For the last few days I have had a feeling in the back of my head, that I am thinking very hard about something, but even I don’t know what it is. I know that it’s something to do with punk movements, with capitalism, with modern society, with the state of the world as it is today, and so on. Now I already absolutely hate to mention capitalism here. Nowadays I see hatred of capitalism as naïve and juvenile. Capitalism does pose many problems, but the way I see it, all of its problems are more like clarified versions of problems of human nature. Capitalism, in my opinion, does not even really amplify these problems – rather, these problems amplify capitalism. Capitalism is not the cause; therefore, abolishing capitalism is not the solution. It is unfairly maligned. If we want to abolish capitalism, we may as well seek to abolish human nature. Not every person exhibits the tendencies that we see so clearly personified in the capitalistic deities of Musk, Trump, Bezos, etc. – but it is undeniable that for many people, that is their nature, and that means that to some extent their behavior is part of human nature. Furthermore, there is no simple or clear way of preventing capitalistic systems from repeatedly emerging. In my experience, complex systems (like the sort necessary to suppress the natural emergence of capitalism) are less sustainable. They are more complex organisms and hence more easily become ill and defective. Of course, this is both a simplification and a generalization, but one I find applicable to capitalism. The reason that I begin with this elaborate clarification of my views of capitalism is because I hate to be lumped in with the nowadays common and growing group of people who see it as the source of all evil, or even as priority number one on the list of things to put a stop to. All of this is misguided and not possible anyhow. But then why is capitalism even part of my cloud of thoughts that I am here attempting to clarify? It is obviously because capitalism is the primary mode of the world today, it is beyond an economic system, it is an entire way of life which permeates all countries and social systems, however small, far beyond the borders of America - the flagbearer of capitalism. Let me clarify what I mean by capitalism: I mean a system in which one can make money simply by having money, charging interest, gaining interest via markets, loans, etc. Such a system intrinsically makes the rich richer and creates a preferential attachment dynamic (or put more casually, a snowball effect), which results in a very natural and beautiful Pareto-looking distribution of wealth. I say beautiful purely out of admiration for the reemergence of this natural and widespread pattern, not as an endorsement of the system’s effects on human well-being. There is no denying that capitalism has a poor effect on the well-being of anyone who is below the cutoff for the snowball effect to take place. The root of this problem is simply that it creates power imbalances between people in a way that is not correlated strongly with the person’s ability to responsibly manage that power.

Power

I am not intrinsically opposed to power imbalances, especially if the power could be correctly allocated, then some degree of power imbalance is likely preferable to an equal distribution, but this is an aside, since I don’t believe there is a good way of correctly allocating power. If we had no money, or if we had no capitalism, there would be other sources of power imbalance, such as natural strength, intelligence, and so on (Although some other investigation is warranted regarding how these forms of power are substantially less heritable and accumulative than money, which may constitute a unique shortcoming of capitalism). Some people laud this natural state, assuming that because it is primitive and original it must be better – there is something to be said about this line of reasoning: Our psyches must have evolved more closely to suit these original conditions than the alien worlds we have built for ourselves today. But our minds are greatly capable of adaptation, and it’s questionable to me whether that original condition is really any more or less desirable on that basis. That is to say, the effect of our natural psychological tendencies seems, to me, negligible. It is not obvious to me that people would really rather live in a world where the strongest person around is the de facto ruler of the others. Of course, the opposite of this, in which power is balanced by artificial means, does not necessitate a capitalistic system in theory. But it does necessitate some sort of overseer figure that correctly adjusts the power balance as needed. It is obvious how any such system is destined to go wrong. Perhaps if people were immortal, it would be possible over time to find the best, most altruistic overseer and appoint them for life. But in the real world, the simple problem of death and inheritance is the source of a strong decoupling between someone’s power and their “deserving” of that power. Again, we can block this at a governmental level, but in that case, we need a strong and perpetual system of descendancy in government, which, as best as we know so far, can be attempted via democracy. But democracy is a perpetually fragile thing, maybe even more fragile than trusting kings to raise worthy princes. Democracy requires not one person to do their job correctly, but millions of people. Again, complex systems have more points of failure, and in the absence of other preventative mechanisms, are therefore more likely to fail. It is not a new thought that any social order comes and goes, it has a lifespan, and when it ends, it often ends violently or tragically for the people who belong to it. There is perhaps no real way out of this cycle. When it comes to the question of human happiness, of how to live a happy life, it seems clear that the time and place of your birth may have the largest and most incontrovertible effect on your ability to do so, regardless of how unpleasant that realization feels to us. Humans are desperate for control and authorship over at least their own lives, to such an extent that we find it distasteful even to see others without that control, and we must invent lies to convince ourselves that those unfortunate others really do have some way to happiness, and therefore that I myself always have some way to happiness as well.

Illusions of Control

Among these lies are most obviously religion, and the capitalist meritocratic doctrine that the smart and hard working become wealthy while the lazy become or remain poor. But more subtly, the thinking of people like Viktor Frankl, or any self-help type of writing, or even some areas of psychology, and the field of therapy itself, are full of hidden desperation to believe that, no matter how dire your circumstances, there always exists some way to play your cards right and win the game. The truth is that some people really just have a horrible situation, with no good way out, and their lives will never be as happy as someone else’s, for reasons entirely out of their control. This is an uncomfortable fact, and although I hate to repeat simplistic luddite refrains, I will give them this: In the primitive world, the brutality of nature and the ready availability of cruel, random death must have forced humans to better tolerate this lack of control (but not forced so strongly, of course, to eliminate the need for gods and rituals). In the modern world, chaos and randomness are not really reduced, but rather they are hidden off-stage, they exist before one’s birth primarily. Within large organized societies, it is easy to believe that one’s happiness really is mostly a matter of their own good decision-making. We understand that intelligence is a strongly distinguishing random factor, but we content ourselves with this randomness by moralizing it away, and believing that intelligent people fundamentally deserve better things than unintelligent people. Is this actually true? Malice and stupidity are often intertwined, but then, so are malice and intelligence. Any question about “deserving” is bound to end up in silly territory because it assumes that it is possible to “deserve” things in the first place. Indeed, there can be no absolute rule for deserving because there is no absolute underlying morality for that rule to match up with. It must be in flux with the particular sentiments of the people who are alive at that time. That is the closest thing to a moral imperative there could ever be, and it isn’t a very strong one. So if I don’t believe in a moral imperative, what am I even upset about? It could only be that things just aren’t the way I would like them to be.

Post-Moral Anger

I want to believe something like: because the way I would like things to be is better for many people, rather than just myself, that makes my desires superior to the desires of the more selfish people (those gods of capitalism come to mind), but of course there is no cosmic truth to this. I only pick the well-being of the majority retroactively as an outer moral good because I recognize that this would then position my desires as the superior ones. So then, when I feel angry at people like Elon Musk, can I not dissolve my anger, or at least the self-righteous component of it, in recognition of the fact that he is not doing anything different from me? Both of us have some desires, and have chosen a moral cosmology that allows us to situate our desires as the most justified. Both of us are acting for the sake of our own desires, and it bears repeating that just because my desires benefit many other people, and his do not, my desires are no better. They could only be better by the measuring stick of how many people they benefit, which is a measuring stick I chose for myself after having formed my desires (and how could I have ever chosen a measuring stick in the absence of any desire?). Unfortunately, while this may dissolve the self-righteous component of my anger, it gives birth to an equally strong component: a component of frustration, specifically at the ineffectiveness and stupidity of my fellow majority. For, there are many among the majority who are quite enamored with Musk. And there is frustration to be had with Musk himself, who seems to truly believe that he is also doing what is best for the most people – making him an idiot. If he has really chosen the same measuring stick as me, then there is no reason for me and him to be opposed, if only we were privy to the same absolute truth of how to best bring our shared desire into reality. But we are not privy to the same truth, and of course from each of our perspectives, the problem is the other one’s failure of intelligence. Only rationality can be the judge in this case, and this is the one saving grace of a post-moral mindset: even if morality does not exist, then the next best thing is mere satisfaction. And if everyone wants the same thing, then the only remaining hurdle to our unified action is a disagreement in how to go about it. Now we are asking “how” and not “for what absolute justification?”, and the former is a real question with real answers, which can be interrogated by real means, while the latter question is complete nonsense. But here human nature, which we could often call simply by the name stupidity, rears its head again to immediately cripple this brief notion of a saving grace. Although we may be asking a real question that we can answer by real methods, humans will quickly disagree on what those methods are, their validity, what the results mean, the validity of the results, and so on – even if they may otherwise have a perfect unity of intent. This is the reality we have always lived in, even when it is masked by confused moral distractions, and it is the reality we will always live in. I will digress shortly about why even a drastic increase in human intelligence would not resolve this problem. It is simply that opinions do not necessarily converge on a single point as intelligence increases. For instance, in the case of yes/no questions, we can easily imagine an eternal debate of increasingly nuanced and sophisticated rebuttals on either side. There are idiotic reasons to answer yes, and idiotic reasons to answer no – and the smart people on either side of the debate will have no problem classifying those answers as idiotic, simplistic, etc.: Wrong in their path, if not in their destination. As someone’s intelligence increases, they may oscillate along this non-converging trajectory of opinions, repeatedly being convinced by a truly superior line of reasoning from one side, only to be convinced back again to the other side by an even more superior line of reasoning. Of course, not all opinions are non-converging, but unfortunately most of the interesting and worthwhile opinions seem to be. So then it is less a question of how intelligent someone is, but just of how much time they’ve spent thinking about the problem, and even then, that is no guarantee that the oscillations become smaller, they may even become larger. We can’t simply poll the longest-thinkers of an opinion, because some of these opinions may have very short periods in their oscillation, or periods longer than a lifetime. The question of determining objective truth is therefore also mired in subjectivity, and subjectivity is the playground for stupidity (and here I must clarify that subjectivity is also the playground for many pleasant effects as well, such as many forms of art and play).

Post-Moral Desire

However, all of this is just a prelude, it’s just initial thinking, it doesn’t get to the heart of my strange unclear thinking in the back of my mind. Putting aside moral objectivity, I would like to focus on what I want. But this is easier said than done, to put aside moral objectivity in this pursuit – our misguided intuition for objective morals is the foundation of many of our desires. It is both the rocket and its fuel. Many desires exist without any substantial moral dimension, like my desire to drink orange juice – sure, there are some moral dimensions maybe about wasteful use of food products, or financially supporting farmers – but these are neither the originators nor the deciding factors of my desire. In the case of something like my desire to see Elon Musk put in prison, the moral dimension is perhaps the dominant factor. Initially, the desire was in fact based on something more selfish and primitive: He poses a threat to people I like, to the kinds of social discourse and behavior that I would like to live amongst, and so on. From this direct genesis, the moral dimension emerges as justification – morality as fuel for the desire. But the need to have a strong justification for my strong desire can become so amplified that it overtakes the original desire itself. What was the moon becomes massive enough to convert the planet into its moon instead. Morality as the desire itself. When probing our own desires, should we prune these sorts of desires? Desires which, although originally rooted in a desire itself, have now become a hyperreal separate entity? It seems like it may be wise to try to put an end to these desires – the process in which the moon and planet switch roles is exactly the process that allows the desire to become decoupled from self-benefit. A desire to live in a society with social discourse I enjoy is reasonable because it benefits me directly – I have a desire innately for enjoyable discourse, which I cannot get rid of. But a desire to see Musk imprisoned is only incidentally worthwhile – it is only valuable insofar as it protects enjoyable social discourse, etc. It may be that there is a less strict relation between the two – because of course I can have enjoyable social discourse even if Musk is not in prison – but the moon becoming the planet encodes these two separate things as one. The distinction between moon and planet is lost as both bodies can be said to orbit one another, and eventually taken as a single inseparable unit – a fallacy. In this light, the relatively low rates of activism are no surprise. Even if we may conceptually commit the fallacy of conflating two things, our deep intuition is often aware of the difference. I am not launching a campaign to imprison Musk, because on some level I am aware that my perceived threat is disproportionate at the moment. But this makes clear exactly the dilemma: It is disproportionate at the moment, but as I said much earlier – snowball effects are in play. It is not hard to understand the idea of “nipping it in the bud”, of stopping the snowball before it’s big enough to be a problem, because by the time the snowball is big enough to be a problem, you will no longer be able to stop it. This level of reasoning, which even many of the dumbest humans can get their heads around, is one of many factors forcing us to be predictive, forecasting people. Even the dumbest person thinks far ahead, despite the fact that many average people believe that foresight is unique to the intelligent. No, almost everyone has foresight, and even when they appear not to, it is more likely a problem of impulse control. So when I want to focus on what I want, and I want to remove the corruption of morality – which I insist is the right move, since I have clearly laid out how the moral phantom creates space to erroneously conflate a necessary desire with an ancillary desire and lead to pointless courses of action – it is not as simple as asking which desires have too strong a moral dimension and getting rid of them.

Fundamental vs Incidental Desires

I have to ask myself, what was this desire before it was corrupted by morals? What is it that I originally wanted, before I had to invent outer cosmic fictions to justify my own desire to myself and others? In some cases, the desire may completely evaporate. Take for example, someone who has a desire for social stability, a clear system with roles for everyone. This desire would then be retroactively justified by the invention of a moral system that espouses social stability and clear roles as a primary virtue. There are many moral systems that may do this, and they will share essential features, but be differentiated by their non-essential features. One system may have the non-essential feature of supporting an aristocracy, while another system may have the non-essential feature of supporting absolute equality – in both systems we can imagine people having clear roles and social stability. Now let us suppose this person one day realizes that their moral system, let’s say they had picked the system of aristocracy, is nothing more than a made-up justification for their desires. Even if their desire itself does not change, any ancillary desires attached to the non-essential features of their moral system will immediately collapse. For instance, maybe they used to practice very hard to serve as a good butler to the nobility. But if they become convinced that it is possible to have social stability and clear roles without aristocracy, their desire to be a good butler may completely evaporate. Clearly, their desire to be a good butler was entirely a mistake, a mistake spawned by morality. So there are many classes and tiers of desires that could be drawn out here, but ultimately it is the fundamental, original ones, and the incidental ones. But it is interesting to note that, because our minds are adaptive, what begins as an incidental desire may become fundamental. Here we can imagine a particularly religious person who initially finds it boring and tedious to recite chants, but after a lifetime of doing so begins to enjoy it, to such an extent that even if they were to completely lose their faith, they may still desire to recite their chants. What should we do about these desires? I believe these sorts of desires should be kept, as a general rule. This keeps things somewhat simple, as a nice side effect. The heuristic is that we want to prune incidental desires and keep only fundamental desires. This self-honesty leaves us with the littlest amount of wiggle room to inject arbitrary side goals that are merely shadows of our moral scaffolding, the scaffolding necessary to form a distance between the sensical world and the moral world, and which therefore must be scaffolding built in a nonsense shape, casting nonsense shadows. The thing of note is that even a now-fundamental desire which was once incidental, may still be valid.

Fundamental Desires and Depression

The next problem is in identifying the fundamental desires in the first place. By a fundamental desire, I should have specified earlier, I mean a desire that you practically cannot help but have. A desire not to be in pain, not to be starving, etc., are examples of common fundamental desires. But what about the people who lack even these desires? Without even a single fundamental desire, there is truly no reason to live – nor is there even a reason to die. There is no reason to do anything. So, I believe it is a mistake to characterize suicidal behavior as being driven by a lack of desire. Any person who has actually committed suicide, after all, intrinsically had a desire to commit suicide, a desire strong enough to overwhelm their strong natural inclinations to the contrary. Depression may be distinguished for suicidal thinking by this means. Indeed, I can imagine a perfectly “depressed” person who simply wants for nothing, who sits absolutely still, desiring not a single thing, not even to eat – and who would indeed die, but only “by accident”, as it were, only as a side-effect of their absolute lack of desires. In this sense I consider severe depression a much worse fate than suicide. The person who commits suicide wanted something, and actually attained it. The only people upset with the consequences are us, the people who are still alive and must actually experience the consequences. The negative depiction of suicide is arguably propaganda by those with a will to live, to coerce the suicidal into continued suffering for the sake of others’ psychological comfort. Thus, we depict suicide as a tragedy, a loss, and at worst even a failure – when in some sense it is a triumph. It is a consolation-prize sort of triumph, to be sure – suicide is nobody’s first resort, but it is always the last resort. But a person perfectly devoid of desire – can we even call that depression? – they would seem almost worse than dead, sentient in name only – all that sentience-making-machinery in their brain going to waste and, while this state is by definition not unpleasant for them, it is not pleasant either. Such a person is as dead as the person who has committed suicide, but lacking their final triumph.

It is important to discuss depression here, because we see it as a sort of watered-down form of this hypothetical desireless person. In reality, no human achieves this “perfect” state of apathy. The depressed, unfortunately, retain a desire for desiring things (outside of that desire itself), which is why the experience is unpleasant. We see that the limit of desire reduction is inhuman, and as we approach the limit, we have depression, which means that the earlier protocol of purging moral and incidental desires and keeping only the fundamental ones, is playing with fire. We don’t want to have too little desires, that much is clear. There is some sort of middle ground, which I believe is defined not by the amount of desires (although there is surely some necessary minimum), but more by the feasibility of those desires.

Desire Pruning

Ideally, one would desire only what is attainable, or what will actually be attained, or what one already has. The difficulty is that this comes naturally to no one, and instead this state can only be attained by practicing the removal of one’s own desires. And it really must be removal of the desire, not just suppression of it, which is known to be counterproductive. But practicing this skill is difficult. It feels to me as though we cannot prune our tree of desires, its branches are too thick and stubborn. The only hope we have of removing some branch of that tree is by burning it, and that fire is much more difficult to control, it spreads easily to the trunk and even to the roots and leaves you with nothing. But why does it seem this way? The mechanism is in fact simple. The best way to put a stop to a desire is to face the ways in which it doesn’t make sense. But every desire is branched off from another desire, and contains the genetic material of its parent, it contains a similar purpose and structure. Desires are fractal and genetic. This means that their properties are bi-directional, what is present in the child is present in the parent, and if you convince yourself that the child has nonsense genetic material, it is not a far leap to believe that the parent also has nonsense genetic material (And of course, the cosmic truth is that all desires are nonsense, and can only be self-justified and circular). If desires were somehow unrelated to one another, if my desire to dance was a side effect of my desire to eat an apple, then maybe I could prune the dancing desire and see no reason to touch the apple desire. But in reality, my desire to dance is likely caused by my desire to express myself, and in stifling a desire to dance, I most likely must also stifle a desire to express myself, and stifle whatever caused that desire, and so on. This delicacy and interconnection is why I often characterize the practice of changing one’s own desires as something like a robot re-soldering its own motherboard. It takes care, precision, it’s very dangerous, and it can go wrong in ways you don’t understand. Perhaps a more apt analogy would be putting controls for a fish’s tank inside the tank, so that the fish can press on the buttons at will by swimming up against them. Unlike the robot, the fish has an extremely limited understanding of what the buttons actually do, and might easily misconfigure the tank to its own detriment. It’s natural to wonder if we should even attempt to perform this self-alteration at all, or if we should just leave well enough alone.

Contradictions

When it comes to happiness, and especially when it comes to improving our own happiness, we are usually so curious and persistent that it doesn’t really matter whether we should think about it or not – we will do it all the same. So, for now, I will give in to this seeming inevitability, and return again to the distant guiding star of this writing, those strange hazy thoughts that I find myself occupied with, without ever really thinking them clearly to myself. I’ll try to stay away from generalized observations for a moment and stick to my own particulars. I dislike very much about the world. Most of the best things in life, and all of the worst things in life, are the result of human activity. This is a slight asymmetry against nature, which seems to present mostly moderate goods, and moderate ills, with a few outstanding lovely things. A preference between ancient nature and human doings then seems to come down to a preference between low risk and low reward, or high risk and high reward. Different people may prefer one of those over the others, but everyone prefers one thing above them both: low risk and high reward. Obviously! But the point is that even though these things often contradict, we desire them nonetheless. It’s a trite sentiment nowadays that “humans are full of contradictions”, and unfortunately when things become trite it is easy to think you understand them without actually understanding them. Let me enumerate the main contradictions. We desire community, but we also desire solitude. We desire shared identity, but we also desire individuality. We desire the well-being of others, but we also desire our own well-being. All of these contradictions are manifestations of the deeper contradiction, the contradiction between other and self. But this is not the only family of contradictions. As stated above, we desire high rewards with low risks. We desire comfort, and we desire challenge. We desire familiarity, and we desire novelty. Of course, none of these contradictions are always irresolvable. Usually the resolution lies simply in the fact that we want these different things at different times, and so the contradiction exists only when viewed with no temporal sensitivity, a mistake of our trying to form a temporally consistent identity out of things that have no actual obligation to be thusly consistent, which is itself a byproduct of our desire to simplify things, itself a byproduct of our desire to understand things, which is unsurprisingly all originating in the desire to get what we want. Originating in, but not necessarily still attached to. Like a small dog chases a ball but fears birds, the incidental desire becomes fundamental, and what was once a fundamental desire is free to dissolve. So, I do not mean to say that humans actually are driven purely by getting what we want, and that any desire for understanding things is only in service of that. In fact I believe exactly the opposite, but I do not reject the genesis of these ideals either. Regardless, I bring up these human contradictions because they of course relate to me in particular, being as I am human. Some contradictions are more or less prevalent to me. One contradiction often at the forefront of my mind is the contradiction between a modern technological lifestyle, and an old-fashioned more natural lifestyle. This itself is a result of many more abstract contradictions. On the side of modernity we have: Comfort, convenience, safety, empowerment, self-expression. On the side of antiquity we have: Freedom, self-reliance, simplicity, beauty, relaxation. But notice that each side can clearly manifest the benefits of the other. They are strange mirrors of each other, they achieve the same ideals by different means, in different directions. In antiquity you have the comfort of a breeze and the sound a stream, with modernity you have the comfort of air conditioning and a shower. That modernity offers convenience is clear, but doesn’t an old-fashioned lifestyle offer its own conveniences? You don’t need to sign up for a million services, you don’t need to keep track of bills, if you live in a small town you can make appointments by just talking to your friends, and so on. Safety is an interesting one. Our modern world seems clearly safer in some ways – we don’t expect to have to defend our home against pillaging hordes, women have tools to protect against rapists, we have advance warning of severe weather and the means to escape from it or shelter from it, we have no fear of wild animals eating our children, we can cure serious illnesses and so on. But in antiquity you had no perpetual irrevocable threat of nuclear genocide, no threat of being watched at every moment by invisible dictators, no hackers publicizing your private life, no superpower so reinforced that you couldn’t at least scratch it if the need arose. It seems that the choice is between many small dangers that arise often, or a few large ones that arise infrequently. I believe the mirror-like duality of these costs and benefits can be clearly seen in the remaining aspects. So what is the resolution to this single contradiction, putting aside the many others I have yet to even mention?

Contradictions + Time = Consistency

I believe a hope for a solution lies in the thought I touched on earlier – the idea that these so-called contradictions are not truly contradictory, but are rather just different desires at different times. One morning I may want to sleep in, another morning I may want to get right out of bed. Only an idiot would characterize that as contradictory behavior. What would truly be contradictory is if I wanted to sleep in, and I wanted to get right out of bed, both in the same morning. Indeed, this is an intrinsically bona fide contradiction that can in actuality occur. So is the modernity-antiquity contradiction a real intrinsic contradiction? Or is it just two separate desires at two separate times? We can experiment with this by imagining for instance, that you had two different places of living, one the picture of modernity, the other the picture of antiquity, and that you could seamlessly move from one lifestyle to another and back again, with no restrictions whatsoever. Would this resolve our “contradictory” desires? If so, they are not contradictory after all. But if on the other hand, you would still find that in the midst of the modernity you felt a craving for antiquity, and vice versa – we would have to accept that you maintain two truly contradictory desires. This is useful information, because this can tell us whether we ought to try burning one of the desires to allow the other to live uninhibited, or if we don’t need to alter our desires at all, but merely our actions or situation. Personally, I have no doubt that this alternating sort of life setup would be an improvement to my current life. But I also suspect that many of the problems of modernity in particular would pervade in both the modern situation and the antiquity situation. For example, I would still need to worry about paying my bills and other such responsibilities in the antiquity “mode”. That is, even if I take my hypothetical scenario and face value, and suppose that magically the modern world completely vanishes, as if I was leaping between two different universes which overlapped only in me, I would still have the mental awareness of the ongoing situation, left “on pause” as it were, in the other universe. But the problems of the antiquity mode would also pervade into the modern. Perhaps the roof needs regular maintenance, the chimney needs sweeping, etc. I may not be able to safely leave an antiquated dwelling on its own for months at a time without it falling into disrepair, and thus it would haunt me. But maybe these ambient responsibilities would be just that - a slight negative, outweighed by the diversity and flexibility of experience. This conclusion seems reasonable enough, at least for the time being. To be reductionist, I could say that the solution to all my problems is a pied-à-terre.

What remains are the feelings of punk movements, and the place of that seems substantially more clear at this point. I do find some interesting irony in the unification of punk ideology with bourgeoisie (or perhaps more accurately aristrocatic) lifestyles, but as I have already seen, many solutions lie within contradictions. I will explore this topic further in my next post.