Patrick Phillips examine the motivation of those that play and pray for profit.

Each year, thousands of books are published that demonstrate how profiteers make profits but never why. My forthcoming book, Ways of Expressing, aims to answer the questions: why are profiteers so insistent on the making of a profit, and what alternative economic-exchange is available to us now? Below are some extracts from it:

Today’s ruling-expression is that of the making of a profit. This expression is not our own, but that of Profiteers. Enclosure of our common land made such an expression reality. It was an act of re-capitalizing existing landownership. Before the enclosure movement, many landowners were already making a profit. But why the need to make even more of a profit? The need to feel eternal in sensation is essential to our existence. Enclosure reorganised Time and Travel; all headed in the direction of the making of a profit. Hence today’s global tyranny in their quest for eternal profit to feel eternal in pleasure. This is why Profitism creates eternal waste, because of a Profiteer’s calculated economic exchange. If the making of a profit was eternal in sensation, then Profiteer’s would only need to make a profit once. Because it is not how many times we exchange that is important but the way in which we exchange. What they make in a second takes you a month. What they make in an hour takes you a decade. What they make in a day will take you beyond your own life time.

Profiteers edify their own illusionary unity with nature, thus, exploiting all natural resources between us and nature. Technological progress has now enabled Profiteers to make a profit invisible, and in consequence, their exploitation of us too. Automation and AI are enabling Profiteers to make a profit even faster: in less than a second. Hence an uninterrupted economic-exchange; again, so that Profiteers can feel eternal in sensation.

The relationship between nature and society is no longer considered to be in continuity. Unity between the two is being rendered obsolete. Profitism today is portrayed as our final end – in that there is no more progress to be had – and no more expressions to be lived out. Profitism is now not the only way, but the way. Each day, we are forced to live out and believe in this exploitative quest for eternal profit. The only time available to us now is the making of a profit.

In our so-called ‘modern’ society our relationship with nature has been completely segregated. We no longer freely live out our dreams awake, nor intrinsically consider our essential daily relationship with nature. How close are we in our daily experiences to being in unity with nature? Never before have we been so removed and disconnected from nature. Our situation today is like no other situation in human history. We have arrived at the modern world without the modern world.

The way we are forced to live today is an ontological crisis (which is getting worse) – because to live a transient existence is to live with the constant threat of our existence. Our fight today is for the ontological right for everyone to exist. This is the urgency of this book: to understand why Profiteers are so insistent on the making of a profit, without ethical consideration. We must begin not only a new way of expressing, but, a new way of becoming.

Profiteers are not hoarders. Today we see hoarding as a mental illness but rarely do we question enough a Profiteer’s quest for eternal profit. We could compare a hoarder with a Profiteer, but a hoarder tries to preserve the eternal waste that surrounds them daily.

In a new expression – without a ruling expression – class would no longer exist. A way of expressing is a way of being, and therefore, living. We need to establish a universal way of expressing – which includes the expression of every human being – in all our dreams awake.

Patrick Phillips is an artist, thinker, writer and dreamer (https://patrickphillips.blog/). He lives and works in a mountain village in Scotland. His photo memoir, The Lawyer’s Dream, about a lawyer who started his own circus will be published in 2019.