the next post

I exaggerated grossly when I said in my last post that I could see the signs of a healthy Brazilian economy all over the place. I have no idea what a healthy economy really means.

I think that what I meant was that I find a lot of people who are living in the moment in Brazil. Living in the moment is the opposite of living in suffering, and it´s the opposite of living in fiction.

To live in the moment, to seize the day, all that stuff is common advice, but it´s also the best advice. Everything that´s good -- art, surprise, feelings -- is in the moment, and everything that´s bad -- especially anxiety and physical pain -- is about fearing the future (in the case of pain, it´s the fear that your body will break), which doesn´t exist, or regretting the past, which also doesn´t exist. Obviously, physical pain is much harder to master than is anxiety.

So my definition of a healthy economy is one where people are able to engage in their lives without thinking too much about the future. Of course, planning is great; it´s obsessing and fantasizing that´s the problem. The future is fictional, and the more we obsess about it, the more we delude ourselves, and the more we commit foolish errors. Let me get to examples.

People pursuing the fantasy of wealth for its own sake end up destroying people on the end of the transactions and creating a toxic business environment. This is my completely naive diagnosis of the American business landscape. Once they get beyond subsistence, the more people or businesses focus on future wealth as a primary goal the less inclined they are to care about present values -- quality, respectful relationships, business as a service to the world rather than a zero-sum game, etc. And sure enough, this kind of thinking leads to deception and lies in exchange for short-term gains, which is what the whole subprime crisis seems to be about.

Organized religion can also be about organized fiction and I don´t need to go into that.

I´m getting tired and this post is way too rambly.




building homes
pride in work
pro-intellectualism
awareness of the world
general aversion to capitalist values -- growth for its own sake
sense of attachment to history, family, and pride in country