One of the traits that stuck out for me in childhood was an obsessive tendency, and traits that stick out like that are always targets of ridicule coming from one's peers, a consequence of how children are socialized in this society at least.
I'm not too worried about that now. An obsessive personality carries with it advantages and disadvantages like everything else, which I'm now well aware of.
But it is always worth investigating the nature of those advantages and disadvantages. I might have touched on this previously - though a little repetition can be healthy - but I always feel the need to reevaluate obsessions, in this case my obsession with the concept of capital.
Besides the fact of capitalism being a central defining feature of our society and world, and the fact that it is very interesting to me, its relevance and fascinating quality don't necessarily justify an obsession on it. For me, it is not simply enough to discover the nature of capital, evaluate it, and formulate a response to it. That has already been done plenty.
What I find to be so useful about capital is that it seems to me to be a massive process of disintegration, at least in terms of its effects, and so this necessarily implies that something is disintegrating. And if something is disintegrating, that must mean that something was born and lived for some time. I have in mind here a civilization, which in turn begs the question: why civilization?
So it is really just a method - a method that is suited to my strengths - for strengthening an analytical starting point, which in this case is the end of something, so that it can be traced back to illuminate a beginning, and in putting it all together, hopefully reveal something about the cosmos.
The questioning forms the basis for a ritual of warding off the danger of over-obsession, which we now know takes the place of the reality in its extreme effects, as reality and one's perception of it is really ultimately related to where the energy is going. And the energy in my case travels in accordance with surroundings and moods. Obsession is very energy-intensive, to be sure. So I'd like to take a deep breath: all of this is useful, but it is not all there is.
The idea is to study capital not as an alien thing that emerged with evil intent, but as something that has been collectively produced by all of us, and therefore it is also in us. Oftentimes to attempt to separate ourselves from something has the ironic consequence of reproducing it.
Further, the question for me is not just, "how can people do this to us?" it is, "how has the universe produced this, and what to do?"
