Recession America, the Myth of Gigs, and History: the Quest for the Beatific Cure
Recession America, the Myth of Gyges, and History: the Quest for the Beatific Cure
This paper contributes ideas to our society’s general efforts to get out of its current economic and social malaise. I argue that although a moderate (healthy) level of consumer spending should always be welcome to jumpstart a sputtering economy, this crisis moment also represents an opportunity to positively reconstruct our society by purging from our lifestyles any traces of excessive mass consumption based on credit borrowing, for this recession, as President Obama has often pointed out, also fundamentally represents spiritual crisis, a momentary dent in America’s self-confidence, whose origins we can trace to an ethos of excess long promoted by the corporate technocrats of a consumerist way of life built on personal deficit spending and basically regressive financial speculative schemes. Any good solution to such a crisis must involve restoring the health of our will to power by returning to an even more authentic American way of life whose central features are moral but also emotional and material self-restraint. We find a model of this project of renewal in the story of Gyges, a Greek mythological figure whose will became horribly transfigured by excess but who eventually would recover his spiritual health, Plato tells us, by committing himself to ideals that help him become someone better than himself. That is, we try not to analogize our problematic with that of Plato but to seek a philosophical framework that will help us understand and successfully deal with our present economic and moral predicaments. Gyges’s story is all the more appropriate because solving the social and