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ok, but there's a trick in the story: you effectively counsel that people adapt themselves practically to whatever their situation happens to be. if you "live within your means" you constrain your actions so they correspond to the limits symmetrical with a particular social position. that position can be determined by any social arrangement, it doesn't matter which. if you constrain your actions in this way and live within them, you adopt a set of practices---which, repeated, are rituals---and you live within them--you repeat them---so you operate in a pascal-mode: in the wager, the problem is that someone does not believe there is a god. the other voice tells that someone: figure the odds: probability will show you that it's only reasonable to bet there is a god. that someone figures the odds and arrives at this conclusion. but, that someone says, i am so constructed that i cannot believe. well, the other voice says, you have to act like you believe--adopt the rituals, condition the flesh, control the desires--and eventually this will work on your as things work on animals---you'll condition yourself--and once you condition yourself, you'll forget you don't believe.
what comes through in the stories, then, is an argument that what is proper is that one "know one's place" and condition oneself into accepting that place---this is an interpretation of the emphasis you place on "living within your means"----and that those who do not know and stay in their proper place are Problems. they violate the moral code that, somehow, gets imputed to the overall system when the fact of the matter is that this sense of moral code follows from conditions that your perky abstraction imposes on him or herself.
so the argument you present is an argument that capitalism represents a moral order.
i don't buy it.
i think that's a better way of saying what i was trying to say above.
i'm still not sure it's clear because it is early in the morning and i am still drinking that consciousness-trigger we collectively name coffee.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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