On Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

I believe that it was Deleuze who pointed out the parallel - ingenious, really - betwixt Capitalism and Schizophrenia. I had myself intuited this condition (and immediately experienced it) from the moment that I committed myself to my first 'paying job'. Thankfully, I never went to the extreme of counting my own money and 'managing my finances'; I would have surely gone Crazy and never even known.
The human mind is not naturally equipped to perform mathematics. This is the theme of my first novel. Give me an imminent Bank Figure and I will take your word (or number) for it.
Ask me to check your math and I will, if I accept and fall into the Devil's hands, become lost in a forest that only the ignorant judge to be totally penetrable.
Deleuze speaks of schizophrenia as the state of agitation betwixt the Absolute and the Real. Numbers cannot exist outside us Absolutely; what is Real is our Conception of them, and 'our' is a tentative word. To say that they are Absolutely Real, one must say that one has Absolute Certainty of them. But Certainty in Mathematics is impossible because we cannot totally eliminate Error. Between any two steps in a calculation, Error might occcur, and we must be vigilant of the possibility of distortion. So, as Camus said, Lucid Reason notes its limits; between my desire for Certainty (or 'Money') and the Actuality of my Conscious ability, the gap will never be filled. At best I have a guess, which is therefore arbitrary. The corroboration of my fellows can at best lend only Assurance. The business-man plotting the 'future' in private is thus a victim of Caesarean Madness; if he believes his plans to be even Theoretically Certain, he has all ready deluded himself. I have seen victims of this. The Unconscious protests the inflation of the Ego. But how could something so simple as an extended math problem be a challenge to one's competence? Were one a person of Thought, one's mind might be put at rest and one's Soul at Peace. Yet for a Business-Man of Action to be a Person of Action, one must take Camus' leap (Ironically) and presume upon an Absolute as a Goal and therefore a Certainty by which not only to reach this (ultimately and originally Impossible) goal but to even justify (the presumption of) its Existence.

Planning for the future is bunk. I choose this truism: If one is truly going in a new direction, the Future is definitionally Uncertain (a more Shestovian idea), but it can be judged to be better simple because:

A. It is Novel,

and

B. The Mode of Travel is intrinsically rewarding.
'Goals' themselves begin to look, therefore, fundamentally flawed as abstract limits and not justifications for immediate, beloved Actions. Finally, Idealism -- not in opposition to Reality, but in Accord with and Because of it -- triumphs over Practicality, and the Life of Thought, rather than being a mere crutch to the Life of Action, triumphs over it and Becomes it, taking an entirely different course than reckless Action and enterprise that would have employed Thought as a crutch.

dm.A.A.