http://www.netnexus.org/library/nexus-library/archive/0012.html
---Greetings! I just thought I would share this essay with you, since New Labor is apparently making an effort to reconcile equality with social darwinism.
-Andrew Straw
Newt Gingrich, Ayn Rand, Marxism and the "empowerment state." _________________________________________________________________ Life means controlling a body, and keeping a form (whether spirit and flesh as separate concepts, as Plato and Christian faith would have it, or as an integrated concept, as Aristotle believed) to that body. But what is a form in the context of humanity and control over body? It is an ability to oppress matter which is under one's control.
But what does it mean to say that one's body is "matter under one's control?" Essentially, it means that one wishes to be an actor, and if one does not have control over the exterior world, controlling the body is the next option. A person who feels helpless often gains control over the body: she commits suicide, she eats in an unnecessarily gluttonous way, she exercises in a way which goes beyond mere physical health, she abuses the body with drugs.
The fundamental formula for making sense of all this is the definition of law: "a legal framework has five components: actor-object-norms-legislation-enforcement." As a postulate, all matter contains a value of "wanting to remain an actor." From the lowly electron, swirling around the nucleus of an atom, to human beings, mountains, planets and galaxies, each piece of matter wishes to control its own destiny. A rock wishes to stay precisely where it is, and when some other actor tries to change that fact, the rock resists; this resistance is called inertia and Newton even gave this idea its own law in his system. Despite the jargon of various disciplines, one can find this pattern repeated: in architecture, one relies on the notion of keystone or balancing supports in recognizing that all matter wishes to control its own destiny, and every object must be balanced against another with a similar, complimentary sentiment in order to attain stability and reject chaos (usually gravity-created). In law, one recognizes the fact that individual human beings wish to have maximum actorhood by passing Bills of Rights and guaranteeing that the arteries of democratic expression remain clear. Interventionist parties are balanced against small government parties just as the people in the country at large are split between those who gain from government and those who pay for government's actions.
People try to control one another, exercise power. An exercise in power affirms one's self, shows that one can DO things in this world. Trying to attain the largest bank account or eating to the point of obesity both demonstrate a desire to claim control over the physical world, over other potential actors. The person who eats gluttonously (a loaded term, I know, but please forgive) very viscerally attempts to make more of this world into "self," and self is that over which we have the most control. Control over money is more abstract; money represents the potential control over the physical world, and for those with abstract minds and the need to have more control and make something an object, obtaining massive amounts of money is a solution, an alternative to being gluttonous. The same can be said of sexual desire; by entering into the contract which is legitimate sexual contact, one attains twice as much power. First, one controls one's own body, and uses it to both give pleasure to the other and to oneself. Second, one controls the body and experiences of the other, trying to give it pleasure and get pleasure for oneself. Money is an abstract objectification, food is a direct, concrete objectification, and sex is an objectification with two sides (because, like with two supporting sides of an arch, two actors take part in the mutual action, and the keystone represents the sexual coupling).
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