Welcome"Vanitiy of vanities, sayeth the preacher. All is vanity." (Ecclesiates 12:8)
he Asperger's philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said most people are not worth much
. Would that was true! Many are debit entries on the balance sheet of mye social world: They create problem for me and cause me trouble, so that, manifestly, the universe would be better off had they never been born (see right), which is probably part of the reason some of them are against abortion. Let me here express my sincere platitude to all the clueless people who childrearended me.
Then there is the problem that people "create" – in a taxonomic, not honorific æsthetic or engineering sense of adding value – a lot of unnecessary trash: If you don't mess it up, then nobody has to clean it up. Let's do the potlatch again! As postmodernist architect Robert Venturi did not say: More is a bore.
The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion observed that all social customs are shared hallucinoses aka: social psychoses. People are mostly 2-legged herd animals lived by their society, not autochthonously alert and awake individuated persons. The invasion of the body snatchers occurs in the nursery: it is socially normative childrearing. The body snatchers / soul murderers are normal[ized] parents who rear the child to be a good citizen, not raise him (her, other) up to creatively shape his own life and to become a critical judge of the world.
Not all trash is bad. One of the few good things about when I worked in a white collar office was that when the vending machine service man restocked the snack machine, he threw items whose "Use by" date had expired in the nearby trash can. I took the discarded packets of Doritos from the trash and had: free expired Doritos! I liked that. Sadly, the rest of the office day was generally less good, to the degree that one afternoon when I had a prostate biopsy, it was less worse than had I expended the time in the office.
I am an aristocrat sans portfolio. This morning (+2021.10.10), I braved going out into the world go to a very fancy pastry shop to buy almond croissants for myself, my wife, and the pre-World War II old and "old money" French lady who lives up the hill from me. I had never been to La Tulipe before, and, as always, another day another dent; on my way out of the too narrow parking area I tapped something and it slightly dented the car's rear bumper (who's rated at 5 MPH?). Then, in penance, I went to Starbucks, to get my wife a Pumpkin spice lattte (what?), and, while waiting to give my order, I compared pastry offerings. So that's what the second thru fourth deciles like.
The croissant, while quite good, was a bit too much: not so much (or little...) to my taste as the less fancy one a good manager had brought to work one morning from La Petite Patisserie (Larchmont, New York). Yum! She was the lady who, when, 10AM one normally busy morning in the office, I said I had never driven a BMW 5-speed, threw me her key ring and told me to go for a spin (the 318 was old enough that it did not even have carpet on the floor, but so what?). Now that's class! To end this little vignette: The old lady has a bunch of superannuating half-empty liquor bottles in a cabinet and she never drinks (you can't take it with you to the other side of the topsoil...), so she gave me a bottle of Benedictine. It greatly improved my morning expresso coffee. Dulce et decorum est pro patria vivere.
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