If the ... is Silent

We have lost self, the singular self, in Hegel. When reason took precedence in consciousness, it lost what is most true--its undeniable (immediate) singularity. In Kierkegaard, we discover several consequences of this lost of the singular self.

The one is the devaluing of faith. We have already discussed this plenty in class. In short, as faith is regulated to the ethical sphere, the immediate paradoxical oneness between Self and Absolute is lost.

The another is philosophical suicide. Suicide is the most dramatic expression of self-consciousness for the act is for Self and what is lost is Self. When suicide is regulated to the field of philosophy, the philosopher will appeal to reason to give the Self a law against suicide. This translates the act of suicide into universal terms and what is lost is the radical singleness of the act. In other words, the philosopher has killed the self through reason much like Hegel does in his philosophical system where reason dominates.

In both Faith and suicide, the incommunicability of the act reflects this immediate self which has been lost in this era of universal reason. In Faith, one cannot speak of why they acted in faith because to do so would put a private act in terms of the universal, which would eliminate the radical singlularity essential to the act. God called Abraham, no one else. No one else can participate in Abraham's relationship with God, and yet the universal is dependent on God for its sanction.

For Suicide, the person commits an act which immediately bypasses all universal claims on him or her. If one chooses to annihilate his own life, he is acting directly with self as self and as such there is no mediation with the universal which is a relationship between self and reason. Suicide can have no reason and cannot be communicated.

So we have this radically singular self whose two basic modes, acts of faith and acts of affirming or denying life are incommunicable. Two questions for me going forward are: 1) If at base each person has an existence which is incommunicable, then how could the universal have any power in our lives? 2) How did the universal  (mediated) emerge from the singular (unmediated) if one is essentially not the other?

Kierkegaard and Hegel

            The beginning of class on Tuesday kind of blew my mind in a way that nothing else in college really has. It had never really occurred to me before that maybe what is the truest is what cannot be expressed in words. At the same time, however, I think some variation of this idea is really what I’ve believed all my life or at least the last few years. When I’m frustrated about some feeling I have about the present in regards to the past, I commonly say something along the lines of “No one understands.” It seems that no matter how much I try to explain something about myself and my life and no matter what details I include, I can never fully get my point across to people; I can’t express it fully in words in a way that is comprehendible. Nevertheless, I still throughout these situations continue to feel like what I feel is valid. Even though I can’t communicate it, I still believe it. For this reason, our discussion at the beginning of class was amazing to me. It gave words (ironically) to something I think I’ve thought for a long time.

            As I said in class, this all makes sense with regards to sense-certainty. An exact moment may not be able to be captured with just words alone. The experience of being there really is different from hearing about something. For example, if one heard about the nature of a sunset at a particular time and place, no matter what words were used, the words can’t fully reproduce the sunset. Hearing about it is necessarily different from experiencing it in that hearing about it can’t fully give one understanding of it. Furthermore, as Dr. J pointed out, even if one experiences something at the same time as another, his or her experience of it might be different than that of the other person by virtue of them being different people. Because different people are different, they may experience the same thing in different ways.

            This was all pretty interesting to me because I actually saw an interesting parallel with Hegel’s notion that the truth is the whole. To refresh, in Hegel’s preface, he writes, “The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development” (11). At this point and a few other points throughout the preface, Hegel makes the point that the truth of anything is not just its ending or a summary of the ending; it is the whole thing or the whole process. This idea fits in with what I’ve just discussed. A moment is possible inexpressible in words because that moment is related to everything around it and moments that came before it; words can’t gather the full development leading up to the moment. The parallel, however, is notably clearer when thinking about the ways in which different people perceive things. As I said before, two different people may see the same thing differently. This is because of their different personalities or their different previous experiences. The individual people have developed through their lives in a way that makes a certain moment take a certain form of truth. For this reason, a description of the moment in general terms may not yield truth; the truth of the moment might really flow continuously from everything in a person’s life before that moment. The truth of that moment is determined by the development of the person’s life that came before it. In other words, the truth is not purely a description of the moment but everything within a person leading up to that moment. It follows that this would be difficult or impossible to express in words. With this in mind, I think that even though Kierkegaard and Hegel diverge from the point of sense-certainty, this general idea of Hegel’s actually fits in well with Kierkegaard’s idea of what is the truest.

Faith and War

So, I was feeling pretty good about Kirkigaurd, before class the other day, but now I don't know what to think. The idea of faith being not a dicision, not something whcih can be taken off and put on like a jacket on a spring day, but instead, an action, a struggle, a war which one wages inside of oneself, resonates with me. I can understnad and sympthethize with his project, of makign faith expensive. But I am struggeling with understanding the paradox, it still seems like any test of faith, any deep and abiding struggle to affirm faith in spite of (and a little bit because of) a malestrome of obsticles should count. As I was writing this, a metaphor occurred to me, and I wonder whether this makes sense to anybody else. If we are too see faith as a struggle, as a war which one wages witinthin oneself, would it be fair to say that. like a war. whcih might rip apart the status quo, causing the suspension of what would otherwise be "ethical," faith, as an experience with such great power, could also rip apart out status quo, could also shatter and suspend the"ethical"? Wars are experiences whcih hold so much power: physical, social, emotional, psycological that they can become the defining characteriztic of people's lives, and the defining characteriztic of a time period, setting the cultural tone for generations to come. Now if we imagine all of the sheer power of a war, collapsed into one singular momemnt of faith, it almost defies logic. If we can see how during a war, normal bonds of ethical and just, right and wrong, fair and unfair are suspended, compressed and transformed under the emence weight of war, how much more so would these things be suspended where that terrible and awsome poer to be multipliex 100 fold and experinced as a moment of singularity within an individual. I feel like this is the sort of power abraham expeirnced, and with that sort of power, your expeirnce would be utterly ripped from reality, beyond ethics, beyond universals, beyond comprehension, and translation, both absolutely real, and utterly uncommunicable.

Kierkegaard, paradox, and individuality

      When reading the problema, Kierkegaard’s influence on existentialism is clear. You can also see why his name Silentio for this text, as his dicussion on speech and silence becomes an essential focal point for his work. I was especially taken by the third problema and the return to the discussion of Abraham. Kierkegaard has made the point that the ethical requires disclosure. However, Abraham cannot disclose. If he speaks then he lowers himself to the ethical, creating a gulf between him and God. God’s command has been unique to Abraham. Just as if someone came up to me claiming God had spoken to him, telling him to kill his son, I would think him a murderer and would not understand. Abraham’s paradoxical situation cannot be universalized.  His decisions and unique interactions with God make him unique, his decisions make his character. As he has demonstrated in his other stories, the individual sometimes has to act against the universal. 

       Johannes’ subsequent reference to Heraclitus surprised me but fit perfectly. As Heraclitus says that one cannot step in the same river twice, so too is Johannes saying that the individual encounters unique problems along her own path. Every situation cannot fit into a categorical imperative. But Zeno does not understand Heraclitus’s point and tries to take it further, rendering it absurd. In this way Johannes may be saying that people have distorted Hegel, rendering it too universal and absurd. 

        Another fascinating point is Silentio’s refusal to intellectualize faith. Unlike science, faith cannot be built upon or passed down like Hegelian conscious. Faith has to be experienced and by definition cannot be shared appropriately. Some things, like faith, cannot be communicated aptly. Communication in fact ruins and changes the very thing you would try to communicate. This idea comes way before it’s time, and you can see the influence on later existentialism to Sartre and even Derrida. The idea that some experiences may not be able to be quantified runs counter to the burgeoning industrialization that Kierkegaard was surrounded with. We too live in a world where we now map brain waves and attempt to identify scientific explanations for every conceivable thing. Kierkegaard here tries to say what almost cannot be said, in a way only Silentio, or silence can really say it. Some things cannot be communicated or studied without changing the experience and each experience is unique. While Kierkegaard may not have started this movement, he certainly brings up the issue in an extremely sophisticated manner, placing himself at the forefront of the new century of philosophy

Frustration: Justification and Amazement via the Absurd

                In understanding Kierkegaard’s position, I think we must take it as true that god exists, that the events of Abraham did occur, and that justification is possible through the absurd. To simply take these as baseline facts of Kierkegaard’s analysis should be something that raises red flags in anyone’s mind.

 The most troubling and the most readily disputable, to me, is the justification of Abraham’s position via a paradox, via the absurd. Kierkegaard is very careful to use the word justification, a word that does not necessarily imply any sort of rationalizing endeavor like the “explanation” or other suitable words would suggest. Though we have come to associate justification with rational explanation, to justify is simply to uphold or defend something as well-grounded (i.e. as justified). It does not by necessity require typical reasoning nor is it necessarily a true/false claim. But I think we can say that there are degrees of justification and that some things are more effectively justified than others.  Again, it is the tendency to associate the degree of the justification with the most rational argument. This is because we can make connections and see most clearly through reason. Asking a human being, who only understands itself as a human and as being via reason, to suspend the ethical—to suspend the universal—on the basis of and with the justificiation of paradox is to ask the human being to suspend the basis of meaning in our lives. There is no meaning without understanding or comprehension.

                There is no wonder and amazement without understanding. In this respect, I think that things which are truly paradoxical—what I mean to bring up here are things that by definition do make sense, cannot be understood, are literally absurd or equivalently miraculous—are self-undermining with respect to the human grasping them. Nothing can be truly contradictory and at the same time be appreciated as a wonder. No one wonder’s at the square-circle because it cannot exist. Try to conceive of it. The wonder and appreciation that Johannes de Silentio suggests we should possess for the faith he speaks of seems to me to be impossible. For by holding wonder for something, we necessarily associate it with meaning and we only possess meaning in understanding. To suggest that we can hold meaning through paradox is simply not the case for paradox possesses no meaning. It is simply impossible to understand, and therefore—if it is truly absurd—should lie out of the realm of human vision.

All of this does take for granted that reason is what is necessary for human understanding.
                

Abraham's defining characteristic within the exordium: silence. Who, after all, could understand him? Why speak of his task at all? As a figure of Faith, he must look inward, toward the tension between his task and its context--God's request must be incommensurable with the context in which the request is made. By asking of Abraham something other-worldly--outside the world's norms, God places Abraham in a position of absolute isolation. God strips Abraham the crutch of communication, of community. Abraham cannot dilute his question with the input of others. To kill one's son does not even warrant consideration. To pose such a question would imply insanity, on the asker's part. How can one describe his interaction with God, when the request made contains within it an absurd, inhuman request: And God said to Abraham, "Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.'"So, like a knight of Faith, he collects his things in silence, then guides his horse and son, for three days, on foot the the top of Mount Moriah--all that time, battling the distance between his reality and the request. Isaac, being Abraham's only son, came after a long bout of infertility. Finally, God, his savior, grants him the son he desired for so long, only to immediately--like a capricious ass--take him away again, not by natural causes or an accident, but through a proclamation to the father. Without any other evidence, he accepts this request, alone. What kind of huberis or deference must someone possess to follow through, so resolutely, with such a request. How can someone so confidently--at least ostensibly confidently--proceed, suspending everything known before hand? If such a law were universalized, in the Kantian manner, what kind of world would come into existence? At this juncture, Abraham's decision seems absolutely in-line with protocol. Of course, this is only retrospectively the case. The observers, proclaiming such idiocy, with confidence, forget the process through which such a decision must be made. The same progression must be true of the man who hears voices for un-Gods. The structure remains the same, but one decision is worshipped while the other disclaimed. 

Johannes de Silentio

In perhaps my favorite passage from the Phenomenology, Hegel says that “what is called the unutterable is nothing else than the untrue, the irrational, what is merely meant [but is not actually expressed]” (§110). What can't be expressed by universal concepts and communicated to another cannot constitute a truth, and Hegel seems to have little interest in things that aren't true. Kierkegaard, like Hegel, also associates language with universal concepts, saying that "As soon as I speak, I express the universal, and if I do not do so, no one can understand me" (110). But unlike Hegel, Kierkegaard seems to find these incommunicable truths even more fascinating than communicable ones. Which is perhaps why, on the whole, Kierkegaard takes more interest in Abraham than he does in Hegel: Hegel (though I'm not sure I would call him a great communicator) is a very meticulous communicator, while the story of Abraham leaves a lot unsaid. In fact, Abraham's defining characteristic, his faith, is incommunicable: he "cannot be mediated; in other words, he cannot speak" (110). This seems to presuppose (and, in fact, Kierkegaard explicitly insists on this) that there is "something" in the individual apart from the universal--"an interiority that is incommensurable with exteriority" (118). 

This is a long way of introducing what really fascinates me about Kierkegaard’s text: the fact that it was originally published under a pseudonym. Perhaps Kierkegaard had more practical reasons for using a pseudonym, but I would like to imagine that this decision has something to do with the concept of the incommunicable and the unmediated. Maybe his anonymity has something to do with his idea that some part of the individual is always separate from the universal and impossible to communicate—that there are some things about the individual that can’t be spoken. Kierkegaard’s chosen pseudonym for this text is, after all, Johannes de Silentio. If this is the case—that Kierkegaard uses a pseudonym because he, like every other individual, can only say so much—it actually seems to make this text incredibly personal. These are just some preliminary musings, but I think a sustained reading of anonymity and pseudonymity could shed some light on incommunicability and the individual.

Multi-cellular Capitalism and The Primordial Ooze of Communism

Marx seems to understand the world under capitalism as reducing more and more people to a base level of subsistence as they labor in a society that depends on them. If this was true, then these workers would obviously revolt against the class system which has no real force on them. The result of the revolution would be to return to a state that all people are on the same level.

I imagine Marx's post-capitalist world to be like a primordial ooze of undifferentiated human matter. Without the environmental pressures of the capitalism, the people would be reduce to the sophistication a clump of single cell organisms who subsist in the same area without accomplishing anything for one another. It is not by lack of motivation or freedom that the post-capitalist would have nothing to say for himself but rather the lack dependence relations which organized individuals without conscious design to produce something remarkable.

As capitalism becomes more sophisticated, the worker is not brought down to subsistence of the lowest of goods but to a dependence on everything produced in the society. Workers are expected to have one or more of every good the system has required of them to perpetuate itself. Books for summer reading, cable television channels, cellphones are all examples of things every citizen of capitalism participates in at some point in their life and in each case there is a willful dependency on the these goods.

This leads me to imagine capitalism as more of a multi-cellular species capable of doing more sophisticated things on a level above its individual components which can persist despite the death of individuals who originally compose it.

Like the cells of the human body which depend on each other for survival without consciousness thereof, so does each person in capitalism. For example, one person makes the product for another to package for another to ship so that another can unpackage and put on a shelf for yet another person to consume. In this whole complicated process just so one individual can consume one product, each individual relies on the person to come before and their is no need for anyone involved to know one another because they are doing their tasks to the pied piper of green. Even the employers need not know what any individual is doing in the process towards consumption as long as in the big picture profit is being made.

I only made this analogy because I think is goes further than merely distinguishing characteristics between the humanistic community of communism and alienating regime of capitalism. I think my analogy points at the future evolution of economical systems, that like multi-cellular life, we will be seeing much more of capitalism, and like bacteria pallets, communism will persist but without the higher functionality granted to a society organized under capitalism.

Capatalism, Morality, and Max Weber

I am not sure how in all of this discussion about capitalism and morality I did not think of Weber. Max Weber's infamous work, "The Protestant Ethic, and the Spirit of Capitalism," attempts to understand the development of American capitalism. In the book, Weber claims that capitalism began with the protestant acetic ethic, which essentially said, "work hard, but don't enjoy luxury," and slowly transformed in a rationalization process whereby it lost its religious roots, and took on a life and a spirit of its own. Weber claimed that puritan religion, particularly Calvinist notions of predestination left people terrified and anxious. Essentially, God has already decided if you are damned or saved, and there is nothing you can do to change that designation. The thought of the time was that, there was not way of definitively knowing that one was saved, but one could look for evidence of God's favor. It was not that if one worked hard and acted right God would save one, but that hard work and good behavior were evidence of God's favor. This philosophy was also tinged with a lot of asceticism, it was considered bad to live a life of opulence, to enjoy oneself was sinful, and ultimately a sign of being dammed. This is where Weber's logic gets a bit shaky for me, but he goes on to claim that hard work plus a fear of enjoying it equals reinvestment equals more capital and more wealth. Weber understands institutions ultimately as self-perpetuating machines. So, as soon as capitalism became self perpetuating, it no longer needed the ideological support structure of the protestant ethic, in essence, it developed a spirit all its own. Rather than struggling and working hard while looking for god's favor, the originally unintentional result of struggle (money) becomes an end in itself. Weber concludes by famously describing capitalism as an "iron cage," meaning that now that the system is self perpetuating, it is very difficult to find a way out, because it has developed a logic and a moral framework all its own. In the Manuscripts, Marx claims that Political economy is a science of asceticism, and the science of morality, and when we think about it like that it begins to make sense. Dr. J claimed that capitalism does not tell us what to value but what we do value, but "we", as Marx clearly stated, are intensely social beings, we have not human nature, and if we do it is pointless to postulate about it, our We-ness is socially constructed. So by pointing out what we DO value, capitalism is really only pointing to something it placed inside of us.

A Struggle to Interpret Private Property

During class we spent a large part discussing what private property meant to Marx. We also discussed what private property meant to us and I found myself disagreeing with the class in defining private property. Let me explain further, when I think of private property I think of any object, idea, belief, etc. that someone either claims to be their own or excludes others from claiming it. For instance, when Dr. J professed that she didn't belief it was human nature to conceptualize private property, but I found her example problematic. Specifically, when we discussed the idea of the chair and Dr. J exclaimed that she could come up with a bunch of ways to sit in the chair and use the chair without having to claim it as her own. What I find problematic is that although you may be never claiming it as private property, your actions are implicating that the chair is private (you are hiding it from others) and that it is a piece of property (your exclusive use of the chair).

When I brought up animals in the sense of private property I think I was too easily dismissed in my point. I will concede that it is nearly impossible to decipher if animals are truly conceptualizing the idea of private property, I do believe that behaviors can indicate this type of human-like behavior. To those of you who are say, "but Will, you are just anthropomorphizing these behaviors" I respond, aren't we doing the same thing when we are taking hypothetic beginning of man situations and their "in nature" responses to their environment and others?

Regardless of whether or not you agree on this point (and in some ways I don't fully believe it) isn't it easy to see that wolves protecting their kill a sense of private property? How about how dogs urinate in a certain areas as if to mark territory and familiarity? What about stories of dogs protecting their owners from threats? Or even cats placing their scents onto people and items by rubbing their bodies against them? Aren't these somewhat compelling in showing that animals (including us) are prone to claiming things? Marking things to be our own? Placing emotional importance and involvement in something/someone?

I think my biggest issue with the claim that private property isn't innately human is that I haven't really heard of a world or any society that lives without some form of private property. Propose to me a community whereby private property does not exist. And even if there were to be a freedom to trade, exchange, and just have equal rights over everything, would this prevent inequality in acquisition of goods. For instance, there may be personality differences that allow one person to be "satisfied" with little while another person will require more. Is it ok to have this inequality when it comes to the distribution and exchanging of goods in a communist society?

The Failures of Communism?

I was in a discussion in the car the other day about communism with an economics major and of course, since I am in this class, I brought up many complaints about capitalism. Being a liberally minded economist he agreed with the issues I brought up but he made the argument that I’ve heard time and time again: “Communism” has already failed, so clearly it is a less superior system to capitalism. I hear this argument almost every time Marx is brought up and I wonder about the efficacy of it. Many people with admit problems with capitalism such as the uneven wealth distribution but are resigned to these imperfections as they claim it is the best possible system for all it’s warts. 

Although I am a history major, I am deficient in my knowledge of how exactly each communist or socialist system worked during the 20th century. However, I do know that many of these systems ended up as power in the hands of one singular leader than in the mass of the common people. The obvious examples are Stalin in Soviet Russia and even Castro in Cuba. People naturally gravitate towards such powerful figures, especially those who control the information and manipulate their persona. For example, I had an old Russian teacher who remember crying when Stalin died because he was so revered. Even though we now know how much damage he did to the Russian people, during his time he had godlike status. But I digress. The point I am trying to make is that has a true “communist” or “socialist” system ever been tried? Or has it not been tried because it is no way possible?

I do not have an answer to this question. I find most of Marx’s theories on estranged labor and communism extremely appealing. However, we have gone so far down the road in capitalism that it is hard for us to think outside of this sphere. We monetize everything, putting dollar values on what for many society would have simply been a favor, such as me coming over to watch your kids for the night. We have incorporated capitalism into our moral system, believing the poor people have less worth and are worse people than the rich. The rich are somehow better and smarter than regular people. It is almost impossible to even imagine a world without private property, a concept that Marx argues that we need to abolish. Socialism, when brought up, is always accused of being a utopia. Sure, it would be nice if life worked like that, but that would be impossible. I would like your thoughts on the possibility of a communist world. Is it even conceivable with how much we are ingrained in capitalism? Did capitalism spark the industrial revolution? Or did the industrial revolution entrench capitalism as the only workable system in our minds? 

Before you begin this reading this post, I want to direct you toward a video that was originally disseminated through upworthy.com. Youtube picked up the link, putting it here for all(ish) to see: 

First, I'd simply like to applaud the architects of this film. Within a rather alacritous epoch, concision is one of the greatest swords. By combining a lucid and visually compelling aesthetic with a very matter-of-fact terminology, these visionaries tossed out a pretty compelling and resolute representation of where 'we'--Americans--are within capitalism's teleological progression. From reading Marx, these graphics shouldn't surprise anyone. The poorer are becoming more so and more numerous. The richer are becoming more so and more sparse. The epistemological gap between what we thought we knew about income disparity and how vast the income disparity actually is may be more surprising to us. Looking down into the comments section, I didn't have to go far to see exactly why that is. The first commentator said, "I don't believe in socialism, but [, I] gotta be honest, we don't live in a capitalistic society, we live in an oligarchy." Of course, we [students of Marx] all know exactly why this comment is somewhat misdirected: this is, in fact, exactly what capitalism is supposed to look like. Perhaps, as an intra-subjective group, our misunderstandings about capitalism coextend with our misunderstandings about socialism and communism. I want to take a short look at a few of the possible reasons for this pervasive mis-directed-ness. 

American Atomism: Known by the more common signification, "American Individualism," American Atomism describes, negatively, the way in which the average american tends to view themselves not as a member of a collective but as an individual. Underscored by the subject's ontological framework (isolated consciousness, and all that), this vantage-point implicitly denies group responsibility and tends to ignore the causal connectedness of social spaces--town, schools, workplaces, etc. So, when an individual has success, it is their success and no one else's. Similarly, when a subject fails, it is their failure and rarely the social structures around them causing the failure. This institutionalized isolationism stems, at least in part, from the way in which America conceives its own history. Individuals colonized the Americas; specifically, individuals who shirked the status-quo in their own countries, or simply believed that hard-work and ingenuity would be enough to hurdle any obstacle. Of course, every historian knows that these anecdotes and universalized dispositions are merely aspects of the American mythos. However, time and political ambition have reified those myths into misperceived realities. The result is a systemic pathology that insists on independence while awkwardly and inefficiently relying upon governmental and communal support. The never-ending states-rights / central government debate shows the intransigence of this problem. The public's relationship to these two issues mirrors a tennis match, with their sentiments oscillating from one end of the court to the other without any apparent conviction. The failure in the analogy stems from the inability for the populous to see the transition between the two poles in the same way a tennis player sees the ball going back and forth. When one political position fails in its descent form abstraction to practical application, the populous flips out and jumps ship forgetting that they in fact voted in the very players that they now vilify. The individual's capacity to cognitively distance themselves from responsibility, in whatever way is necessary, would be worthy of applause if it didn't lead to so much misery and decay. 

Ideology over Class: Given the statistics, its hard not to ask, "what the fuck?" And, "why the hell haven't the lower classes colluded to burn this mutha- down, pitchforks and all?" My diagnosis spins off from the issues stated above. As far as atomism is concerned, the white version tends not actually to be an individual belief but in fact an unconscious collective belief in the inherent goodness and betterness of whiteness. In other words, the kinds of groupings endorsed by American institutions tend to deviate away from class consciousness toward 'social issues,' like white supremacy, puritanism, christianity, et al. These fractures supersede class issues. In the mid-1950s, when the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Committee) attempted to organize a union for factory workers in an industrial town, many of the labor leaders insisted on the meetings being segregated. Even though all these cats were in a position to benefit from class solidarity, they could not, even for their own economic benefit, suspend racial prejudice and myths of essential otherness to strike a deal (bad pun intended). A really interesting analysis of how this tendency played out in post-war France can be found in Anti-Semite and Jew. 

In conclusion: we discussed, on Tuesday, whether or not Capitalism is a moral or amoral system. I am still committed to the amorality of the system's logic but I must concede that it nonetheless creates institutionalized justifications for its own economical aims and social impacts. In her post, Maggie points out that, "We brought up a few of the "moralities" which seem to result from a capitalist mentality--that the poor are underemployed because they are lazy, for example--but demonstrated that these kinds of moral pronouncements are in no way essential to capitalism." She goes on to concede, what I also believe to be true, that these don't seem to be necessary appendages to or consequences of capitalism. The more I think about it, however, the more convinced I am that, in practice, capitalism needs some kind of overarching framework that explains why so few should have so much. Within America's case, the public's belief in what ends up being a merely nominal meritocratic system combined with racial, religious, and locational differences does just this, distracts from the interrelatedness of economic, social, and political issues.