Profit and loss

[jbor]

----------
>From: "Phil Wise" <philwise at paradise.net.nz>
>

> You're right, it
> is more complex, but Pynchon's narrator does say that PR3's people made the
> basic revolutionary mistake by investing in a cult of personality.

I rather got the impression that Weed lacked "charisma", that this so-called
"cult of personality" was artificially-manipulated. Wasn't it just because
he was tall?

> As were the revolutionary and reactionary selves of the young PR3ers before
> and after they were turned by Vond.  Pynchon's implied author clearly
> regards one as a totum of failed promise, the other as fascism.

This is certainly one interpretation. They weren't *all* turned, of course.
Frenesi's seeming genetic predisposition to uniforms certainly complicates
the issue, as does Prairie's final wistful call to Brock: "You can come
back. ... Take me anyplace you want." (384) I'm not convinced that the
intentions of Pynchon's "implied author" are as clear-cut as you say they
are.

>   Why can it
> not be the same with laissez faire capitalism?

Well ... there's absolutely no commonality between the one and the other, is
there?!

> How can it be the archetypal
> expression of democracy when many of ther most powerful figures cannot be
> held to democratic account?

Of course they can. It's an *open* marketplace: that's the whole point of
it.

> Not best: this makes me mad.

I'm sorry, but that's actually your problem. It's a salutation, nothing
more.

> I didn't label anything anything - I explained some similarities I
> perceived, explained that they made me nervious.

I did read your post carefully, and this is what you wrote:

> Totalitarianism is neither about economics or ideology.  It is about the
> total domination of its subjects, and about the official ideology, which
> could be virtually anything, infusing its way into every aspect of social
> life.
snip
> What I am seeing
> appears to be conditions in the process of being set in place to achieve the
> inevitable rise of the entrapreneurial subject leading to a free-market
> utopia.

The comparisons you made were between utopian Marxism and Nazism, i.e.

> the inevitable historical rise of the
> proletarians to achieve dialectical materialism, the historical destiny of
> the Germanic people because of their innate superiority.

The conflict, as I see it, is between *national* democracies, which have
*national* economic interests at heart, and *global* economic growth.

best