Sandwichman quoted Keynes:
"this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long
run we are all dead. Economists set for themselves too easy, too
useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that
when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."
Keynes here makes both a social ontological and a psychological point.
He treats social relations as internal relations. This social
ontological fact makes many aspects of the "long run" unknowable, i.e
"uncertain" in one of Keynes's particular senses.
He also claims, however, that this is psychologically intolerable to
those who haven't mastered fear of death; one certain fact about the
long run is that in it "we are all dead." He associates the
"purposiveness" dominant in capitalism with denial of this fact.
"purposiveness means that we are more concerned with the remote future
results of our actions than with their own quality or their immediate
effects on our own environment. The 'purposive' man is always trying
to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing
his interest in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but
his cat's kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens'
kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat‑dom. For him jam
is not jam unless it is a case of jam to‑morrow and never jam
to‑day. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he
strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality."
<http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/368keynesgrandchildren.html>
Ted
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