I recently spent some time on Montaigne’s 22nd essay, One Man’s Profit is Another Man’s Loss, and I am kind of excited by the new direction I found to examine it. You can read my new take here.
This has never been one of my favorite Montaigne essays, because it’s very short and its view of economics is reflection of feudalism. It then becomes a lynchpin for difficult choices, which Montaigne doesn’t do much to examine in any detail here and returns to later in essays such as How Our Mind Tangles Itself Up.
But in looking at it again, I tried to apply some Slavov Zizek-like thinking to it, looking for a utopian solution to a dismal problem. In doing so, I considered how Hollywood love triangles are a reflection of the consumer capitalist ethos and our abundance of choice. At first I wrote it as a critique of this ethos, but it didn’t hang together well, and it just felt off.
Then I realized that there is an interesting utopianism in these love triangle plots, that when the protagonist is trying to hold it all together, she is being both greedy and ethical, because she is trying to have it all, but in a positive way. She is trying to avoid disposing people valuable to her life. In essence, she is modeling sustainability for us. This is a good kind of greed. We should all hope to keep people who’ve carved out an important place in our lives and find the proper place for them.
There’s an analogy here for this project as well. So much of my writing has a disposable nature to it. Speeches come and go, it often is just about getting them done and moving on. My takes on Montaigne for a long time followed this model as well — burn through his essays one day at a time and move on. This project in its current form gives me an opportunity to linger and revisit, to consider that value in life sometimes requires not letting go or moving on to the next.
This led me to a conclusion that we don’t need to create new ethics or virtues to explain and sell concepts like sustainability, we can continue to rely on the thing that holds capitalism together, our greed. For sustainable greed to work, we simply need to shift our mindset towards valuing the things in life that we want to keep, that we do not want to be replaced. We need to consider that whenever we take on something new, we are pushing something with meaning to us a little farther away.
One thing I really like about this approach is that it uses Zizek-like thinking to take a position radically opposed to his. Zizek strongly believes in mad love for one person and the life destructive forces inherent in it. But our technological present should be a warning that moving fast and breaking things has consequences and mad love is the ethos of Silicon Valley capitalism.
The more utopian, and therefore more radical, stance is that we should venerate those people who work hard to make positive use of everyone important in their lives, who try to find creative ways to throw no one away.
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