On what was Tuesday Hatred: one for the road

I hate unnecessary excitement. Almost all excitement is unnecessary. All of this is because people get excited so rapidly  that the currency of excitement is suffering from hyper-inflation. My hatred should be the least of anybody’s concern given that the ones really suffering are those which have good reason to get excited.

As a cultural optimist and believer in progress I need to find a away to reason away the tendency to the increasing levels of unnecessary excitement. This is the way: hyper-inflation of excitement is the balance of cultural growth. Progress is made but in order to continue l’élan vital it can only continue to be made if the progress that was made is canceled out in our perception, leading to excitement inflation.

I hate this reasoning because it connects Bergson, Darwin, Smith, Malthus to the crunching logic of monetary affairs and ‘the markets.’ And if there is one great subject of unnecessary excitement it are the markets. In the late 90′s I thought that the world would take a fundamental turn for the worse if the Dow Jones would pass the 10.000 mark. Now I’m convinced it can only take a fundamental turn for the better if people just stop talking about the Dow Jones as having any a meaning outside of its proper technical field. What I mean is that a turn for the better will only be achieved when people just stop talking at all about the Dow Jones or any of its ilk.

Only when people stop talking, let alone get excited, about this can we shed the third most silly human invention (after nationalist violence and the atomic bomb) which is the area of 3-letter acronyms such as Pay for Performance (bonuses), Key Performance Indicators, Balanced Score Card, Sales Incentive Plan, Manage by Objectives etc. &c &c.

It is concepts like these which I ultimately hate with a vengeance because they personalize something which should be a cherished common project: to try to be better than we were because it is better all around. So: fuck you, Six Sigma; fuck you in your black unlubricated hole, Integrated Quality Management. The knowledge we gain on natural processes is to be gained for 1 reason only: to escape the pernicious effects of unknown, and therefore, unconditioned natural processes.

This was it. No more Hatred.