Why?

Why is it impossible for some to imagine a logic other than the logic of the market?

You're assuming greed is moral, and that the market is somehow virtuous merely because it exists. Why not an ethical counter-force against the market, not to deny it its authority, as an unavoidable but also useful reality, but to make other demands on people? Why the absurd assumption that freedom, whatever the word means, is a good.

Sociopaths are free

What is it about this romance with individualism that says that nothing but a 'neutral mechanism' may interfere with its operations? And of course the market does not by its nature lead us inevitably to advancement. McDonald's in not an advancement in worker's food. And sheetrock is not an advancement in construction technology, it's a fucking abomination.

On the other hand I knew 20 years ago that value of real estate in the neighborhood I live in was going to go through the roof. Others did as well. I know a schmuck, and he is a schmuck, who turned $20,000 into 30 buildings and a home in Tuxedo Park.
He doesn't 'deserve' his wealth, but having the power to toss someone on the street is a virtue?

Finally, Capitalism is 'forward-looking' and therefore you approve of it, but you accept a need defend 'looking-backward' for the purpose of charity. Not curiosity but charity!!?. No history, no literature, no sense of curiosity as to whether there may be other ways to be aware of the world (that perhaps sheetrock isn't a universal good)
And please, don't think I'm making a religious argument. I just think selling widgets is not a particularly interesting way to spend a life. And the philosophical defense of the inevitable as moral is just bizarre.

The market is not neutral. Or rather it is, only if you consider the central element of life to be the individual. But why should we do that? What is language? What is Tudor architecture? (was it made by someone named Tudor?) What is 'The Baroque?'

I'm still trying to figure out why people are so stupid. Is it that by imagining the market as a thing outside of history its defenders can imagine themselves outside it as well? "The Baroque was a period in time, but The Market is forever." Does that mean there's no difference between the decadent laziness of the American markets and the vibrant Barbarism of China? Why are all my bets on China? And does the man who places my bets think in such lofty neutral terms?
No fucking way.

The lived world is the conflict among systems. It can not be defined in terms of one.
Idiots.

I think my comments on the desire to be outseide of history hit the mark. And of course it ties into my comments about my mother's unhuman performances of Bach.


She plays the notes, unable or unwilling to take the indulgence of adding any variation, any idiosyncratic gesture that might make the playing personal. She refuses to perform as if by performing she would become merely a specific thing in time, a part of the world, unaware, un-intellectual.

It's all about power/ the inability of a few people to relinquish a power they never had to begin with.

When did system building become so vulgarized, so pathetic?