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1 Prologue The pursuit of certitude and wealth lie at the foundations of the growth of human societies. Societies that care little to know for certain what is true and what is not, or those that have little concern for increasing their holdings —material, monetary, intellectual, geographical, or political—are easily swallowed up by those that do. The accumulation of certitude and of wealth has given us civilization and its discontents. Those at one end of the spectrum who doubt fundamental truths or who forsake the prevailing criteria of wealth in the name of other values are kept in check by the mere fact of being outnumbered and outpowered. The further away individuals are from that extreme and the greater the routine and normalcy of the accumulation, the higher they are ranked in the chain of civility. The number of those who try to find a compromise somewhere in between is in constant flux. In one sense, access to literacy, education, democracy, and private property are crucial to increasing the population of the self-reflective who aim at transforming those pursuits away from the intolerance and greed that always seem to accompany them into something more worthy of a human existence. In another sense, the institutionalization of the means to that end menaces the role of self-reflection. As organizations established to control normalcy grow in influence and expropriate the law to insure their own continuation, the pursuit of certitude and wealth is driven further and further away from the reach of individual conscience. In the name of social stability, institutions intended to serve the greater good take on a life of their own and batten to the point that they can eventually come to work against their founding ideals and yet enjoy the protection of the law. Once that threshold has been crossed, the reflected life becomes more and more powerless to reverse the course of a society. Once the basic need for schools, courts, governmental agencies, hospitals, financial systems , and religious establishments has been taken for granted in any given society, whatever its cultural history, the role of critical thinking is easily redrawn to focus on improvement and reform of those institutions. Warfare between tribes or nations waged in the name of competing ideals remains 2 | Nothingness and Desire under the control of these pillar institutions that compete among themselves but as a bloc are exempt from attack. Strict or loose as the laws governing plurality of opinion or accumulation of property may be, the way back to reflection on the initial drive to pursue certitude and wealth is blocked. Institutions cast a shadow that blocks out the sun of basic questions about how civilization is structured and how those very structures can victimize ever-greater numbers of societies and their citizens while empowering the ever-shrinking minority of those at the helm of the establishment. Free will is diminished to freedom of choice among available options. It ultimately matters little how much those options grow in variety and attractiveness; the institutions that monitor the diminishing are left untouched. The will to turn these simple complaints against the civilizations that generate them is stopped short by the sheer dread of imagining what life would be like without institutional controls. The clamor for “rights” that has expropriated so much time and energy of the modern conscience aims at particular institutions and their managers and all the while is distracted from the question of the right of basic institutions to grow beyond our need for them. For most of the twentieth century, criticism against the expansion of the institutional imperium has sought to ground itself in principles of human morality. The reforms that have taken place in societies across the globe to improve the lives of individuals and minorities are a tribute to the human spirit, both personal and social. And yet by any account they have proved a poor match for the rewards of intolerance and greed that accompany the pursuit of certitude and wealth in the institutional forms these take within the very societies that have pursued the reform. Worse still, energy spent policing the morals of societies that have not made the same improvements is often oblivious of its collaboration in the imperium. At the same time, criticism leveled against the imposition of supposedly universal moral values by one culture on another continues to gather respectability in the academy. Sympathies in the mass media for the arguments are fragmented and in any case tend to be eclipsed...

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