Drapetomania

In 1851 psychiatrist Samuel Cartwright gave a name to the mental illness that caused slaves to attempt to escape from slavery: “drapetomania.” As a consequence of the progress of psychiatry we now have dozens of names for the mental illnesses that cause corporate slaves to attempt to escape their slavery: depression, bipolar disorder, attention deficit disorder, to name just a few.

David Hume vs. Wallace Stevens

“The ultimate ends of human action,” says David Hume, “can never be accounted for by reason.” For Hume, the ultimate ends of human action are to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. He has reduced man from a rational animal to an animal. Should we be surprised that he sees no reason in the aims of a being whom he has stripped in advance of his reason? A rational being strives to know and understand. He accepts pain. He does not fear it. He accepts death. He does not fear it. Hume’s life, like that of the typical bourgeois, is no more than a cowardly quest for comfort and convenience. All heroic sentiments, including the passion to learn and understand, have given way to the petty concern for material comfort.

For a genuine philosopher, the ultimate ends of human action are knowledge, wisdom, enlightenment, happiness and virtue. These are precisely the same ends that any rational being desires, the ends that reason itself desires, or, that God, the ens intelligens, the ultimate conception of reason, desires.

When the sincere philosopher asks himself why he hates pain, the question to him is a serious one, and he may decide there is no reason. When a limb is amputated, the patient often feels pain in the phantom limb for the rest of his life. He can learn to ignore the pain. It is, in fact, only biology that demands we hate pain. The mind is perfectly capable, as every ascetic and flagellant can attest, of overcoming its biological programming,. Hume pays no heed to ascetics and flagellants, perhaps because he perceives them as irrational. But aren’t they in fact more rational than he, having overcome the biological prejudice against pain and risen to a higher level of intellectual autonomy?

Hume admits that there is no rational reason for hating pain and loving pleasure, and yet he is unwilling to try to overcome these irrational biological prejudices. Here we see that in Hume’s world common sense prevails over reason, or, better put, common sense defines what it means to be reasonable. The idea that excellence is rare, and can therefore never accord with anything common, whether common beliefs or common tastes, is not one that Hume is willing to entertain.

The eternal philosopher, says Wallace Stevens, is the one who remains always on the road from self to God—or more precisely, since the number of ways from self to God is limitless, on one of the many roads. The poem that would be “unimpeachably divine,” Stevens says, is the poem that would allow us to leave behind the faults of animal life. The best philosophy is part of this unimpeachably divine poem. “The idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea.” Proto-pragmatist philosophers like Bacon, Locke and Hume want to traverse the road in the other direction, so that philosophy will return to its human limitations and rely on the humble evidence of “the teeth, the throat and the bowels” (Stevens’ expression), and not on the divine will to truth at any price.

Tell a man his desire for wealth and pleasure may be corrupting his reason so he can’t see clearly. He blinks. What’s reason for, if not for the pursuit of wealth and pleasure? In his mental life, reason occupies a very humble place. The teeth, the throat and the bowels occupy the places of honor in this kingdom, while reason drudges thanklessly under their whip and sleeps in the servant’s quarters.

Even those who are exceptionally clever in finding the means to wealth are seldom perplexed by the fact that the end goal to which all their intelligence is directed is precisely the same goal the least intelligent aim at.

Class warfare

I saw this on a bumper sticker the other day:

REDISTRIBUTE WEALTH OVER $5 MILLION
MAKE CAPITALISM WORK FOR EVERYONE

This raises an interesting question, which in my experience is seldom discussed. Suppose economists are right that property rights are essential to prosperity. We might still ask, are unlimited property rights essential to prosperity? Most good things are not good in excess. Could property rights be one of those things?

The specter of communism, which our rulers use to frighten us into submission, is a red herring. Confiscate the obscene wealth of plutocrats. Redistribute it. Then let capitalism loose again so it can work for everyone. Our rulers would prefer we don't talk about options like this. The debate is framed as a choice between an unjust system and an impractical one. And we drop to our knees and thank our leaders for leading us on the practical path.

Throughout history, rulers have claimed they rule us for our own good. Even when they imprison us, they claim this is for our own good. The inquisitors in the Middle Ages claimed they tortured heretics for their own good. When our rulers tell us the rules are for our own good, we should be demanding evidence for this claim, not accepting it on authority.

For the more than two thirds of Americans born with no property, how is the ruthless enforcement of unlimited property rights good?

How to outlaw a counterculture

In the 1660s, one out of every 100 Parisians was confined to an asylum. The leadership of Paris, according to Foucault, had “acquired an ethical power of segregation, which permitted it to eject, as into another world, all forms of social uselessness.” Today in the United States, as incarceration rates also rapidly approach the one percent mark, we might be inclined to look for parallels.

America’s dominant culture of unmitigated economic rapaciousness has always been accompanied by oppositional cultures, one of which we might call the leisure counterculture. This counterculture calls the dominant commerce-centered outlook into question, and is therefore a menace to economic productivity. The question is, how to get rid of it? Rulers have often encountered difficulty when they arbitrarily incarcerate citizens based on their ideology. But this turns out not to be so great an obstacle as it might seem. The solution is to criminalize the rituals of leisure, thereby making a large proportion of the leisure counterculture into criminals.