Thursday, October 18, 2012

Truths and Goods?

Is that all I meant? Is a particular instantiation of justice, i.e., "the good", simply "a good", like a particular instantiation of truth is "a truth"?

Capitalism has done much to convert our sense of the Good into a taste for goods. And it would not be wrong to say that something similar has happened to our appreciation of Truth.

We think of justice, now, as merely a fair price for goods and services. What, I wonder, of truths and __________s?

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"It is likely that the survival of capitalism is no longer possible without the creation in the consumer of a series of psychically disruptive needs which circle about such wants and emotions as the desire for excessive security, the alleviation of guilt, the lust for comfort and new commodity, and the consequent allegiance to the vast lie about the essential health of the State and the economy, an elaborated fiction whose bewildering interplay of real and false detail must devil the mass into a progressively more imperfect apperception of reality and thus drive them closer to apathy, psychosis, and violence. Nineteenth-century capitalism exhausted the life of millions of workers; twentieth-century capitalism can well end by destroying the mind of civilized man." (Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, p. 355-6)

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