Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

What fresh, exciting clarity about America’s economy and our own self is in “Faustus, Profit, & Our Lives”! This issue of TRO is eye-opening. It will educate you about the fact that there’s a fight in every person between the desire to respect the world and the desire to have contempt—and what this fight has to do with economics today. And—there is a thrilling showing of what we can learn for our own lives from Christopher Marlowe’s great drama The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. This TRO is very much about power, and the kind of power that we should go after, that will have us respect ourselves.

You’ll love reading “Faustus, Profit, & Our Lives,” the most recent issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing the magnificent lecture How Effective Are We?, given by Eli Siegel in his class of July 24, 1970. It is one of his many talks under the heading Goodbye Profit System, a series begun that year. Mr. Siegel was describing then something that people today need to know if we’re to understand what we’re in the midst of.

Mr. Siegel showed that an economy based on the famous profit motive had failed. The profit motive—in keeping with its name—is the seeing of other humans in terms of how one can financially aggrandize oneself through them. It is the having, as one’s motive with people, to use them to get a lot of money. In 1970, Mr. Siegel saw, people were increasingly disgusted that jobs and buying and selling had such an ugly basis. They felt increasingly that they were being rooked.

That feeling has become clearer and more intense over the years. Americans, struggling to get along financially, know that a huge percentage of their nation’s wealth is held by a small number of individuals—and they don’t look upon this fact with pleasure….Read more