[Redo in progress. I'm going to be redoing this essay during this week (at least). I wrote the first draft in a hurry at the end of the semester with very little time. I'm not happy with it. Of course, I'd appreciate any comments while I am working on this revision. In the past I've done my work on a word processor and then imported it into the wiki all at once. This time I'm going to try working mostly on the wiki, so it may look a little ragged.]

The Key to All Mythologies

"You don't have to change the world" -- Prof. Moglen during one of our last classes

1

For the past few years, I've tried to figure out how to understand how groups of people function together. There must be some way to understand the feedback loop between individuals and the large groups of people that somehow produces collective desires -- something like a more detailed understanding of Freud's super-ego that is at once an intensely personal and collective entity. If I could understand how groups of people created collective desires, then I could act intelligently in collective movements. I would be like an ant in Arnold's anthill that understood how it all actually worked. I've been fascinated by the May 1968 strikes in France, where Pompidou broke up an coalition of worker's unions and bourgeois students by dissolving the representative assembly, which reminded the members of the coalition of their differences by forcing them to chose representatives. There's someone who knew how collectives behaved. On a slower and more repetitive plane, there's the entertainment industry that creates and profits from collective desires through movies and music. If I could understand how collectives behaved, then I could act effectively within them. I could change the world.

The upshot of this obsession is that I've been drawn to authors that attempt what George Eliot calls "The Key to all Mythologies" -- grand-unified theories of everything. I've tried to read Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the result of a collaberation between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari that promises to answer the question "why do people most desire their own repression?" through a materialist philosophy of just about everything. I've studied Spinoza's Ethics which promises a rational explanation for everything.