The Economy of Desire

All and everything in the universe is moving. Matter, sub-atomic particles, energy and even ideas are on a 4.5 billion year trajectory, and it’s all happening at once.

And yet, borrowing from Physicist Richard Feynman’s ideas, each “object” has its own “world line,” a trajectory through spacetime that intersects with and separates from other world lines. This is true of every proton as well as every person. The discernible ways in which world lines intersect and diverge from each other is what we call history.

At a fundamental level this is why history interests us: we are products of history ourselves, and value things based upon their histories, be it genealogy that gives us a sense of self-importance or provenance of art that imparts financial gain. Even the history of ideas, as immaterial as ideas are, interests us.

The subject of repeated study is how and why world lines come together and separate. From a physical standpoint, factors like gravity, the curvature of space, black holes, the effects of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, the subatomic weak and strong forces, and time itself affect history but still defy complete understanding. So too the emotional forces of charisma, resonance, attraction, and repulsion affect the trajectory of world lines. It’s no surprise, therefore, that quantum experiments reveal that participation by an observer affects the movement history of subatomic particles. Like a craps player chanting “Daddy needs a new pair of shoes” before throwing a pair of dice, we often act as if our desires will alter outcomes, and they sometimes do.

How does order emerge from chaos? If we could answer this question, we might be able to fully understand the origins of life. Chaos theory posits that underlying the emergent order following the chaos of the Big Bang, the cataclysm that created our present universe of you, me and everything else, is the influence of a “strange attractor.” Could it be desire?

Religion leans in the direction of a Prime Mover, a god or gods that started the ball-of-order rolling. For many, this is enough, a welcome relief from having to otherwise explain our origins. The scientifically inclined use a reductionist approach, such as smashing subatomic particles together at high velocity to document the world lines produced by their collision and try to find out how and why things are as they are.

While on vacation in the Southwest, I collided with an object of desire: a handmade silver watchband adorned with turquoise stones. Each of the stones has its own history, its own world line, as does the silver, which itself began long ago as ore and was mined, smelted, and crafted. So too, the artist who designed and created the watchband, a Navajo descendant of a people living in America for tens of thousands of years. These world lines having intersected, the watchband is now on my wrist, securing my turquoise colored, battery-powered watch. After my passing, all will diverge and continue their own trajectories.

Four and a half billion years is a very long time, and this universe might be one of many, each with its own world line. Time as we know it may not exist outside of any universe and so too history, perhaps just an invention of human thought.

Participating in this miraculous coming together and falling apart brings me happiness, an example of what Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls “the economy of desire.” Just so, just so.