death, waste, capitalism

ONE DEATHis a tragedy

A MILLION is a statistic

* Exploring the relationships between death, capitalism and waste.

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How does Capitalism,Waste, and Death relate to you?

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“This is confidential.” It will be anonymous, I wont use your name or anything.

I am really glad to talk about, pointlessly, he-he no. I can talk about, about waste, about capitalism, and um death in terms of my experiences of gambling over the past twenty... eight year’s I’ve been involved in, probably one might say a destructive life style where gambling has, overshadows many aspects of my life and I can relate it to or people can relate it to capitalism, certainly the waste is evident and the death, I’ve know people who have died in it, through it.

Um

You don’t have to say umm... its OK.

Sorry

I have been gambling since 13 years old and have used it as a tool to escape certain emotional problems through an upbringing that was quite destructive, through the death of my father, and through abuse through my brother, and to an extent a lack of support from my mother. I used gambling to overcome sort of feelings of nihilism and worthlessness, and I’ve used that as a tool to forget and not worry about the things that I worry about. And inevitably through gambling it’s not really about the accumulation of wealth, its about the destruction of ones self, its about taking

away from myself rather than adding to it. So where as somebody who wants to gamble because they think that a football team is gunna win, and they’re sure of it and they can put ten quid on that football team, and win forty pounds. My ideal would be to start off with four hundred pounds and loose it as quickly as I can, or as slowly as I can depending. So the feeling your left with after is, is probably the place I want to be. So the waste is enormous in my life, I’ve gambled more money than many people would have in many ways. I’ve placed more bets than people earn in a life time, and I’ve squandered an awful lot of money through pointless, pointless, pointless, activity. And what I’ve learnt from it is, that it becomes a learnt behaviour that you use it as a tool to get through your life and it creates nothing of worth. It strips parts of you away and messes up relationships, and messes up how you interact with people, and messes up you own moral code. It messes up your own morals and your own picture of yourself, your ideal picture of yourself that one has is jeopardised by your behaviour. And it teaches you that the behaviour is important to something deeper than your consciousness, that your behaviour actually takes away from or adds to the sum of all your parts. So I think that’s something, I’ve learnt. I’ve learned that you can push yourself to the limit, that you can push and push and push and push and you may think that it doesn’t matter but inevitably behaving in a way that’s against the way you’ve been bought up, will eventually come out somewhere. And you can have negative thoughts, and you can think of ending it. You can think of suicide, you can think of hurting yourself. I’ve been lucky because I’ve got my son who I wouldn’t want to leave fatherless on

purpose. I’ve know people that have taken their own lives for as little as £10,000, which they owed to a bank. And you can look back on their life and say, what? How can you take your life for £10,000? But for them it was £10,000 they never had. They didn’t like owing money, they were bought up in a family that didn’t have money, and it was too much for him to bare and um, and he committed suicide and left his mum and dad without a son. His girlfriend without a boyfriend, and um obviously a lot of other very upset family members. And his death came solely because of his gambling addiction. Solely,

“if he hadn’t gambled he’d be alive today” and there are many other stories where gamblers have taken their own lives and ended up upsetting many people. There are more stories of people who win a fortune, and lose a fortune. There are stories of famously, nick the Greek, who played poker for many many weeks with a guy called Johnny Moss, who gambled many many millions and millions of dollars for a long time. Which was the largest poker game in history which, both people, both players had millions of dollars. It wasn’t about the money, it was about who was better. Who’s ego was better, who’s abetter card player, who’s a better gambler and it ended when Nick The Greek a very famous gambler, ran out of money and said to Moss;

‘Sorry I’m going to have to let you go’ which is one of the famous quotes in gambling, ‘Sorry I have to let you go’ which means that he still thought he could win, and of course he couldn’t win because ordinarily gamblers don’t win and even the most successful gamblers in our day and age, be it poker with Phil Ivey or Daniel Negreanu, they openly say it’s not about the money, because they have millions they lose millions they have a different concept of money, to people who don’t gamble, because their lives have been based upon going broke. And they need to raise money and borrow money, to gamble. Not to make more money, it is to gamble, and I suppose that’s where the waste comes into it because you know your borrowing money to gamble. You waste money, and you waste time, and inevitably you waste relationships because gambling takes a lot of time and, the time to do it, the time to think about it, and time to organise it, time to get away from what your meant to be doing. And the waste is all around you when you, you know, you continually gamble, the waste can be seen in the state of your house, or where you live, or the state of your bank balance or the state of your relationships, with girlfriends or your parents or your friends. Relationships are wasted, money is wasted, time is wasted and it creates nothing apart from money if your successful, If your not successful you done even create that. It creates uh, well nothing basically. Um, I have endeavoured to keep it secret from as many people as I can, because its a personal thing and its not a nice thing to admit to people. People say its good to talk about it but its not, because I want to do this, and I don’t like people knowing because its a secret, and I want to, I know its dysfunctional

but, I want to sometime continue doing it. And in many way’s I think most people who gamble problematically or drink or do drugs or do anything, have to have that secret because once its out in the open its more difficult to justify to yourself. You know a part of therapy, a part of overcoming any addiction is about understanding your own denial system. How you actually justify to do things in your life that are perhaps not the norm, can be against you. You know that if your a drug addict and you know that cocaine is no good for you, you know inevitably its going to lead to some sort of addiction or your already addicted. You know your gunna wake up in a bad place, you justify short term goals. And gambling’s very similar where, you justify your behaviour sometimes based upon the need for accumulating money for a particular event, be it a birthday or some altruistic gift to somebody, philanthropic sort of gesture, which is never gunna happen but it allows to need that money to gamble. To get that money inevitably your never gunna get it and your never gunna do the gesture, but its in your head that what a nice guy you are because you were thinking of it, and that’s enough. The bottom line is you probably could of done it anyway if you’d actually given 10 minutes of thought to it, and um, not gambled and got the money another way. Recently the laws of gambling have changed where gambling companies such as bookmakers, casinos, can advertise and they can advertise in shop windows prior to I think it was about two or three years ago, that you couldn’t and now you can and, you know part of it is about, you see adverts on the television making gambling more accessible to people, take away the myth of bookmakers being dirty places or dangerous places, casinos being for degenerates its been marketed as a fun place to express yourself to have an idea, to have a thought and to put money on your own perception of things and the reality is that obviously the only people that win are book makers. The odds are mathematically

in everything that the book makers do in their favour, and sometimes its not by much sometime it could be two percent or three percent every book that’s held on a football match or a horse race, it doesn’t matter who bets what that is irrelevant because they’ll have the book covered which means who ever wins they will make money. And for the punter, for the gambler, it means that yeah they might win but they’re not getting the true odds of the thing they’re betting. So if England are playing Germany and you think its fair that its an evens chance and the odds are 4-1, well I wont go into odds but needless to say your never gunna get the odd the true odds of any contest given to you so you’re always gunna lose. And uh, the waste of, uh, I’m trying to involve waste in everything ha-ha and um, Oh yes capitalism. Capitalism, gambling plays on, the advertising play’s on the desire for money, they play on the greed of humans, of me, of you know people who gamble are often accused of being greedy. It ends up as not being about greed, it ends up as being about destruction. However you can argue that, you know, there’s, no body has a need to gamble, not you know, there’s no need there to do it, and people do because they think they can make easy money, they think they can beat the system and make money and you know it has happened in history, where people, you know there are professional gamblers who make a living doing it, who make a lot of money but you have to remember that the money that they generate, comes from a lot of other people who lose that money. So for every on person who makes say, makes ten million dollars in a year, there are perhaps half a million people who have lost you know, 20 dollars in that year, or there’s a million people who have lost 10 dollars or whatever it may be. But that money is from somebody else. So there are a lot more people, you know millions more people who lose that than who win. Obviously that’s capitalism, I think. Um, what else do you want?

I think I’ve got quite a lot thanks. Thanks for doing this.

Not a problem.

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So maybe we could start by talking about what you do. Day to day, with-in philosophy?Ah, um, I have no idea, I’m too busy. Well most of the time, in terms of what I do, actually no that’s not where I’ll start. I actually started out as a fine art student, and decided that I’d take the first year course of philosophy and decided that um, actually I had more fun making stuff with concepts that perhaps making stuff out of metal or you know out of paper or what have you.

Yeah.

But it was metal actually that absorbed me, because you could take a blowtorch and all of a sudden a bus became liquid. You know there’s this beautiful sense that your, piece of kit will turn apparently the most resistant of materials into something eminently mouldable, and that’s just glorious. Apart from that, concepts started to intrigue me. So the practice of philosophy is something that I couldn’t stop after I was a student, I couldn’t stop so instead of stopping I went on, I did some more, I did my MA, and my PHD. I couldn’t in fact do anything else by that time, I was not willing and not able I think to do anything else, that’s all I wanted to do, so I kept doing it. And the consequence, philosophy is one of those things that, like music which is absolutely, you either do it because you have no conception of what it would be like to do anything else, or your not doing it properly at all. Uh and so I’m not really sure that my day to day, um, I’m not really sure it makes sense

to separate work from, you know what people call leisure. Ha-ha.

I guess its intertwined with your everyday life?

Completely, completely, I’m never not doing this, so teaching is part of the activity. The worst of it, the downside of it all is the bureaucracy and you know the tedious morons, with which one has to deal. When sitting down in a meeting nothing could be dumber, its incredible the depths of stupidity which the human mind can sink to. Ha ha but you witness that in meetings and so forth. But everything else is just part in parcel with the same process. One in the same process, so you know, when I’m not, when I don’t have to be here what am in doing? I’m, I read, I discuss, I travel, to go and listen to other people talking about stuff, when I’ve got you know vacation period, is when I do conferences, its when I write, and so forth. Um so yeah, completely intertwined, such that I really don’t recognise, it sounds like a cliché but I really don’t recognise the separation of work and leisure. I think I learned this, my MA tutor the guy that ran my MA at Warrick was um, David wood, Professor David Wood, and uh he used to have every two weeks when there was a visiting speaker he would invite them to give a paper in the department and then invite them to give a paper at his home in the evening. And he would invite all the graduate students back to his home, and he would lay on food and wine and there would be talks, and we would be socialising at the same time. And I thought that’s how to do stuff, yeah I never looked back. That’s exactly right.

So in terms of works its, kind of a lovely job isn’t it? If you enjoy it then it becomes your whole life?

In large measure yeah its inseparable from the rest of my life, I wouldn’t say it becomes my whole life, I’d say it was inseparable from the rest of it.

That’s interesting.

So, I think there’s a distinction to be made, other

stuff I do, its not distinct from this, I mean its in kind to this. Yep.

OK so in terms of waste, you don’t really waste any of your time.

Yeah I do, bureaucracy.

Oh ha-ha, yeah, OK.

Absolutely pointless complete waste of time I feel in a sense my own mortality weighing on me every minute.

Ha ha

Bureaucracy and busses actually that’s the other thing. Sitting on a bus you know for an hour and a half just to get here.

The U-link?

Yeah exactly or the uwetube as I called it the other day. Uh, complete crap, those sorts of endless wastes of time really get to me, that’s the time I feel waste. You know, 14 billion years of evolutions and I’m sitting in a meeting. Ha ha ha

So um,

And yet another thing, everything I do is a waste. I mean if you talk to economists and so forth,

“everything anyone ever does in education is a waste” You know we are not contributing towards the immediate economy, the needs of the economy. You know we are not churning out obedient little robots who, scuttle about doing their masters bidding and so forth. Hundreds, being defined solely by economic resource, as waste. Yeah, so we have no contributions

On the 21st March 2011, I met with Dr Iain Hamilton Grant (BA Reading, MA, PhD Warwick). Dr Grant is a Field leader for Philosophy, at the University of the West of England. He is also a member of the Metaphysics Research Group, and supervises dissertations on a wide range of topics, from Speculative Philosophy, to Kant and German Idealism. I wanted to gain an insight into the life of a philosopher, and to see whether we could find any interesting perspectives of Death, Waste, and Capitalism. The following is the conversation we had.

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not remotely satisfy. So that’s an important side effect of not fulfilling what the species is for, which is reasoning. There are several other things that they basically revolve around, this following conundrum, what is it to live a good life? That question has no immediate answer, so in order to live a good life one must ask that question, and the tools for asking a question like that and for considering various possibilities are tools that are provided by the development of the intellect. If you don’t do that you don’t know what it is to live a good life. Someone that doesn’t know what it is to live a good life and doesn’t ask what it is to live a good life is wasting exactly what it is they are. So you know, we have the capacity to wonder about how we should do stuff, we are not merely determined to do stuff, you know its not a law of nature that we work in the banking sector. That is not a law of nature, so we have choices, the reason we have choices is because we can ask ourselves what is it to live a good life? So if you want to know, acquire the tools.

Yeah definitely, so would you say capitalism as a whole gives you the ability to pursue that?

Well capitalism, there are two things, capitalism in terms in term of the economy, and capitalism in terms of the ideology. Capitalism as ideology is just flat out stupid, you know, there’s a fantastic pair of french philosophers who um, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, who wrote a book called Anti-oedipus, in 1973, where in they stated ‘literacy has never been capitalism’s thing’, ha OK, its profoundly stupid. It really doesn’t care about anything at all, you know about, military about government, about goods, about services, it really doesn’t care, its interested fundamentally in destruction. So ideologically capitalism has done more damage, if you like to the infrastructure of society than Genghis Khan ever did. You know because its global. Um that’s one

to make to that, apparently. You know so there is a sense in which rather than saying its not wasted, there’s a long term gain. Actually I think its more important to emphasis the fact that it is waste with respect to all utilitarian aims. You know, any goal that a process has, anyone who wants that there should be something out the other end of this, we are at war with. We do something that does not feed directly back immediately to the economy, if anything it puts breaks on the economy, it stops it functioning as smoothly as it might. You know, at another level of course everyone can market concepts I meant there’s been a massive growth in the, if you like, the economies of the spirit one could call them. Such that you get idiots like Alan de Botton, who’s able to make television series, which is scandalous, you know any one so stupid should not be aloud near a camera. Ha ha

Ha ha

Its frightening. So I mean, I think that there are complex relationships, as a society as a whole, that academics have and that the best thing we do, the things that happen to us as academics, is that more and more people um, get hooked on doing what we do. Not doing what we ask them to, its quite the converse what we do. And that’s really important. I think. I’m really interested in that you can be defined oppositional with respects to a general economy, without necessarily going down the rout of, um you know simply criticism of the economy. There’s a mere brute fact, I think academia gets in the way of fast turn overs and immediate profit.

So if it opposes general economy, what wouldyou argue that the plus side to it would be?

That the longer term health of an individual, benefits from it, that there is, a great, a momentous sense of a life well lived, which doing something like philosophy or doing something like art is in fact the practice of doing. Anyone who says otherwise is simply lying. There are short term needs, we all have, we all, need to eat, and we all need shelter and support, but to turn that into the goal of all your activity is I think a waste. Its to define waste as utility or its to define utility as waste. Where as we do the converse, we say that waste is, in fact, a thing quite important to what it is we are.

Defining utility as waste, that’s quite nice. Ha ha

Ha ha

So I guess its dependant on perspectives isn’t it? Other than what you just said how would you convince someone with an oppositional opinion to change their outlook?

OK, this would be another, what sort of animals are

we? I think its indubitable that we are rational and social animals. We fulfil our social aims in so far as we act within a social context. But we cannot fulfil our other aims as a species unless we’re engaged in the rational side of things. Therefore reasoning is the goal of the species. If your not contributing to that, your not fulfilling your potential as a human being, and I passionately believe that, and would argue until the end. And more over when you speak to people, and you say that, you know, your on open days its fascinating because the people your actually talking to are the parents and not the students. Yeah so, if you went to open days yourself you’ll know what I mean.

Yeah

You know its all about satisfying the parents, and it really is, and we’re not cynical about that, but one thing that you notice is that if you say things like this. Then the parents perk up and start to look, um, poignantly aware of the sense of waste that dominates a life spent doing something that does

“Capitalism has done more damage, if you like to the infrastructure of society than Genghis Khan ever did.”

“poignantly aware of the sense of waste that dominates a life spent doing something that does not remotely satisfy”

thing, that’s the ideology of it, on the other hand, um, there are basically ways things work, you know, and we’d be crazy to ignore the ways things work and its a simple fact in the matter that the world doesn’t have blood like animals do, it has money, yeah, so the organism, that is the earth runs on cash. Um and the cash buys things like um, I mean this is best exemplified I think by um the carbon credit economy, which I think is hilarious. They think they can buy their way out of not destroying the planet, ha ha ha, insurance against the future, not even Christians are that dumb! ha ha So that’s really funny but, um capitalism as a system as the way things get done we cannot ignore its in the DNA if you like of every institution of every walk of life of every process. But that doesn’t care either so in fact there’s no, theirs no, immediate reason why the philosophy, the art, the music don’t in fact function perfectly well in a capitalist economy what you’ve got to watch out for is the ideologues. Um, people who say the market dictates, the only one who knows what the market dictates is frankly god, you know um, the rest of them are just guessing, and one has to be profoundly stupid again to be able to guess accurately to think that they know what the outcome will be.

I like the idea that capitalism is an organic creature, that uses money as blood. But also that it is only interested in destruction.

Liquidation of asset.

Yeah

Everything is about flow, nothings about keeping anything. Um nothings about permanency, in fact permanency is the problem. You know so, unless capital is circulating then you don’t actually have capital doing the utmost of what’s in its potential. And what’s in its potential, lets take something lets say, I dunno like an army, yep so a national army and lets say the costs become prohibitive, so capitalism takes it over, flows of capital take it over, your primary investment, is to buy the goods and services that is the military and their hardware, um, then you have secondary investments which are deployment and so forth i.e. Increases in expenditure. Um , pretty soon you start to look at your expenditure and start to think where is my return? Ad the return will come from reducing input relative to output. So you put in less cash to get more out, basic law. So lets say you’ve got a hundred thousand troops and three computerised aircraft. The obvious thing to do is increase a tertiary level of investment, in technological development and eradicate

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your standing cost’s burden i.e. Eliminate troops. So you know over time capitalism’s interests is manifestly in the elimination of humanity.

Would you say that the idea, it will go on destructing humanity, is quite a fundamental aspect of humanity itself, and the rest of the world, through entropy for example. Do you reckon that’s why it seems to work?

Uh, there must be a connection mustn’t there? There must be a sort of, I mean Nietzsche called it Nihilism, at the end of the 19th century, uh, Thomson called it the heat death of the universe at the turn of the 20th, you know so, there’s ties between systems that destroy as an apparent side effect, and lets say the death drive, or the heat death of the universe however you want to articulate it, seems undeniable, so I don’t know what it would be to deny that actually. I don’t know how you would. Which makes the entire species dedicated not only towards waste, but to its own eradication, and we’re back with Bataille. Ha ha

Ha ha, it’s got pretty huge hasn’t it, It’s fundamental to our species to waste and destroy, but also we’re constantly battling against that and trying to sustain our survival instinct. So do you think there’s a battle of balance?

I’m not sure there’s a, huh, when Freud was talking about the two opposing instincts in humans he called the one death, and the other sex, now at a certain point sex and death blur, so you’ve got you know Hollywood’s been the best place to celebrate that sort of death cult. The sex death cult that is Hollywood and that kind of thing, um. The nearest thing we’ve got to a church for the second law of

thermodynamics is Hollywood, ha. Um so, you know, its not so much self preservations that’s redundant its really reproduction i.e. Species preservation. So the baseline terms are future and its elimination its a contrast between if you like destruction and creation that maps out as it were human instinctual demands according to Freud, um. I think theirs a third element which is reason, um, and in that I don’t mean to say that its possible to um step outside that instinctual domain if you like or that contrast between creation and destruction, but I do think that part of what goes on their, is inherently rational. Um, and that is not to say rational in the sense that economist’s mean it, economist’s always think by rational they mean, um something like what is in my interest’s OK, so they always are in fact talking about something like a survival instinct, what is in my interest’s, that’s rational, everything else is irrational. So lets say I dunno, um, if this were true for example I would demand payment from you for talking to me, yeah? Um, but I’m not interested in that, that’s not the point, the point is your doing a project, your engaged in some sort of act of creation. And I think that’s something that I want to support so I’m happy to do it. Um, so does that belong to sex or does it belong to death? To a certain extent it belongs to both in so far as its an attempt to, as it were get past my own instinct for destruction, by engaging in a means of reproducing myself for the future. You know, so you can read, every action in those terms but there is always this reason going on that’s involved in the calculation, and the reason is not necessarily determined by what the outcomes are for me, but is determined by all sorts of future contingencies and affairs. So, you know, what we can reason about can become determined for us in

terms of what actions we choose to perform, and its not the case at that level that we are dealing merely with the sort of instinct.

Would it be fair to say though, that um, due to your line of work, its not just money that your interested in. Ideas tend to be your capital?

Yeah

So in a way we are exchanging capital just my talking.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, that’s quite interesting, I think I’ve inherited quite a lot of your capital today.

Fantastic

Thank you very much for your time.

Not at all, not at all, I’m happy to do it.

For more information about the philosophy degree at UWE go to:

courses.uwe.ac.uk/v500/2011

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everything anyone ever

does in education is a waste.

You know we are not contributing

towards the immediate

economy, the needs of the

economy.

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Le petite mort is french for; the little death. The term has become a reference for a sexual orgasm, made popular in

France. The idea of death and sex being linked in someway could be seen as some what strange. The first, being death is often seen and feared as the worst aspect of life. The latter is often seen as being the converse, one of the greatest aspects of life. The juxtaposition of the two ideals therefore have the ability to provoke very powerful feelings. The link between death and sex on the other hand seems to me quite obvious. They are the main driving forces of life, one produces and

the other ends. They both also deal with strong emotions that give the feeling of spirituality. The great unknown of death

and the overwhelming feelings of desire sex can give, feed directly into our most primal of instincts. As Sigmund Freud

said ‘Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.’ 1 meaning

that the feeling of spirituality is simply a result of our own desires and a way of making us desire certain things.

1 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,1933.

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