notes)

In his introduction to Deleuze and Guatarri’s Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault summarised the book into seven points which, he suggested, could serve as a guide for the everyday life of any anti-fascist. These seven points were:

“Free political action from all unitary and totalising paranoia.” …or, in other words, avoid dogma at all costs.

We see this as the problems that arise from envisaging objectives as something fixed, or the perception of the Ideal as kind of frozen immobility. The essence of progress is that it is always moving beyond itself. The real revolutionary objective needs to be to maintain the linear impacts of progress and keep it out of the curving tendency that will render progress circular again.

“Develop action, thought and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchisation.”

… let us add communication and visibility through social networking as real instruments of democracy and subsequently as destabilising instruments on all attempts to impose dogmas. This has to be done by uncovering and exposing manipulations, especially the most subtle, which are the ones that contemporary dogmas thrive on.

“Withdraw allegiance for the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.”

Propagate a philosophical and artistic perspective of reality.

“Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.”
“Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.”
“Do not demand of politics that it restore the ‘rights’ of the individual as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to ‘de-individualise’ by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualisation.”

Liberation of the individual must come through the liberation of humanity, not through the individual itself.

“Do not become enamoured of power.”

Escape the vicious circle of our sado-masochistic reality and our perverse fascination with power. Look for harmony rather than brutal domination and/or pathetic submission.

(Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, UMP, Minneapolis, 1983, Preface, p. xiii)

Ibid

Ibid

Ibid, pp. xiii-xiv

Ibid, p. xiv

Ibid

OUR GREAT DIALECTIC – between the dictatorship of non-desire and the tyranny of want

20th century literature produced two antithetical prophecies of the technological world we have today: George Orwell’s 1984 with its Big Brother and the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley. In one sense we could affirm that neither prophecy has really come true, but in another sense we could argue that both prophecies have been realised. How can that be?

Modernity is in fact a dialectical struggle between Big Brother’s omnipresent gaze and oppression of desire, on the one hand, and the seemingly liberating dictatorship of the Brave New World on the other.

Totalitarianism is a rejection of superfluous commodities while liberation is an embracing of the superfluous.

In another sense, totalitarianism is an embracing of responsibility and liberalism is a fleeing from responsibilities.

Dictatorship can only work in a perfectly enclosed reality. Enclosure can only work by closing frontiers (as in the iron curtain between communism and capitalism, or in the isolation policies of traditional Japan or modern day North Korea), or by making itself a total-reality in which there is no alternative to its dominion, as in the aspirations of our current economic globalisation programme.

Dictatorship only fails when the subjects within the total-reality becomes aware that their reality is not total but that in fact it is sadly lacking in many things. When this is realised, the regime itself becomes a hindrance towards achieving possibilities or fulfilment. Once the awareness of blocked possibilities seeps into the society, the dictatorship is doomed. Because of this, all regimes must struggle to maintain the illusion that their power does not actually retard possibilities, or that any oppression that takes place is necessary to combat undesirable elements threatening the comfort of the reality it has created.

In order to maintain power, all regimes must dedicate much of their energy convincing their subjects of the inexistence of any fundamental lack. If lack does exist, it is because what is absent is either frivolous or dangerous. Or, it simply just hasn’t been obtained yet by a system which potentially has the power to provide everything for everyone who subjects themselves to the rules and norms of the system.

Modernity is a dialectic between responsibility and desire: between the necessary and the frivolous; between duty and freedom; between obligation and emancipation; between the freedom achieved through responsible action and the oppression maintained through the addictions provoked by unfettered desires…

This dialectic is a complex one, at times favouring one side and, as Power itself, it takes a firm hold on the reins of the discourse in order to drive our cart in its direction. It is the dialectic between communism and capitalism; between Freud and Marx; between Al Qaeda and the oil companies; between religions and the women’s or gay-rights movements; between democracy and plutocracy; between humanity and the world.

What is our place in this constant dialectic? Our argument is not a condemnation of desire but a redirecting of it away from Big Brother or Brave New World manipulations. We obviously stand on the side of responsibility and necessity, but we are not waging war on desire itself. Desire needs to be harmonised with necessity in order to inflame desire with purposiveness and infuse humanity with a sense of itself based on its optimistic and noble visions. We define positive human desires as those impulses which point towards the fulfilment of human interests against the negative, because self-interested, desires of individuals or corporations.

The dialectic now changes and becomes immersed in a new antagonism between the personal desires and the solving of immediate problems against the future perspectives for humanity as a whole that are looking toward the fulfilment of our deeper, collective desires. This new dialectic is one between the desire for progress and the need for preservation; between the self-centred reality and the human; between the sharply focussed point-of-view and the global vision; between the family and the world; between the perception of things within us and the space around us and its atmosphere that allows us to exist at all.

But basically, it is a dialectic between the immediate present and the far-distant future that is threatened by our present. Whether we believe in the future or not, it must always compete with the conditions of the “now”. It is the dialectic compressed into the story of the Grasshopper and the Ant. In that fable labour – the ant’s labour – is a necessary condition that has to be done now in order for future survival, whilst the grasshopper’s summer appetite – our own locust appetite – will be its death sentence in the winter to come.

A Diachronic reminder about Freedom and Democracy

In linguistics, a diachronic study concerns itself with the evolution words. How does a word’s meaning change over time?

Freedom and Democracy were hoisted up onto a golden pedestal and worshipped, but, like all things that are worshipped, the true significance of their adoration is painted over with interested reasons and appropriations of the original meaning. The success of falsehood lies in an ability to manipulate language so that words maintain the power of their original definition whilst actually meaning something quite different – something that the manipulators want it to mean. Ideologies have manipulated words like Freedom and Democracy in order to create a belief that some original moral purpose is being maintained whilst in truth it has been completely undermined.

The truth, however, can always be found by re-evoking that original meaning of the word. By so doing, one can drill into falsehood by resurrecting the etymological measure in order to calculate the perversity of the reasons contained in its deformation.

Binary Metaphysics and the World Will

If the Information Age is to be remembered, it may very well be for its affirmation of the binary nature of the cosmos – that the essence of everything is a 0I0II0 process of information accumulation. The forms that have grown out of this amazingly simple, Either/Or, quantum reality are perceived by us as the immensely complex thing that is the universe, and from the perspective of the Information Age we are able to understand the mechanics involved in this process. It is a mechanics that had been deemed metaphysical or esoteric and spiritual by earlier ages, but now we see reality very differently. So much of our new perception is reflected in our computers and the other digital apparatus that have become so important to our daily lives – virtual realities exist on our desktop and in our pockets and they point to the virtual reality that is our own. Like the microcosm so is the macrocosm. Our computers operate with the most basic language possible, and so does the cosmos.

From the void comes form, from the inanimate comes life – and by sharing information these forms, inanimate or otherwise, are able to reproduce themselves. The foundation of the universe is a process of reading and interpreting information. It is an enormous factory of evolution and creativity.

SCIENCE’S ESCHATOLOGICAL APOCALYPSE

According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, not only humanity but also the entire universe is destined to suffer an unconditional final mega death when it reaches a state of high entropy. Nevertheless, whilst entropy pushes everything towards chaos, the tendency of life is to become less and less chaotic and more ordered.  Here there are two dynamic forces at work – a dialectic of physics between nothing and anything, life and death, the positive and the negative, the yin and the yang. For life to win this battle, it needs to do more than just go on living and propagating more life as it always has done – it needs to understand the universe in a complete way. Only by understanding the fundamental error in its own system of creation, propagation and self-reproduction, will the universe be able to reprogram itself and tilt its evolution away from finality and a return to the void, unto eternity and perpetual creation.

THE WORLD WILL

It is in life’s nature to have a drive for continual creation and permanence. The same drive is inherent in the very building blocks of the physical world. We call this drive the World Will.

If it can be conceived that, through knowledge and technology, a conscious entity will be able to act like God and redesign the universe, pushing it away from finality towards the direction of eternity, then should that not be adopted as a primary motivation for such an entity. As humanity, homo sapiens, is a conscious entity, should it not become our priority to work toward the fulfilment of guaranteeing an eternal universe.

THE ETERNAL UNIVERSE AS A POINT OF INSPIRATION

Of course, there are more pressing problems, and to become God would take thousands of millennia to achieve. So why bother?

Cosmological reality is our reality. Life and death is our reality. Our motivations, what gets us up in the morning as well as that which inspires us to work, are driven by our perception of the purposefulness or purposelessness of life. The cosmological lesson derived from the second law of thermodynamics and the promise of the mega death is “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!” Our cosmological reality is pessimistic and in order to be able to truly think positively, without sliding into the trap of religious nihilisms and their promise of something better beyond this world, we need to have an antidote to the poison of cosmological pessimisms.

What we are proposing is the consumption of positive, purposive vitamins and their immediate effect is a positive enhancing of our perception of humanity itself, with all its positive ramifications. Its secondary effects will be in the solving of so many of our dire ecological problems. This is why we should bother about eternity.