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Christopher Lasch diagnoses the “thinking classes”

“The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life-hence their feeble attempt to compensate by embracing a strenuous regimen of gratuitous exercise. Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality ‘hyperreality,’ as it has been called-as distinguished from the palpable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in the ‘social construction of reality’-the central dogma of postmodernist thought-reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate them selves against risk and contingency-against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life-the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.”

“Upper-middle-class liberals, with their inability to grasp the importance of class differences in shaping attitudes toward life, fail to reckon with the class dimension of their obsession with health and moral uplift. They find it hard to understand why their hygienic conception of life fails to command universal enthusiasm. They have mounted a crusade to sanitize American society: to create a ‘smoke-free environment,’ to censor everything from pornography to ‘hate speech,’ and at the same time, incongruously, to extend the range of personal choice in matters where most people feel the need of solid moral guidelines. When confronted with resistance to these initiatives, they betray the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. Opposition makes humanitarians forget the liberal virtues they claim to uphold. They become petulant, self-righteous, intolerant. In the heat of political controversy, they find it impossible to conceal their contempt for those who stubbornly refuse to see the light-those who ‘just don’t get it,’ in the self satisfied jargon of political rectitude.”

Bonus: Paul Kingsnorth

“This process accelerates under its own steam, as Weil explained, because ‘whoever is uprooted himself uproots others’. The more we are pulled, or pushed, away from our cultures, traditions and places — if we had them in the first place — the more we take that restlessness out with us into the world. If you have ever wondered why it is de rigueur amongst Western cultural elites to demonise roots and glorify movement, to downplay cohesion and talk up diversity, to deny links with the past and strike out instead for a future that never quite arrives, consider this: they are the children of globalised capitalism, and the inheritors of the unsettling of the West, and they have transformed that rootlessness into an ideology.”

Byung-Chul Han on money, violence, mortality and capitalism

“The archaic economy of violence didn’t simply disappear in modern times. The nuclear arms race also conforms to the archaic economy of violence. The potential for destruction is built up like mana to create the impression of more power and invulnerability. At a deep psychological level, the archaic belief persists that the accumulation of the ability to kill will ward off death. More deadly violence is interpreted as less death. The economy of capital also displays a notable similarity to the archaic economy of violence. Instead of blood, it makes money flow forth. There is an essential proximity between blood and money. Capital behaves like modern mana. The more of it you have, the more powerful, invulnerable, and even immortal you consider yourself to be. Even the etymology of the German word for money, Geld, points to the context of sacrifice and cult. Thus it’s presumed that money was initially a medium of exchange with which sacrificial animals could be obtained. If someone had a lot of money, it meant that he could have many sacrificial animals, which could be offered up at any time. The owner also possessed an enormous, predator-like deadly violence. Money or capital is thus an instrument against death.

On a deep psychological level, capitalism actually has much to do with death and fear of death. This is also what gives it its archaic dimension. The hysteria of accumulation and of growth and fear of death are mutually dependent. Capital can also be interpreted as time spent, since others can be paid to work in one’s stead. Endless capital creates the illusion of endless time. The accumulation of capital works against death, against the absolute lack of time. Faced with a limited life span, people accumulate time as capital.”

The public policy phantasmagoria: which way reforming man?

There are two completely incompatible refrains to be heard at the nexus of politics and policy. The first voice warns “we need to go slow, account for ‘legitimate grievances,’ address the needs of the people ‘left behind'” etc. Ad nauseum.

The second voice says something like “we need to change many things fast, everything is changing anyway, the minority who object are shrieking irrelevance, there’s a new paradigm” etc. Ad nauseum.

To some extent these incompatible positions represent a divide in the establishment center of politics. To a lesser extent, the second group wants to see the end of popular democracy and the adoption of more technocratic governance.

The second voice will get more of its way than the first because the first voice has little connection to politics and social life. Almost all the people -most particularly left/liberal academics and commentators- who drone about “legitimate grievances” have no link of any sort to the people legitimately aggrieved.

Some part of the ruling class is behind the first voice but the second voice is a near consensus position at the top. For that reason, second voice reforms will go forward and the grievances at issue will probably only get more legitimate. When does a grievance get so legitimate that it actually matters? That’s a trick question.

TRBOT’s “Meeting in the Middle” – report summary

I’ve summarized this report recommending “missing middle” friendly housing reforms for Ontario. Link: https://t.co/cRO5dBXl8h

-residential neighbourhoods are currently “protected” from “missing middle” development like triplexes or small apartment buildings

-this contributes to a shortage of housing with negative economic and environmental consequences (the high cost of housing impedes the attraction of “talent” for ex.)

-political leadership in the form of “courage” at the provincial level (ie. Doug Ford) is required to push through reforms that will increase density

-TRBOT proposes a “provincial framework” to permit missing middle options “as-of-right”

-missing middle density would allow for greater use of existing infrastructure and provide a wider variety of housing options outside of the typical “single detached” home

-the Ontario govt. should enable “as-of-right permissions” to build “at least four units in a building” in residential areas, reduce development charges for missing middle developments and reform laws governing ownership to allow for more co-ownership and shared ownership

-municipalities should implement a “housing elimination charge” to discourage multi-unit to single-unit building conversions

Germany’s unique romanticism

“Romanticism took different forms in different national contexts but everywhere it was part of modernity. At its center stood the celebration of the self. In France and England, it partook of democratic and egalitarian traditions to a far greater degree than in Germany, where it combated such claims. No one understood this better than Thomas Mann. Commenting on the ‘melancholy history of German Innerlichkeit,’ he said that the ‘romantic counterrevolution against the Enlightenment’ had made decisive contributions to Weimar’s ‘old-new world of revolutionary reaction’ as well as to National Socialism. Speaking of Hitler’s Germany, he wrote that ‘there are not two Germanies, a good and an evil one, but only one, which through the cunning of the devil turned the best to the service of evil.’ National Socialism reconciled Innerlichkeit and modern technology. The reactionary modernists were German ideologists who selected from their own national traditions those elements that made these cultural reconciliations possible.”

The enlightenment and “pleasure”

“The Enlightenment was convinced, as Bayle wrote, that basic to the human temperament was ‘our natural inclination to seek pleasure.’ In reaction to the religious view that in this life and under its veil of tears a virtuous person lived a life of self-denial and privation, Enlightenment writers emphasized enjoyment and happiness, not the least of which was sensual pleasure. How better to ridicule the asceticism and self-denial preached by religion than to mock it in sexual fantasy. So it was that the eighteenth century is the fountain of modern pornography, be it the Marquis de Sade or John Cleland’s Fanny Hill. Montesquieu, Diderot, and even Franklin wrote their share as well. In his Encyclopédie entry on ‘Enjoyment’ (jouissance), Diderot praised sexual pleasure as the most noble of passions. To the ‘perverse man’ who takes offense at this praise ‘I would evoke Nature before him, I would make it speak, and Nature would say to him: why do you blush to hear the word pleasure pronounced, when you do not blush to indulge in its temptations under the cover of night.'”

Commodification, a 19th century case study

“…the emergence of large-scale grain markets in Chicago during the middle of the nineteenth century.

Before 1850, grain was bought and sold in large, open air marketplaces near the waterfront of Chicago. . . . Grain was sent by the sackful from a farm to a merchant, who would haggle face-to-face with buyers in an effort to obtain the best price. The merchant acted as a middleman for the farmer, who retained ownership over his grain and paid the merchant a commission for each sale.

“…the rise of the railroads transformed this mode of exchange and ‘transmute[d] wheat and corn into monetary abstractions.’ Railroads allowed crops to be efficiently transported from outlying farms into Chicago, rapidly increasing the amount of grain that entered the city’s market. When it became clear that bulk grain was more efficiently sold at market, traditional grain sacks were abandoned and farmers pooled their crops into freight cars. But combining grain from different farms raised the question of how to deal with the ownership of the grain that each farmer contributed to a given carload.

A private industry consortium, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), eventually solved the problem through standardization. The CBOT designated three categories of grain and four levels of quality (‘Club,’ ‘No. 1,’ ‘No. 2,’ and ‘Rejected’). Farmers putting grain into a train car re ceived a receipt indicating a quantity of grain and a quality level. The receipt was redeemable for an equal quantity of the same quality grain-not the same grain, but its func tional equivalent.

Once standardized, grain became abstracted into a commodity. The receipts could be bought and sold with out regard to the specific identity of the farmer who originally produced the grain. People with no interest in grain production could make a profit by buying and selling receipts. Famously, the CBOT also facilitated the rise of a vigorous trade in ‘futures,’ speculative contracts betting on the future price of grain.”

the zeitgeist (a first attempt)

What is the “spirit of the age” or “zeitgeist”? (In German zeit means time and geist means ghost). I’m not sure I understand the concept to be completely honest, but the following is based on a longstanding note I’ve kept tracking “whats in the air”.

As I’ve written before, “we live in a ‘psychological age’ meaning everyone is preoccupied with mental health”. Reduction in the stigma around mental health problems is a good thing in itself, but who would deny some odd effects?

Words like trauma, anxiety and dissociation have escaped any bounds of agreed meaning and are used haphazardly. “Therapy” is prescribed for virtually any problem. The more “psychological” things get, the more the actual “terrain” of human life (class, politics, economics, geography) is neglected. Hopefully that last sentence isn’t true.

Diversity, empathy and inclusion are promoted. People themselves are “empaths”, diverse and included or not. If you want a “primary document” testifying to these feel-good notions in combination with the therapeutic trend noted above, watch an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “Instagram Live”.

We live in an age of “distraction”. Viral Tweets and TikToks make light of the extent to which people will avoid thinking “a single thought”. It’s incredible all the media we have at our disposal, is it for that reason?

Capitalism is without challenge worldwide so as striving individuals, humanity is united. Within this global regime there is personal freedom, especially if you’re lucky enough to be mobile. For the unlucky, a “cold face” of persecution and control is daily reality.

Meritocracy is the ideological justification. Accordingly, competition and status have infected everything. It is up to you to succeed, self-help “is now so ubiquitous as to constitute a kind of ambient noise. It is the unofficial language of Instagram”. Do you have a “growth mindset”? “You can change your life, but you can’t change anything else.”

Cultural revenge by losers is the natural reaction to the “clout chase”. “Deplorables”, Jokers and others considered disordered, dysfunctional, disagreeable or inefficient now have their own perverted appeal. Is the phenomenon of political populism, rather than representing a particular class interest or coherent social force, simply a matter of “losers” crying out?

Relatability and authenticity are prized superficially. Quite often this means that the mediocre are put forward, and they satisfy the losers. Losers are just another group to be marketed to after all. Shamelessness is a super power.

“Dystopia” (in Ancient Greek a bad, hard place) is a concept intuitive to everyone and too appealing to many. There is some evidence that things are better than ever, but if we take dystopia to be our accepted “destination”, the corollary is that people are all too ready to acquiesce to cultural narratives of decline. And a culture of pessimism is a very bad sign.

Simone Weil in On the Abolition of All Political Parties

“Everywhere, without exception, all the things that are generally considered ends are in fact, by nature, by essence, and in a most obvious way, mere means. One could cite countless examples of this from every area of life: money, power, the state, national pride, economic production, universities, etc., etc.

Goodness alone is an end. Whatever belongs to the domain of facts pertains to the category of means. Collective thinking, however, cannot rise above the factual realm. It is an animal form of thinking. Its dim perception of goodness merely enables it to mistake this or that means for an absolute good.”
…
“…no finite amount of power will ever be deemed sufficient. The absence of thought creates for the party a permanent state of impotence, which, in turn, is attributed to the insufficient amount of power already obtained. Should the party ever become the absolute ruler of its own country, international contingencies will soon impose new limitations.

Therefore the essential tendency of all political parties is towards totalitarianism, first on the national scale and then on the global scale, And it is precisely because the notion of the public interest which each party invokes is itself a fiction, an empty shell devoid of all reality, that the quest for total power becomes an absolute need. Every reality necessarily implies a limit – but what is utterly devoid of existence cannot possibly encounter any form of limitation. It is for this reason that there is a natural affinity between totalitarianism and mendacity.”
…
“If a man, member of a party, is absolutely deter mined to follow, in all his thinking, nothing but the inner light, to the exclusion of everything else, he can not make known to the party such a resolution. To that extent, he is deceiving the party. He thus finds himself in a state of mendacity; the only reason why he tolerates such a situation is that he needs to join a party in order to play an effective part in public affairs. But then this need is evil, and one must put an end to it by abolishing political parties.

A man who has not taken the decision to remain exclusively faithful to the inner light establishes mendacity at the very centre of his soul. For this, his punishment is inner darkness.”