Frugality

Depiction of Henry VIII in 1542

Frugality |
Wednesday – September 23, 2026

The degradation of the Coinage is actually a rather important but overlooked part of history, read "Gold", and it should come as no surprise to learn that of all the things that we have to contend with here in the material domain, money has undergone the most advanced and adverse transformation, to the point where it has become a concept entirely of the imagination, that is to say below the material surface of the human order, something that now can only be said to belong to the infrahuman order. Well, spending is what most things revolve around today, and a man has to be capable of spending, at least if he is to be considered a "proper man" and all, read "Gender Roles". Of course, frugality is still something that people talk about, because yes a man should be able, capable really, of spending, but he should also not spend beyond his station, or really beyond his means, which is why it would be quite accurate to view the ability to spend as just the new and mutated meaning of ability. Yes, if ability in the past was synonymous with the ordering of the real world, it seems that ability in our times has nothing to do with the real world, and indeed the world that does revolve around spending is for the most part a virtual world, but yes, I will admit that men who are capable of spending are still capable of ordering the real world, but it seems that they are almost never immediately able to order the world, instead they have to anticipate a certain period of delray, a gap between spending and effect in the world, and I suppose too that it is the intention of modern men to close this gap as much as possible, to reduce the delay imposed by transforming action into a kind of sub action. If a man spends money on improving his life or perhaps the life of many people, I suppose that man would be viewed with some suspicion, but if a man can prove that he is capable of improving his life right now and the life of others now, then he is a hero. The spirit of something quite old is still there, but only in the subconscious it would seem, read "Theory of Mind".

    Yes, this is a contradiction, but most things appear to exist in contradiction and conflict these days, at least most things that are considered interesting and even useful. Still the masses benefit, materially, from men that are willing to spend their money within the appropriate limit of anticipation, and so men who can spend but spend with frugality, those are the new heroes, almost. Besides, most people who go onto criticize the system, read "What Is Capitalism", are themselves not really opposed to the system and more to the point most of these people are themselves not even opposed to the material consequence of the system;* really, it would seem that most of these people remain perpetually in a painful state of anticipation, a state that is not only bound to grow and mutate into a contradiction, which these people base their entire worldview on, but a state of debase agitation: if money cannot buy immediate satisfaction, then everyone who is still capable of satisfaction within this state of anticipation, that is to say the men who are capable of perpetual motion forward within each time frame of anticipation must be made to see their past, they must be made aware of their trail, a path that most of them make no effort to hide. No, we are not exactly dealing with humble people, but then again what is the point in being humble, or frugal? Again, the contradiction is painful and obvious: on one hand it would be good to spend but not beyond your means, and it would be good if you could spend on something good, an act of charity, while still not losing sight of yourself, but you should not expect to be held in high regard. Look, I suppose that most people are capable of seeing the hero in the man that is capable in the corporeal sense, the man who is capable of fighting the beast, but when the hero has been reduced to someone who is merely capable of producing a negative transactional flow, it does become unclear, unless of course the good effect that this negative transaction flow manages to have on the world is immediate.

    So, I suppose that this is also an issue of scaling and abstraction, because simply giving someone money will usually do the job, or even buying something that you later give to someone will also usually do the job. But no, if you are capable of creating jobs and ordering the material world with a far greater magnitude of effect, then most people will simply lose sight of you, the spender, mostly because they would struggle to see the good, and yes to some extent because they would struggle to accept their own inability to order the world in the same way, and so there is another painful contradiction to consider: can people who emass vast fortunes really ever act out in the world in a good way, in a way that is not in the order of perpetuating materialism? And so yes, I suppose that someone would have to answer this question, but really the answer to this particular question seems to be of little importance. What we are dealing with here are, as I mentioned above, contradictions and some of them seem quite painful, and if we are to assume that indeed people are motivated by and propelled forward by cognitive dissonance, then yes this would also be the entire basis, in true Marxian fashion, of politics as a discipline, or a subdiscipline really; the fundamental axiom of humanity is contradiction, contradiction and the need to find rest in some kind of inevitable compromise, in some kind of frugality, which then becomes the basis for reason and motivation, ideology and dogma, and indeed as we have seen, each great civilization and each epoch seem to be capable of finding rest, temporary though it must be, in the dogma of frugality. This is not to suggest that there is anything inherently wrong with this sense of history and sense of urgency really, but there is also no reason to believe that the instrument of debasement must always reign supreme: if quality must suffer, read "Qualification", then so be it, at least the final contradiction must become clearer yet: why must everything good suffer in the course of taking a mere limit to zero, read "Transhumanism"?

Reginald Drax (AKA, M. C. Dutt) – September 23, 2026.

Footnote(s)

* In this connection it would be appropriate to consider the material dialectics of Karl Marx, read "My Views on Socialism" and "Sentimentalism".