From The Utopian, two of the finest minds of the 20th century engaged in a discussion about humanity’s future that is still relevant today.

“Adorno: My innermost feeling is that at the moment everything has shut down, but it could all change at a moment’s notice. My own belief is as follows: this society is not moving towards a welfare state. It is gaining increasing control over its citizens but this control grows in tandem with the growth in its irrationality. And the combination of the two is constitutive. As long as this tension persists, you cannot arrive at the equilibrium that would be needed to put an end to all spontaneity. I cannot imagine a world intensified to the point of insanity without objective oppositional forces being unleashed.

Horkheimer: But I can. Because mankind is destroying itself. The world is mad and will remain so. When it comes down to it, I find it easy to believe that the whole of world history is just a fly caught in the flames.

Adorno: The world is not just mad. It is mad and rational as well.

Horkheimer: The only thing that goes against my pessimism is the fact that we still carry on thinking today. All hope lies in thought. But it is easy to believe that it could all come to an end.”

The Utopian · Towards a New Manifesto.

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The title may be an emo-core band name waiting to happen, but Slavoj Zizek is nailing it once again in this expanded version of his speech at the Occupy Wall Street protest:

The Western Left has come full circle: After abandoning the so-called “class struggle essentialism” for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, gay rights etc., struggles, “capitalism” is now re-emerging as the name of THE problem. So the first lesson to be learned is: Do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not found in the slogan “Main Street, not Wall Street,” but to change the system in which Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions—questions not about what we do not want, but rather about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders do we need? What new institutions, including those of control, should we shape? The 20th century alternatives obviously did not work.

It is thrilling to enjoy the pleasures of the “horizontal organization” of protesting crowds with egalitarian solidarity and open-ended free debates, but as we do so we should bear in mind the words of Gilbert Keith Chesterton: “Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

This holds also for politics in times of uncertainty: The open-ended debates will have to coalesce not only in some new Master-Signifiers, but also in concrete answers to the old question: “What is to be done?”

The Violent Silence of a New Beginning — In These Times.

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I’m going to post something to expand on the themes in this article shortly, but to whet your appetites:

Capitalism would seem to require an optimal balance of happiness and unhappiness amongst its participants, if it is to be sustainable. The need for dissatisfaction is implicitly recognized by Keynesian economics, which sees the capitalist system as threatened by the possibility of individual or collective satisfaction, manifest as a demand shortfall. Capitalism’s gravest problem is then how to maintain governments or consumers in a state of dissatisfied hunger, and how to find ever more credit through which to feed that hunger. The defining difference between the Keynesian era and the neo-liberal era was simply that the former depended on an insatiable, debt-fuelled, ‘unhappy’ state, whereas the latter depended on an insatiable, debt-fuelled, ‘unhappy’ consumer. The question of who or what is to inject such an appetite in future has no apparent answer as yet.

Max Weber, and more recently Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism, addressed a parallel problem, but via moral and cultural sociology. To what extent and on what basis must capitalism serve our human needs and desires, if we are to remain committed to it? Immaterial needs and desires play a key role, as these are less easily exhaustible than material ones. As Boltanski and Chiapello argue:

Whereas capitalism, by its very nature, is an insatiable process, people are satiable, so that they require justifications for getting involved in an insatiable process. It follows that capitalism cannot make do with offering nothing more specific than its inherent insatiability.

The culture of capitalism must keep individuals sufficiently dissatisfied that they continue to seek satisfaction from it, but not so dissatisfied that they reject or resist it outright. Boltanski and Chiapello’s central argument is that capitalism has drawn on varieties of anti-capitalist critique in generating the ‘spirit’ which induces a sufficient mass of the population to remain at this finely tuned level of engagement. At key moments of crisis, capitalist accumulation has alternately drawn on those criticizing its unfairness (the ‘social critique’) and those criticizing its dullness (the ‘artistic critique’) in order to find ‘routes to its own survival’. [12] In promising to answer these critics, it pledges to treat the moral and human injuries that it itself has enacted, thereby renewing its legitimacy.

New Left Review – William Davies: The Political Economy of Unhappiness.

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Most people view creativity as an asset — until they come across a creative idea. That’s because creativity not only reveals new perspectives; it promotes a sense of uncertainty.

The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don’t even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.

“How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?” said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people.

The studies’ findings include:

• Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
• People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical — tried and true.
• Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.
• Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea.

More at Science Daily

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I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks — or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?

We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that’s even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings Video to get the empty houses off their books.

Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff — it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

Are jobs obsolete? – CNN.com.

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Make no mistake about it, without plentiful, cheap, and easy to access oil, the United States of America would descend into chaos and collapse. The fantasies painted by “green” energy dreamers only serve to divert the attention of the non critical thinking masses from the fact our sprawling suburban hyper technological society would come to a grinding halt in a matter of days without the 18 to 19 million barrels per day needed to run this ridiculous reality show. Delusional Americans think the steaks, hot dogs and pomegranates in their grocery stores magically appear on the shelves, the thirty electronic gadgets that rule their lives are created out of thin air by elves and the gasoline they pump into their mammoth SUVs is their God given right. The situation was already critical in 2005 when the Hirsch Report concluded:

“The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.”

In the six years since this report there has been unprecedented oil price volatility as the world has reached the undulating plateau of peak cheap oil. The viable mitigation options on the demand and supply side were not pursued. The head in the sand hope for the best option was chosen. The government mandated options, ethanol and solar, have been absolute and utter disasters as billions of taxpayer dollars have been squandered and company after company goes bankrupt. The added benefit has been sky high corn prices, dwindling supplies and revolutions around the world due to soaring food prices. The last time the country went into recession in 2008, the price of oil plunged from $140 a barrel to $30 a barrel in the space of six months. I’d classify that as volatility. We’ve clearly entered a second recession in the last six months. So we should be getting the benefit of collapsing oil prices.

But, a funny thing happened on the way to another oil price collapse. It didn’t happen.

WHERE’S OUR OIL PRICE COLLAPSE? « The Burning Platform.

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What do I mean by ‘better at romance’? Well, there are costs and benefits to romance. Having to buy sexy clothes, going on unpleasant dates, paying for pleasant dates, obsessing over another person’s every utterance for months, crying over break ups, blushing over refusals, and compromising over the layout of the living room are all costs. You can probably think of some benefits. I will say we are better at romance when we are more efficient at it, that is we get more benefits for the costs we incur. A romantically efficient person gets more affection and orgasms for the same input of searching and pining, just as an efficient farmer gets more grain and pigs for the same amount of land and dirt. The big question: are we getting more romantically efficient?

It’s fairly hard to judge the rate of improvement here. Romantic satisfaction is complicated to measure and measuring it too quantitatively is supposedly destructive to it. People tend to be private and deceitful about it. But suppose we were getting efficient at romance as fast as we are getting efficient at, say, animating movies. We would notice, even without detailed records, because the relationship we have now would have been completely unbelievable ten years ago (OK, for some near the start of our adult lives this is still true). Even if romance was improving as fast as say farming, everyone would be able to see a huge improvement since their grandparents’ time, when one had to get up at 5AM to start the foreplay.

Still, perhaps romance is improving more slowly than we can tell with such primitive observation methods. There are some reasons to think it is, and some to think it might be getting worse or at least moving very slowly. Let’s break romance down into a few different parts. First you have to find someone to do it with. Then you have to convince them that they have also found someone. Then you have to actually do whatever it is you wanted to do with them, and both enjoy it, or get whatever else it was you wanted out of it.

Where Are You, Sexularity?.

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The concept of intellectuals in the modern sense gained prominence with the 1898 “Manifesto of the Intellectuals” produced by the Dreyfusards who, inspired by Emile Zola’s open letter of protest to France’s president, condemned both the framing of French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason and the subsequent military cover-up. The Dreyfusards’ stance conveys the image of intellectuals as defenders of justice, confronting power with courage and integrity. But they were hardly seen that way at the time. A minority of the educated classes, the Dreyfusards were bitterly condemned in the mainstream of intellectual life, in particular by prominent figures among “the immortals of the strongly anti-Dreyfusard Académie Française,” Steven Lukes writes. To the novelist, politician, and anti-Dreyfusard leader Maurice Barrès, Dreyfusards were “anarchists of the lecture-platform.” To another of these immortals, Ferdinand Brunetière, the very word “intellectual” signified “one of the most ridiculous eccentricities of our time—I mean the pretension of raising writers, scientists, professors and philologists to the rank of supermen,” who dare to “treat our generals as idiots, our social institutions as absurd and our traditions as unhealthy.”

Who then were the intellectuals? The minority inspired by Zola (who was sentenced to jail for libel, and fled the country)? Or the immortals of the academy? The question resonates through the ages, in one or another form, and today offers a framework for determining the “responsibility of intellectuals.” The phrase is ambiguous: does it refer to intellectuals’ moral responsibility as decent human beings in a position to use their privilege and status to advance the causes of freedom, justice, mercy, peace, and other such sentimental concerns? Or does it refer to the role they are expected to play, serving, not derogating, leadership and established institutions?

Boston Review — Noam Chomsky: The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux.

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Totally Psyched for the Full Rip Nine

A stunning article from Outside Magazine, deftly blending fact and fiction to explain the economic, structural, environmental and human cost of an overdue 9.1-richter earthquake hitting the Pacific Northwest.

By “full-rip nine” Corcoran means a mag­ni­tude-9.0 earthquake, the kind of massive off­shore temblor that triggered the tsunami that killed 28,050 people in Japan on March 11, 2011. Geologists call them megaquakes. Geo­logists also call the Northwest coast of North America—from Vancouver Island down to Northern California—one of the like­­liest next victims.

“When that earthquake hits, it’s going to shake for a long time,” says Corcoran. “Three to five minutes or more. You’re going to feel lucky to survive. Then guess what. You rode out the quake? Congratulations. Now you have 15 minutes to get above 50 feet of ele­vation. Fifteen minutes. You’re elderly and not very mobile? Sorry. Your condition does not change the geologic facts. It’s called a tsu­nami. The water’s coming. It can’t be stopped. Don’t ask Jesus to save you. Be your own Jesus.”

This is the prophecy that Corcoran offers to school groups, Rotary Clubs, town ­councils, and first responders up and down the Ore­gon coast. In Newport, Coos Bay, Seaside, Cannon Beach, Gearhart, Waldport, and Bandon, the people have heard his rap. And how do they respond?

“People are like”—he sticks his fingers in his ears—“Na-na-na-na-na-na-na! Can’t hear you!” He shrugs. “It’s human nature. People don’t like to get bad news.”

More at Outside Magazine

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The Decemberists – Calamity Song

Normally Satan would be turning up the air-conditioning before I posted a Decemberists song on here, but this is different. Michael Schur, who writes Parks and Recreation (which I am reliably informed is as good as Community) and who plays Mose Schrute on The Office is the only person (so far) who has been able to put a scene from David Foster Wallace’s fiction on film (his Office co-star John Krasinski’s take on Brief Interviews With Hideous Men doesn’t count and I don’t need to explain why.)
Here we see the students of the Enfield Tennis Academy play Eschaton, a game of tennis and thermonuclear warfare that starts weird and goes downhill from there. Wallace-dorks as big as me might pick some faults (isn’t Ann Kittenplan, who gets hit on the head with a tennis ball/ICBM, meant to be a hulked-out steroid freak? Which one is Hal Incandenza? Does the book explicitly state that Michael Pemulis’s hat has one of those propeller-thingies?) and you’ll have to mute an annoying song, but it’s worth it to know that you’ll never again see a single frame of any of Wallace’s work on film. Unless somebody makes a wacky fish-out-of-water romantic comedy out of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

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