- Making buying and selling the foundation of life ends in mass insanity and mass violence. Some people find themselves the loser in every transaction. They are left with nothing. They become outcasts. Try however much to feel for them, the nature of your relation to them is contaminated by your habit of treating all transactions as acts of war. You help but feel you shouldn't. You wonder if maybe you are wrong to help at all.
- It's unproductive.
- So all these outcasts, they never stop talking of roles. They try to make a place for themselves, to compose a life in talk and in fantasy. Over and over they do this, but with no real practice behind the talk and imagination. They are outcasts given nothing to do and have no prospect of ever being given anything to do. In their lives there is no ritual, no repetition of doing the same thing to give them a sense of power over life. Eventually all the powerless fantasy and talk fails in its purpose of maintaining hope, the intoxicated excited talk is followed by total silence. In modern terms, the manic episode is followed by depression. It's like an artist in full flow of his work succeeding, but finding the world is unchanged, gives no response, grants no new love, and feels his art to be useless and everything and all to be useless.
- So the outcasts are kinds of artists.
- Artists without audience. If you want we'll go around with the Guru one night, see the Beverly Hills lower depths. I'll show you the desperate with their self definitions. The Beautiful Wronged Woman. The Beautiful Man. The Inexhaustible Fountain Of Small Talk. The Effortlessly Comic Teller Of Uncensored Life Stories. The Agent Publicist...
- The one who promises to make you famous. You left out the Guru, doing you the favor of dispossessing you of your luxury item hat gloves and books.
- Yes. And the big topic of being outcast that the Small Talker avoids, the ugly lives the Beverly Hills Beauties are living. I haven't told you this, the day a couple of months ago the Guru and I met he also got in with the rabbis down the street. Apparently they are a team in battle with the devil over my soul.
- That's crazy.
- When you start from a foundation of war in every act of buying and selling, and with buying and selling being the foundation of every human relation, people have no choice but to win if they are not to fall into outcast status and go insane. They're manic and depressed, they're paranoid that friends and family are pretending and in reality are bought with money, they're made schizophrenic by the general inconsequence of life resting on continual renegotiation. Fantasy, the human faculty for forming hypotheses to be tested, with practical activity denied the outcast floats free as delusion. The only thing which prevents their insanity is being able to do an actual job which roots in reality the role they present to themselves and each other.
- Isn't that good enough?
- Whenever jobs or social regularity in general are threatened we can expect more people to be confronted with falling into outcast status, and can expect the unreality such status results in to be expressed. We can expect otherwise normal people to be willing to kill where previously they were merely willing to dispossess. The transition from kill to dispossess is rapid. It is happening more and more frequently.
(from The Lower Depths)
