Getting back to this whole metaphor of the body’s arousal system and energy consumption… this makes me think about “consumerism.” The term “consumerist culture” is usually used in a derogatory way. But I’ve never heard anybody talk about the flipside of consumerism: creativity. In order to fuel an immense culture of consumption, don’t we logically require an extremely powerful creative force as well? We must.
Or, you could invert that, and say that the reason we have a consumerist culture at all, is because we possess an inordinately powerful creative drive. So that would place consumerism as a necessary consequence, a sort of natural check to keep unbridled creative energy under control. Creative energy would be literally “consumed”. Which is interesting, because I’ve never heard anybody suggest that consumerism performed either a necessary or positive function in society at all.
I’m also curious about practical implications of this theory of how culture works. Namely, what percentage of people in a culture function as entropic consumers, and what percentage function more according to principles of creative/quiescent/negentropic. I would personally wager that the creative number is just a small small fraction.
It makes me think a bit about the Biblical story of Lot and the cities of Sodom & Gammorah. God and Abraham are discussing the wickedness of those cities, and Abraham manages to convince God to spare the cities from annihilation if he can find 50 “righteous men” who dwell there. Through more haggling, Abraham manages to spare it if he find just ten righteous men living in the city. In the end, the angels sent by God cannot even find that many “righteous men”. All they can find is Lot, and they help him flee the city, which is then devoured in flames.
Besides the classical interpretation of this story as being about homosexuality and the wages of sin, it’d be interesting to look at it from this idea of consumption. Maybe the problem in these cities was that there were too many people who were functioning in the arousal/consumerist end of the spectrum (the word “arousal” here makes sense too, since the city was enveloped in sex and “perversion”), and not enough people to act as quiescent/creative anchors. The story suggests that even a small amount, 50 or even 10 quiescents in a city would be enough to keep the balance in check. But since they don’t exist, the system - the city - ends up literally consuming itself in flames, and running down to entropy.
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