From: "Mary&Eric Murphy&Salstrand" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Remember Globalization?
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2002 11:28:2 -0600


Hugh,

I gonna try to answer you with an essay here. It seems for the most part we
are in agreement here. Let me know if I have let anything important out.

First of all, with regard to Epicurus,I have always been struck by the fact
that Epricurus was a product of a world defined by Alexander the Great.
Thus, he lived in a localizing period that possesses certain analogies with
our own. 

For me, his chief insight lies is distinguishing between the two kinds of
pleasure - kinetic and katakesmatic.  I don't know about this in connection
with social construction. In some ways Epicurus seems to be to be a kind of
Platonic realist as far as pleasure is concerned, but certainly social
situations provide a kind of set-up, or dispotif for accessing these states
of pleasure or pain.

At the simplest level, the insight Epicurus had about pleasure was this. We
have both necessary and unnecessary needs, but these needs have limits and
can be satisfied.  In other words, it is possible to have the food and
shelter one needs in order to have a fulfilled life. It doesn't need to be
a daily regimen of fois gras in a chateau waited upon by servants.

However, Epicurus recognized that these needs can be artificially
stimulated in such a way that they can become endless, kinetic and always
on the move.  It is not for nothing that the phrase 'simulacra' originates
in Lucretius' poem "On the Nature of Things."

What Epicurus observed was that once basic needs had been met, and with
this, the mental anxiety that comes from fear and stress overcome, a
different state may be experienced, one in which the pleasure is more
subtle and sublime, a godlike state of pleasure without the same limits
where one may feel into infinity. (Think of what Maslow called the peak
experience or what you have experienced in deep meditation or possibly on
drugs.) This state, once experienced, through an ethics of care may even
become one's abiding condition. Thus it is possible to live one's life out
of freedom, having realized the state of ataraxia. Happiness known as
transforming pleasure - ecstasy!

It is possible to fruitfully compare the teachings of Epicurus with those
of the Buddha. In fact, it is possible to describe the teachings of
Epicurus as a kind of Buddhism for the West, one that unlike Buddhism, is
compatible with science and freed from mysticism.

One might even go further than this and argue that Epicurus effectively
solved the problem of religion. The various end states projected by
religion such as the Kingdom of Heaven, Paradise, Union with God, Nirvana,
Atman, Enlightenment, Satori are simply this state projected into a time
endlessly deferred which grants the religious institutions their mediating
authority and charisma. 

What Epicurus taught in place of all this was that the Happiness projected
by religion into an endless future may be realized here and now without the
need for Gods, Priest and Masters.

The relevance this might have to our conversation is the following. 
Capitalism, like religion, endlessly projects into the future a similar
kind of social control. Time sub Capitalism is a financial stream of
discounted cash flows.  The promise the metanarrative of Capitalism makes
is that through this kind of libidinal investment, one can become
successful and realize a better future, albeit endlessly deferred.

The problem of Capitalism is similar to that of the Las Vegas gaming
tables. In order to successfully operate, the winners must always be
disportionate to the losers.  Thus, for a few to live lives of extreme
wealth, others must live with greater uncertainty and stress, and then
there are the others, the wretched of the earth, who must experience
extreme poverty and hopelessness in order to underwrite the spectacle that
Bush names freedom.

The specter that still haunts the world remains as follows.  If America was
not so arrogant and voluntarily chose to live a simpler and less
ostentatious life (one, I would argue, that does not entail a return to the
farm!), then it might be possible to establish positive freedoms in a world
where poverty and chronic disease might be overcome.  

In such a world, where basic needs are met, then the attendant
hopelessness, anxiety and stress which fosters terrorism might be overcome
as well. This would lead perhaps to people leading lives where the measure
of one's existence need no longer be tied to the constraints of the market.
Leisure (as free work or play) would then trump over the need to enter the
job lottery (as a form of enforced servitude) and the realm of freedom
would triumph over the realm of necessity. Life would enter into a new
stage as freedom became the self-determination of one's desire rather than
the beguiling mirage of freedom, that remains in the end only the false
anarchy of an unregulated market (which is actually the dictatorship of the
insider.)

America's only response to terrorism so far has been to call for increased
militarization which in the words of an old David Bowie song is merely the
attempt to put out the fire with gasoline. (oil pun intended.)

My hope is that now the middle class is now impacted upon in new ways by
globalization and the failures of unregulated insider trading. (Whether the
loss of technical jobs occurs domestically or through some other form of
global outsourcing), some of the class divisions may finally be overcome
and a new common cause may be established that attempts to create a greater
baseline for global economic and social security. My fear is that the
American Taliban in order to circumvent this threat will drag the country
into even deeper wars a more unstable world. Perhaps only history will
tell. They tried to tell us once it was over, but they were wrong.

eric