UPDATE AND A WORD ABOUT MY FUTURE PROJECTS

You've probably noticed that I haven't posted anything in a few days. Once again, I've been extremely busy handling my partner's health problems. I spent the better part of the last two days in the hospital. I didn't sleep much during that time and when I got up this morning I was too exhausted to think, let alone generate a decent post. Aside from that, I was out of town this weekend and have been occupied with lots of new things; and don't worry: They are good for me!

Still, all these events have denied me my writing time. That bothers me on many levels. It makes me feel better just to let you all know what's going on with me, since I'm accustomed to a certain weekly output. On the other hand, I realize that life does not always offer the best circumstances in which to create. And if I have to go into "writing dormancy" more than usual in the coming weeks, I will have to face it. I apologize in advance if I don't crank out my hoped-for three or four posts every week.

I always get so many ideas during my breaks. When I just live and observe, I amass new thoughts, experiences and impressions. I know those ideas will all buoy me when I settle down into another long writing phase. I've actually jotted down three big ideas for longer pieces in the future. Although I do not have the time or space to discuss them all here, I will say that they involve these issues: Truth; confessions; power; capital punishment; free will; death; sexuality; categorization; identity; desire; subjectivity; happiness; prejudice and reflection. I have conceived both fictional and nonfictional structures in which to explore these themes. But my piece on sexuality will be part reflective, part anecdotal and part polemical. Think of it as a sequel to Foucault's work on sexuality, with a personal twist to make it accessible.

To share some detail from my own personal experience lately, I have been entertaining serious doubts about my own sexuality. And my doubts move in an unconventional direction. Namely, for almost 14 years I have been quick to characterize myself as "gay." But in fact I'm not so sure what that means anymore. By the same token, I cannot say what "straight" means, either. In truth, the only reliable conclusion I've made in this inquiry is that sexual identity is never clear-cut. That is because it reflects basic desire. Basic desire, in turn, is purely subjective. It is impossible to categorize desire because there is no limit to individuals' deepest subjective tastes.

I don't think people appreciate just how fluid sexual identity is. That is what I will address in my piece. In the process, I will discuss the unfortunate human tendency to associate absolute meaning with artificial categories. I plan to show that categories like "gay" and "straight" are not talismanic. Rather, I will show that they are at best "rough guidelines" that exist in various proportions in us all at different times in our lives.

I also plan to discuss why I think the term "gay" is absurd. When it comes to categorizing groups, sexual "orientation" is a dubious--and barely unifying--characteristic. That is not to say that people who identify themselves as "gay" do not merit certain assistance or solicitude under law. My main argument will be that "gay" is not a good identifier, nor is it absolute. There are plenty of people in the world--including me--who find men attractive, yet have no difficulty whatever finding women attractive, too. The bottom line is that one desire never excludes another. And "gay" is a category that essentially implicates a particular sexual desire.

So that's what's on my mind these days. Forgive me for the sparser posting. I promise there is plenty more to come. I have a whole list to get to!

Take care. And thanks as always for reading my archives.

Oesterhoudt

HOW TO BREAK UNHEALTHY ATTACHMENTS TO PEOPLE

OESTERHOUDT ON RELATIONSHIPS

People often approach me for relationship advice. I don't like to flatter myself, but I'm good at it. I know a thing or two about human beings and their capacity to live with each other. I have credentials. I have been in a committed relationship for eleven years and I have endured every emotional, physical and sanity-damaging challenge you can possibly imagine. Along the way, I have coped with jealousy, envy, longing, lust, passion, disappointment, infidelity, vanity, heartache, reconciliation, misunderstanding, rage, sleeplessness, abuse, frustration, ecstasy, contentment, simple joy, tension and anxiety. I have even weathered trying health troubles at my partner's side, like unforeseeable life-changing accidents and mental illness.

When it comes to living with another person, I've been around the block. I'm not a boy anymore. I'm a man. That's not a boast. That's a fact.

In many cases, people ask me whether they should transform pleasant acquaintances into lasting relationships. Others ask me how to overcome consumptive attachments they develop to people, then the terrible disappointment that flows when their love interests do not reciprocate their devotion.

These are related situations. They arise frequently. When a person tries to force a relationship onto another level, a power struggle ensues. One person wants something the other might not. This leads to a disparity in desire, as well as wishful thinking and blind faith that the other person is acting in accordance with your fantasies. In short, it is emotionally dangerous. When you start expecting another person to act the way you imagine they will, you are setting yourself up for heartbreak or worse.

I did this in my first love. I became very close friends with someone when I was just a teenager. I loved our time together. We had a very special friendship and I felt respected whenever we met. Eventually, my feelings grew stronger. I wanted a romantic relationship. I started believing that he did, too. He really didn't. I wanted him to love me the same way I loved him. I turned it over in my mind all the time; it kept me up at night. I wanted to talk to him all the time, but I didn't want it to seem that I was the only one making the phone calls. So I would wait around for days at a time wishing that he would call me; and of course he didn't. When he finally did call, my heart would race and I would stumble on my words. I felt that I was speaking to my savior; he had all the power over me. It was just pathetic. I was slavishly dedicated to him even though he never gave me the reciprocation I craved.

It took me several years to break my attachment to this person. I wasted so much psychic energy on an illusion. I will never do it again.

Now I see clearly what I did wrong. I created a whole mental patchwork of fantasies about my friend. Those fantasies overwhelmed my mind. I expected my friend to act in accordance with them. It was unrealistic, of course, but when you're craving a person's love, you do not think reasonably. My mistake was this: I fell in love with a subjective fantasy image, not a real person. And when the real person did not act according to the fantasy script in my mind, I felt crushed. I expected too much; and I learned that people are basically inscrutable: They rarely act the way you really want them to.

My youthful attachment to my friend was unhealthy for another reason: It led me into slavishness. I hung on his every word. I followed his every action with total devotion. I delivered my fate into his hands. Whatever he did, I followed. I gave him all the power because I wanted him to give me what I wanted. I wanted him to love me so much that I sacrificed my own dignity and spirit to win his affections. I stumbled on my words when I was around him because he was my mental master. I wanted too much. That made me slavish.

I did not break my attachment to this person until I stopped wanting what he had to offer. And that is the lesson: If you have an unhealthy attachment to a person and they are not showing you the love you want, you must convince yourself that they have nothing you want. Once you do that, you will stop obsessing about them. You will regain your peace of mind and dignity. You will reorder your desires and think clearly again. True, it is hard to do. But you will thank yourself if you can pull it off.

Let us try to understand how this works. We develop unhealthy attachments to people when we WANT something they have. "Want" is the most important word in our mental lives. It expresses our truest desires. It honestly discloses who we are. No one controls what we want; our personality dictates it. We are never so happy as when we get what we want because it satisfies our deepest, most personal yearnings.

Problems arise when we want something that only another person can give. In this case, we cannot easily address our wants because we cannot directly slake them. And because the other person has what we want, we make concessions in order to entice him to give us what we crave. We indulge him far more than we should. We bow, scrape, flatter and stumble on our words. We make our love interest our master; he has power over us because he has the discretion whether to grant us what we want. That is unhealthy. It leads us into despair because we willingly enslave ourselves to his will. Disappointment and frustration become our dominant emotions. We never get what we want. And we are crestfallen every time our love interest does not act the way we expect--which is much more often than we'd like.

But there is a way to overcome this cycle. To break the attachment, you must engage your reason. You must take control over your own desire again. You must convince yourself that the other person has nothing you want. If you can do that, the other person loses his authority over you. He becomes indifferent to you. You get to say what you want, not him. You can pursue your own desire again without a fickle middleman. That is freedom in the purest sense.

I know it is difficult to do this when you are caught in an unhealthy attachment. It is hard to engage your reason when you are contorted with unrequited desire. But it is worth the effort. It helps to have a distraction that breaks your incessant attention to your love interest. In my case, I met someone else who took my mind off my obsession. It helped me turn my mind away from its destructive focus on unattainable affection. Within a few weeks, I felt free again. It was wonderful.

If you ever find yourself with an unhealthy attachment to another person, think about why you feel the way you do: You want what the other person has. You put your happiness in his hands. You heap unrealistic expectations on the other person and you disappoint yourself every time he acts some other way. You give him total power over the way you feel. Conceptually, it is easy to understand. To break the attachment, you must simply stop wanting what he has to offer. Once you control your own wants again, no one will ever tyrannize you with frustration and disappointment. And life feels much better when you're not frustrated.

HAPPINESS, UNHAPPINESS, WORK, CAREERS AND DRINKING

AN ESSAY

When I practiced law, I learned the real meaning of the word “unhappiness.” I have garbled memories about my months in practice. Impressions flitter back to me without warning. No matter how they reappear, they put a bitter taste in my mouth. They confirm to me that I made the right decision to abandon the legal profession. They remind me just how awful I felt every day in a law office.

Before I practiced law, I never thought much about the concepts “happiness” and “unhappiness.” In my young mind, happiness was uncomplicated; it simply meant that you generally “felt good” in your circumstances and that “nothing was wrong.” Applying that definition, “unhappiness,” too, was easy to understand. It was just the “opposite of feeling good.” “Unhappiness” depended on “happiness.” If I knew one, I could abstractly imagine the other. I never considered that “unhappiness” could have an independent meaning.

It does. The mere fact that the word “unhappiness” contains the word “happiness” does not mean that “unhappiness” depends on “happiness.” To the contrary, “unhappiness” is a unique, pervasive, all-consuming feeling of malaise that darkens your entire outlook on life. It is not merely the absence of happiness; it is much more. It is a poisonous, enervating, hopeless mental condition. When you are unhappy, life appears bleak and pointless. Days pass slowly, even torturously. You just want to lie down and go to sleep. You expect bad news at every turn. When you are unhappy, you do not think to yourself: “I am not happy.” You think: “I am unhappy; and unhappiness has nothing to do with happiness.”

Practicing law made me unhappy. I could not bear to get up in the morning. I would lie in bed and pray that the minutes on the clock would not pass. From the moment I walked into the office, difficulties arose. My supervisor would yell at me for failing to make a phone call or fax something. She would reject my explanations with vague advice, such as: “You need to do better, remember more and move faster.” Of course, she never told me how to make people answer the phone or return calls. Nor could she tell me how to make the U.S. Mail move more quickly. Whenever I mustered the effort to fulfill her requests, she had a fresh rebuke for me. She called me names and told me she would dock my pay if I kept “fucking things up.” I tried to emphasize that no one had trained me. She told me to train myself by reading a 900-page “best practices manual.”

I felt disillusioned. I entered law practice after a very successful law school career. I thought my academic success would carry over into practice. It did not. Whenever I talked about legal theory, I was told to be quiet and do “case management” instead. That meant making phone calls and setting up appointments with doctors and engineers. Law had nothing to do with my practice. It was an elaborate horse-trading game that happened to revolve around a courthouse. All the while, intimidating people besieged me from all sides. My own supervisor told me I was incompetent. My adversaries called our lawsuits “baseless, stupid and worthy of sanction.” I even made judges angry because my supervisor instructed me to file idiotic motions in court. In short, I was castigated for following orders as often I was for failing to follow them. It was classic Catch-22 material.

My life degenerated into pure negativity. Nothing ever felt right. No matter what I did, I expected to be insulted, censured or criticized. I never received even one encouraging word from anyone. I remember losing interest in everything, even things I really liked. My libido vanished. Lawyers in my firm sympathized with me. But they, too, endured the same hardships I did; they had little time to worry about me.

And I could not escape. I stayed in the office for 11 hours or more for six days a week. I had no vacation time. I received cell phone calls before and after I left the office. The bad news and mean-spirited criticism never ended. Six months into my law practice experience, goodness seemed to have evaporated from my existence. It had become one grim, emasculating failure after another with no end in sight. My boss even reneged on a promise to increase my salary after six months, explaining: “You haven’t earned it yet.”

That’s when I learned what “unhappiness” really meant. I quit. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made. Since then, life has dealt me more tough cards. But at least I do not face ridicule, scorn and criticism every hour. I happier now than I was when I practiced law. In any event, I know I am not “unhappy” anymore.

Could anyone be happy in such circumstances? I remember something my supervisor said to me one Friday evening. It was about 6 PM. I was working on something that had to be done on Monday; there was still a long way to go. I knew I was going to be back in the office on Saturday, but I wanted to knock some work out before the weekend. Everyone else had gone home except my supervisor. She wanted to leave, too. So she came into my office and said: “Would you wrap it up? You’re cutting into my drinking time.”

I will never forget that. It made me seriously think about life, careers, happiness and success. Here was a successful law firm manager who divided life between “work time,” namely, Monday morning through Friday afternoon, and “drinking time,” namely, Friday afternoon through Sunday evening. When she said “I was cutting into her drinking time,” she implied that she drank at any moment she wasn’t working. For her, life was binary: Working and drinking. She must have liked drinking, because she did not like the fact that I was keeping her at work during her drinking time. If she had liked working, she would not have minded staying at work for a few more hours. But she was upset because I was encroaching on “her time,” and in “her time,” she liked drinking.

I am sure this is a common sentiment. But what does it really say about happiness and success in America? People are so proud of their jobs, especially people—like my supervisor—who achieve prominence and wealth. Yet despite this pride, they always yearn for days off so they can go get drunk. People say they love their work. But if they would prefer drinking to work, are they really being honest with themselves? Sigmund Freud wrote that intoxication is the “purest, most effective method” by which to ward off unhappiness. Civilization and its Discontents, S. 44 (Fischer Verlag, 10th Ed. 2007). Drinking “drowns cares.” If my supervisor loved drinking, she must have had “cares” she wanted to “drown.” This showed me that, beneath the collected exterior, she was somehow unhappy, too. She may not have been abjectly unhappy, but she must have been unhappy enough to want to drink as soon as she got home on Friday night. My unhappiness sprang both from my ill treatment and my disillusionment with a profession that cared nothing for the principles I struggled so long to master. My supervisor’s unhappiness came from some other source. I do not know what made her unhappy. She was powerful and had much more money than I did. She commanded people around the office and owned three apartments. Yet she was upset with me because I delayed her weekly rendezvous with the bottle.

Can we ever really find happiness in employment? It seems that every working person “lives for the weekend.” I know I do whenever I work a “traditional job.” I do not delude myself by saying “I love my job.” I do not like being a servant. I do not like sacrificing my time for a few dollars. Sure, in many cases it is necessary to sacrifice time for money. But that does not mean I like it. That is why I meticulously count the days toward Friday. During the week, a part of my mind always resents the idea that I am stuck doing someone else’s bidding for a shekel or two. Friday, however, represents a liberation from service. Working people divide their mental lives between weekdays and weekends. Weekdays are boring, stressful and unsatisfying. Weekends are exciting, free and fun-filled. The human brain does not like stress, obligation and constraint. Yet it loves freedom and fun. If it came between weekdays and weekends—and if money were not an issue—everyone would choose the weekend: Who would willingly face stress and obligation if there were no compensation for the pain? That is just the way our minds work. It is easier to be happy when you do not face stress, ridicule and failure. Even if you do not face extreme pressure at work, you still have to show up and sit in one place for over eight hours a day. Your brain would much rather be doing other things during that time, like drinking, sunbathing, shopping or surfing. That’s just the way we are, no matter how much guilt-ridden social programming we’ve absorbed to the contrary. We are trained to say “we love to work at traditional jobs.” But this is self-delusion.

Ironically, traditional jobs tend strongly to induce unhappiness. They consume time, leaving only limited opportunities for personal satisfactions. The fact that so many people—even wildly successful people—yearn to drink on Friday night is compelling evidence that people would “rather not be working” if they had the choice. More to the point, the persistent mental distinction between “workday drab” and “weekend fun” vibrantly illustrates that employment makes people unhappy. Workdays are “unhappy time” and weekends are “happy time.” It is childishly simple, yet accurate. “Weekend fun” makes us “happy.” “Weekday drab” runs us down, then thirst for “fun.” Without sufficient “fun” in our lives, we are not “happy.” We may not be truly “unhappy,” but we set ourselves up for unhappiness.

All this makes me wonder whether our entire social program even cares whether people achieve happiness. We learn to work at traditional jobs. We hear rhetoric about it all the time. It is “good” to have a stable job. It is “good” to know your place in the workplace hierarchy. It is “good” to spend your best years serving some company’s economic interests. And it is “good” to make money in the process. We hear that it is important to “be happy.” But how can we be happy if we spend 72% of our lives (ie, 5 days from every 7) wishing it were the weekend? Is it “good” to be happy only 28% of the time? Against this background, it almost seems revolutionary to want happiness 100% of the time. No offense to office workers, but if you say you are “100% happy” at your job copying papers, answering phones, staring at spreadsheets, delivering coffee and cataloging documents, I don’t believe you. I know that every Wednesday morning you secretly say to yourself: “Only two more days to go….only two more days to go.”

Happiness should not be a revolutionary sentiment. I made it my goal in life. I have experienced unhappiness. It is deeply unsettling. It makes you doubt life altogether. It makes you just want to give up. Still, avoiding unhappiness is more difficult than it seems. In our society, we learn to serve. We learn to spend our time to benefit others in order to win some monetary reward. Only a few have the freedom to spend their time as they please. But happiness lies in the power to say: “I will do what I want to do.” On weekends, working people say: “I will do what I want to do,” and they do what they want. On weekdays, they say: “I must” and they do not do what they want to do.

This is not a good recipe for happiness. Yet this is the program we’ve received from day one. When we sit in an office dreaming about the weekend, we understand just how little time we have to be happy in this world. Freud put it best when he said: “Our chances for happiness are already limited by our constitution as living organisms. But it is much less difficult to experience unhappiness.” Civilization and its Discontents, S. 43 (my translation) (Fischer Verlag, 10th ed. 2007).

When we divide our time between “work days” and “drinking days,” we obviously don’t like the work days as much as the drinking days. Yet we work much more often than we drink. Where does that leave us? Or do we drink because we work? If we do, what does that say about work? Should we defend it so proudly?

FINANCIAL UNION OF PEOPLE WHO GET TO DO WHATEVER THEY WANT ALL THE TIME AND WHO COULD GIVE A SHIT WHAT ANYONE ELSE THINKS EVERYWHERE AND FOR ALL TIME

POLITICAL PARTIES FOR A CHANGING WORLD

By : Mr. M. Myron Bird, Jr., Ph.D. (Leisure Studies), M.B.A. (Account Management); Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Short Hills Federal Savings & Loan Society; Avid Water Polo Connoisseur; Beachgoer; Honorary Chairperson, The American Relaxation Society, Age 27.

Many Americans face difficult times today. They worry about their jobs, finances, and even relationships. In challenging economic times like these, they wonder whether they will ever find happiness amid so much worry. After all, it is hard to be happy when banks threaten foreclosure, savings accounts dwindle and you lose your health insurance. Basically, many Americans face insurmountable problems. For these Americans, life is a wrenching struggle fraught with worry, pain, inconvenience, frustration, anxiety, uncertainty, heartache and indignity. For these Americans, joy is fleeting, if they ever experience it at all. They never get to do anything they enjoy because there are too many obligations. There is too much to do. There are too many people who expect them to get things done. There is never enough money to pay everyone who demands it. Who can feel joy under such pressure? Who can feel joy when so many other people dictate how you must act in life?

We can because nobody tells us what to do. We don’t feel pressure at all. We are the Financial Union of People Who Get to Do Whatever They Want All the Time and Who Could Give a Shit What Anyone Else Thinks Everywhere and For All Time. Put simply, we are the guys who make life hard on everyone else. We impose obligations; we don’t live under them. Our fathers own massive banks, investment houses, insurance conglomerates and pharmaceutical companies. We employ people; we don’t work. We wear T-shirts and flip-flops. We stay at home. We hire and fire. We collect fees. We divide up partnership profits. We buy eighth houses and jets. We swim on Tuesday afternoons in beautiful pools. We drink pina coladas with topless blond models while Americans worry about health insurance premiums. People give us money, not the other way around. We own so much property we don’t know what to do with it. You don’t hear about us much, but we’re out there. And we’re having a fantastic time, too.

We find it strange to hear about all these Americans who suffer hardship. After all, we have it good. Every time we turn on the news, we hear about “problems” that Americans face. We hear about low-income women who abandon their children because they can’t afford to care for them. We hear about middle-class families that descend into chaos because they can’t afford an unexpected carburetor repair. We even hear about struggling young professionals who complain they have “no work-life balance” because they never leave their offices. Basically, it seems that every American is worried to death as they struggle to cope with obligations from all sides.

Sucks to be them: Too bad they don’t own banks and pharmaceutical factories. We are the guys who impose obligations; we don’t face them. The only obligation we have is not to murder the gardener or rape those hot Polish cleaning ladies. Even if we did that, I’m sure we could pin it on someone else; hell, we own law firms and our dads know all the judges. Some say that we don’t understand the term “consequences.” But “consequences” are for people with problems and obligations. We are the guys who give other people problems and obligations; we make others suffer “consequences” when they fail to adhere to obligations. So how can we suffer “consequences?” That’s like telling the king to punish himself; the king punishes, not the other way around. In a word, we shit on “consequences.” When you own banks and control currencies, you don’t worry about “consequences.” In fact, you don’t really worry at all.

That’s why we can’t understand why people whine so much about life being “hard.” For us, life couldn’t be better. We get up when we want, stay out all night, have sex with models whenever we want, drive cars, go on luxury vacation cruises at our sixth family beach resorts, drink specialty mixed drinks with friends and buy any car we see. We have fun from morning to night, 365 days a year. We never have to do anything; we only do what we want. Sure, we might defer to a friend’s suggestion to fly to Aruba instead of Monaco, but that’s just courtesy. We’re never bound to do one thing or another. Still, we are courteous people. We listen to our friends. After all, we all just want to have a good time. There’s no need to squabble when you already own everything. When you get to do whatever you want all the time, life is beautiful. That’s why we don’t really grasp all this talk about “hardship” and “difficulty.” If you were in our loafers, you would say: “I love my life!”

We recognize that many people don’t like us. They say we don’t belong in a society committed to equality for all. They say we should face the same challenges as everyone else. We disagree with these criticisms for two main reasons. First, our society is not committed to equality for all. Rather, our society is committed to rewarding those who provide value to society. Our families provide real value to society, and our reward has been to live happy lives without obligation. Additionally, it would difficult to imagine a society in which both “equality” and “obligation” could coexist, for obligations always involve a superior and an inferior party.

Second, even if “equality” really were a social aim, it would not include the requirement to “subject everyone to the same challenges.” Some people have tough luck. Others get good breaks. That’s life. Some people get chronic skin diseases and look like walking corpses. Others are born mentally defective. Surely these “equality critics” do not think everyone in society has to endure these challenges? Hey, it would be great if everyone were beautiful, well-formed and wealthy like us. But that just can’t happen. Some have it better, namely, us. Not everyone can be both beautiful and own JP Morgan Chase.

Still, most people fail to comprehend our responses to their objections. They say it’s “just not fair” that we get to sit poolside all day having sex with models while they have to trudge into an office tower and move paper boxes from one corner to another for $28,250 annually (less taxes). To this we merely point to our party name: “We are the Financial Union of People Who…Could Give a Shit What Anyone Else Thinks Anywhere and For all Time.” You see, we really don’t give a rat’s ass that people are jealous of the way we live. You have your lot; we have ours. We are the ones who make your life difficult; we get to enjoy ourselves while you work. There’s nothing you can do to change the way we live, so there’s no point complaining about it. If you cared enough about yourself, you would stop complaining and work a little harder. This is America, after all. You can try to change your circumstances. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you say you can’t get anywhere because you’re injured, you have debt, you have a family to feed, no one’s hiring, no one pays overtime, blah blah, blah. Excuses, excuses. Face it, you are who you are: A Loser. If you just tried a little harder you could make the next pay grade. You might never get to our level, but you could at least make a few more dollars if you just grit your teeth and worked until 7 each night instead of 5:45. But you’ll never get anywhere if you cross your arms and pout about us. No matter how much you complain, we don’t give a shit. You see, when you have as much property as we do, you have the freedom not to care. And let me tell you something: We don’t.

To be clear, we do care about some things, just not you. Specifically, we care about whether we have to wait for a runway to clear before our jets can take off. Or if we’ve planned an outdoor dinner bash at the Hampton House, we care about whether it rains.

Despite these occasional challenges, we can’t say we’re unhappy. Our life is good. It is hard to explain just how good to someone who wakes up every morning to face pressing obligations. We wake up any time we want. We get breakfast served. We can choose to drive the Aston Martin or the custom Maybach. We can party or we can stay home and watch a first-run movie in our personal movie theater. We never see a bill, let alone pay them. Basically, every day we can choose the best way to amuse and delight ourselves. We don’t have to think about anyone but ourselves. We don’t have bosses; we are the bosses’ bosses. Believe me, it is a great way to live. We don’t think about bank balances, child support payments, car notes, interviews, denied medical coverage, standardized test scores or school deadlines. If someone denies us something, we just make a phone call and it’s solved. We don’t worry because there is no one who has anything we don’t. In a word, we think differently because we own everything. When you own everything, you don’t stress.

We fought to get where we are. We are happy to be here. There is no way in hell we are going to share it with anyone else. We are the Financial Union of People Who Get to Do Whatever They Want All the Time and Who Could Give a Shit What Anyone Else Thinks Everywhere and For All Time. Our membership is strictly limited. We control money; we don’t worry about it. We play by a different rulebook than the rest. You can’t join us unless you kill us and take our spots. If you try to do that, you’ve got a fight on your hands, because everyone works for us. And they don’t even know it. Everyone works and suffers so that we get to keep doing whatever we want, every day. It’s amazing what owning banks can do. Just ask us.

Problems and “consequences” are for little people. We love this country.

WE OWN OUR TASTES; WE ARE WHAT WE WANT

OESTERHOUDT STRIKES

Earlier this week, I wrote that art appeals to subjective taste. It is impossible to measure “good art” because no objective standards apply to it. A person either likes a painting or he does not. There is no magical checklist that automatically transforms a scribbling into a masterpiece. Greatness depends on publicity—and enough people who like you.

What appeals to one man will not appeal to another. For a lawyer, these are difficult concepts to grasp. After all, in law school, students learn that there are objective standards to measure everything. This is complete bullshit, of course, but the law adopts “objective standards” for administrative convenience. For example, the law judges “reasonable conduct,” “reasonable belief” and “reasonable reliance.” It does not look to the individual actor to determine what is “reasonable.” It looks to a fanciful “average, prudent person” to determine what is reasonable, then compares this nonexistent person’s assumed behavior to the poor sap under review. This is a totally unrealistic intellectual enterprise. But without it, there would be no standards at all for human behavior in society. People could get hurt and defrauded. Thus, while objective standards for human behavior may be unrealistic and philosophically untenable, they are vaguely necessary in order to maintain relative decorum in society.

Yet lawyers tend to forget that objective standards for human behavior are unrealistic and philosophically untenable. Instead, they start believing that objective standards actually exist. Legal education and legal practice have a perplexing, smugness-inducing effect. After all, lawyers wield very tangible power in our commercial world. Their words and writings have the power to impact property and even bodily security. By applying unrealistic and philosophically untenable legal formulae in particular cases, they can send people to prison or take away their homes. This naturally will make a lawyer feel quite powerful in his craft. But smugness in an unrealistic and philosophically flawed analytical methodology does not change the fact that it is unrealistic and philosophically flawed. Lawyers actually believe that there are objective standards in every life pursuit. This is just wrong. As Nietzsche said, there are no absolute “facts, only interpretations.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments 7(60) (Summer 1887)(my translation). Lawyers cannot fathom this. If they did, the pillars supporting their fanciful castle would collapse.

Yet how can we really debate the fact that objective standards and “truths” depend on interpretation? They do; moreover, they reflect the perspective of those with sufficient power to press home their interpretations. Still, everyone has a unique perspective. Everyone interprets differently. No matter what the law says or attributes to a person, that person still sees things and feels things in his own way. According to the law, he may “deviate from the reasonable standard,” but that is not because the person is intrinsically flawed. It is because the law—by sheer power—judges the person according to a standard that derives from its own perspective.

In this way, the law—and juridical thinking in the abstract—wields considerable influence in our lives. It does not just constrain our behavior by threatening punishment for certain “negative acts.” It also convinces us to think that objective standards exist in life as “absolute facts.” It convinces us that there is such a thing as “reasonable behavior,” even though that is merely a figment of some jurist’s imagination. They forget that everyone has a valid perspective and actually believe that there are universal standards governing everyone. This is unfortunate. On the other hand, it is administratively convenient. What kind of society would we have if every socially unpalatable person simply claimed he “did what he thought was correct” in particular circumstances? It would be a terrible mess. Nonetheless, every individual—in a strict, philosophical sense—is entitled to his own truth, perspective and interpretation. The law is not more right because it has the power to condemn men’s bodies or property. In this sense, the law sacrifices philosophical cohesion for administrative convenience. Legal thinking does not really care whether it represents “true truth.” It is content to merely keep things working without turmoil. Practicality wins over theory.

But there are realms in which subjective taste reigns and the law has no influence at all. Even people who believe strongly in the law nonetheless relish their own, personal tastes. Taste reflects individuality, not obedience to an artificial standard. When we say what we like and what we want, we express our own desires and thoughts. No objective standard applies to these things. They come from within, not from without. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: “Wanting liberates: that is the true lesson of will and freedom.” Also Sprach Zarathustra, Teil II (Auf den Glückseligen Inseln)(my translation). In other words, expressing our own wants and desires from within frees us from the objective standards imposed upon us from without. Wanting feels good because it originates in us, not outside us. Nothing controls our wants; they bespeak us. They define us. The law might say we have “unreasonable desires,” but they remain ours. And nothing in the law makes its judgments intrinsically “right.” It is “right” only to the extent that power supports it.

Taste is crucially important in our lives even though the law has no authority to influence it. What do we consider “beautiful?” Do we refer to a statute book listing the objective factors that constitute “what is beautiful?” Certainly not. We consider things “beautiful” that move us and appeal to our intuition. We define ourselves by judging people or things “beautiful.” After all, certain people find certain things beautiful, while others do not. It has nothing to do with law or objectivity. Rather, it has only to do with individual desire and taste. From an individual perspective, we think about these things all the time because our tastes reflect our deepest core. We pursue things that we like in life. We want to appease our tastes. We want beauty. Why do we want things that appeal to us? Because only we have control over them. We decide what we like, not an external standard. Psychologically, we live for our wants. We make ourselves happy when we satisfy them. We descend into unhappiness when life’s circumstances prevent us from doing so. Wanting is everything because we are our wants.

Recently, I thought about all these questions when reflecting on my own tastes. I thought about people I find beautiful. What turns me on? What makes me say: “That is a beautiful man” or “That is a beautiful woman”? For the longest time, I thought that everyone could agree that certain people are beautiful, at least from a sexual or aesthetic perspective. But then I realized that I was imposing my own tastes on everyone else. This revealed to me just how pernicious objective thinking can be; it leads us to substitute our judgment for others in areas in which we have no authority. After all, we live in a society in which we learn that we can objectify things and rate them according to “reasonable criteria.” This modality works in some areas, but it definitely does not work in others. When it comes to beauty, everyone has a different view. And we have absolutely no right to judge another person’s view about “what is beautiful.” Some people find Tiger Woods beautiful. I don’t. By contrast, I think that Fernando Torres (the Spanish soccer star) is extremely good looking. Yet I’m certain that many people find Tiger Woods more beautiful than Fernando Torres.

Objective standards play no role at all here. Taste is subjective and individual. No one can take it from us. Only we know whether something appeals to us, no matter what anyone says in a book or manual. There are no “universal principles of taste or beauty.” If anyone dares to lay down such principles, he does nothing but memorialize his own subjective desires. True, many people have similar tastes. But tastes remain subjective. We cannot control the myriad details in life that excite our interests or lusts. At the same time, the same details that excite me may not excite my neighbor.

We should never be ashamed of our desires and tastes. In fact, they define us as much—if not more—than our DNA. Nothing truly expresses our individual uniqueness more than the judgments we make about beauty. Taste and desire live within us, beyond all juridical control. We need not conform our tastes and desires to some external standard; we are always free to like and desire whatever appeals to us. We may never get a chance to enjoy or relish the things we want and desire, but that does not deprive our power to want. That power always remains in us.

“Wanting liberates.” It liberates us from external strictures and gives us free rein in a uniquely individual realm beyond all external controls. I think it is important to remember this in a world that mercilessly seeks to hold us to objective standards. Worse, our world even attempts to change our wants. Why do advertisers try to foist a certain image of beauty upon us? Are we not free to make our own judgments based on our own tastes? Skinny, tan white chicks may appeal to many, but not all. Abercrombie boys may appeal to many, but not all. I find it presumptuous when mass media attempts to displace our own desires with “better ones.” When mass media does this, it encroaches on sacred ground—our ground. Wants and desires belong to us and no others. There is nothing “better” about one person’s ideal of beauty as against another’s. All are valid. Powerful people may ridicule less powerful people for having “strange wants and desires.” But those judgments carry no real force. We should be most vigilant when defending ourselves against attempts to “change our wants.” Our wants are us. If we allow others to displace our wants—or even to doubt or regret our wants—they displace us completely. When we no longer want, we no longer are.

For better or worse, our tastes reflect our individual humanity. They might be “weird,” “off-color,” “unconventional” or even “deviant” in some eyes, but they remain uniquely ours. No matter what the law says, objectivity is a fantasy, and subjectivity really does matter. It matters because our whole existence is subjective. No one will ever experience life the way we do. No one will ever see, feel, hear, touch, taste and smell the world in precisely the same way we do at this very moment in time. Our unique experiences and senses lead to unique emotions that no one can duplicate or even really understand. Our existence is subjective. We can only look through our own eyes; we have only our feelings. We have only one consciousness—our own. Within that consciousness, we want, we desire, we think; we even dream and fantasize. No one else does it the same way we do. And that is a wonderful thing if you stop to think about it. That is why our tastes, desires and wants really do matter, even if they mean nothing to the law.