"Loneliness and atomization... Caused by capitalism, the rapacious drive for profit, individualism and so on. Try a simpler explanation: we don’t like each other all that much, nor do we like ourselves."
Dialectic at work here; move to a place like where I live, where basic communal solidarity still exists to some extent and late-stage capitalism isn't the only game in town, and you find that folk don't dislike each other all that much. Some of them even like themselves, though corporations are working hard to stamp that shit out ASAP.
Yes! The difference between small towns and big cities is enormous.
Big cities are full of ambient hostilities.
I moved from a metropolitan area of three million people to a town with 70,000 people. That’s small enough so that you can’t go around being an undiluted asshole; there’s only 1-2 degrees of separation between everyone in town.
Before moving, I thought it would be stifling, like being buried alive. I expected to die from lack of “culture.”
The warmth, openness, and ease of living in a smaller place more than makes up for it.
I do travel when I can, to big cities, to look at art. The United States has some of the best art museums in the world, and you could spend a lifetime in the Rust Belt admiring the hoards the great industrialists and robber barons bequeathed to Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, etc.
I'm glad to hear that's true, Claudine, and that community and culture can still exist in the US. It's heartening that warmth and openness are thriving somewhere over there.
Though in my tedious politicized way, I was referring in my comment to those pockets of the Western world where late-stage neoliberal capitalism hasn't fully taken hold. Where I live is still small-s "socialist" and the sense of communal values is quite strong, even though it's quite a big city.
I agree with you that communal solidarity hasn't been totally obliterated, especially in smaller scale settings. Cities of 50-200 thousand people are likely to be better for cohesion, among other things.
What I'm getting at, in an especially cranky way, isn't so much a factual matter, but rather the increasingly dull, repetitious and voluminous pseudo sophisticated sociological explanations for certain trends and behaviors. I'd rather think about some of our deeper, dare I say more essential failings as flawed creatures, individuals who consistently lie to others and ourselves, and not long windedly ascribe every current observable pattern to a buzzy concept
Agree completely, and I'm completely in favour of avoiding buzzwords and trendy lifestyle-concepts for real social phenomena.
I just would emphasise that the alienation that follows from the late-capitalist neoliberal fragmentation of communities into discrete individual pie-eating units, and the basic self/other loathing experience are a classic dialectic dynamic, or even a positive feedback loop.
The more I am an individual pie-consumer, the less I want Charlie Not-Me to have any of 'my pie'; the more I loathe Charlie Not-Me, the greater my individual hunger for my shrink-wrapped Pie-For-One. So it goes, as Vonnegut wrote in Breakfast of Champions.
In the informational age everyone is a expert on the problems that be.
Yes, there's that addiction to analysis and more analysis. Another form of escapism, to feel comfortable in a supposed understanding of reality. And I'm not free from that, I admit.
The best way to tell what the hell is wrong is through the creative act. Art. With a poetic expression. A subversive art in that case, otherwise it is, again, escapism. Self-indulgent bullshit for an equally self-indulgent vain public. A pastiche of Beauty.
It is what even Marx did in some of his writings, including his brilliant Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Right. It is also the Situationists later worked on, its zenith being all the witty grafittis on the streets of Paris. Unfortunately the revolution failed. And of course it is a long tradition, those are just two small examples of the whole thing.
It will not bring a change, but it will be transmitted for sure. The only way ever to communicate succinctly.
(The french director Philiippe Harel made a movie adaptation of Houellebecq's novel 'Wathever' and there's a scene when the main character reflects on May 68. He just says it all. Movie here: https://vimeo.com/260391237 )
Yet, I charge the situationists with some influence on the overvaluing of experience as part of the postwar spread of narcissism a la Lasch, touting desire and immediacy that only led to more extreme self-commodification.
Really, there's no escape, except maybe through faith. Certainly not more banalysis
That first paragraph is a complex process to tackle.. but I will refrain to.
Going to what matter, yeah, if this faith it entails a certain resilience against this damned world. I'm all for it.
A related sad note:
"It is a terribly painful thing to feel oneself able to see and understand the truth about contemporary man’s situation, the total human crisis in which we must all realize ourselves to be involved, and yet to feel oneself powerless to act in a way which will effectively contribute to the spreading of such understanding as can alone enable man to resist the subhuman forces threatening to destroy him from within and to produce in him that complacent indifference which can make him accept destruction and non-being as his destiny. The evil of the modern world is entirely the result of lack of faith. The kind of faith that is lacking is synonymous with love: this is not the kind of faith that expresses itself in dogma or ideology which are always substitutes for it."
This sentence of yours made me chuckled - "If life is short why are you so slow in getting to it." I agree that the loneliness, depression, narcissism trends have been analysed to death by now. There's just so many different ways to describe how messed up we are and the fact that we have society to assign some blame to.
You mentioned A24 and that instantly brightened up my day. I'm a big fan of the studio too. So many masterpieces produced in such a short span of time. I have enjoyed their work with bolder narratives like Everything Everywhere All At Once, Midsommar, The Whale, Beef, Past Lives - unfolding human trauma stories in the most creative ways.
But you're right, I think that we like each other less. Whether it's from some of us having less tolerance, or that people are becoming more of an asshole. I mean, there's actually a book called "The Asshole Survival Guide" that came out in 2017 that teaches you how to deal with the ones in power. Assholes in power... I think that's the problem right there.
"Loneliness and atomization... Caused by capitalism, the rapacious drive for profit, individualism and so on. Try a simpler explanation: we don’t like each other all that much, nor do we like ourselves."
Dialectic at work here; move to a place like where I live, where basic communal solidarity still exists to some extent and late-stage capitalism isn't the only game in town, and you find that folk don't dislike each other all that much. Some of them even like themselves, though corporations are working hard to stamp that shit out ASAP.
Yes! The difference between small towns and big cities is enormous.
Big cities are full of ambient hostilities.
I moved from a metropolitan area of three million people to a town with 70,000 people. That’s small enough so that you can’t go around being an undiluted asshole; there’s only 1-2 degrees of separation between everyone in town.
Before moving, I thought it would be stifling, like being buried alive. I expected to die from lack of “culture.”
The warmth, openness, and ease of living in a smaller place more than makes up for it.
I do travel when I can, to big cities, to look at art. The United States has some of the best art museums in the world, and you could spend a lifetime in the Rust Belt admiring the hoards the great industrialists and robber barons bequeathed to Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, etc.
I'm glad to hear that's true, Claudine, and that community and culture can still exist in the US. It's heartening that warmth and openness are thriving somewhere over there.
Though in my tedious politicized way, I was referring in my comment to those pockets of the Western world where late-stage neoliberal capitalism hasn't fully taken hold. Where I live is still small-s "socialist" and the sense of communal values is quite strong, even though it's quite a big city.
Thanks for your insight!
I agree with you that communal solidarity hasn't been totally obliterated, especially in smaller scale settings. Cities of 50-200 thousand people are likely to be better for cohesion, among other things.
What I'm getting at, in an especially cranky way, isn't so much a factual matter, but rather the increasingly dull, repetitious and voluminous pseudo sophisticated sociological explanations for certain trends and behaviors. I'd rather think about some of our deeper, dare I say more essential failings as flawed creatures, individuals who consistently lie to others and ourselves, and not long windedly ascribe every current observable pattern to a buzzy concept
Agree completely, and I'm completely in favour of avoiding buzzwords and trendy lifestyle-concepts for real social phenomena.
I just would emphasise that the alienation that follows from the late-capitalist neoliberal fragmentation of communities into discrete individual pie-eating units, and the basic self/other loathing experience are a classic dialectic dynamic, or even a positive feedback loop.
The more I am an individual pie-consumer, the less I want Charlie Not-Me to have any of 'my pie'; the more I loathe Charlie Not-Me, the greater my individual hunger for my shrink-wrapped Pie-For-One. So it goes, as Vonnegut wrote in Breakfast of Champions.
Hmmm, who's hungry?
In the informational age everyone is a expert on the problems that be.
Yes, there's that addiction to analysis and more analysis. Another form of escapism, to feel comfortable in a supposed understanding of reality. And I'm not free from that, I admit.
The best way to tell what the hell is wrong is through the creative act. Art. With a poetic expression. A subversive art in that case, otherwise it is, again, escapism. Self-indulgent bullshit for an equally self-indulgent vain public. A pastiche of Beauty.
It is what even Marx did in some of his writings, including his brilliant Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Right. It is also the Situationists later worked on, its zenith being all the witty grafittis on the streets of Paris. Unfortunately the revolution failed. And of course it is a long tradition, those are just two small examples of the whole thing.
It will not bring a change, but it will be transmitted for sure. The only way ever to communicate succinctly.
(The french director Philiippe Harel made a movie adaptation of Houellebecq's novel 'Wathever' and there's a scene when the main character reflects on May 68. He just says it all. Movie here: https://vimeo.com/260391237 )
Yet, I charge the situationists with some influence on the overvaluing of experience as part of the postwar spread of narcissism a la Lasch, touting desire and immediacy that only led to more extreme self-commodification.
Really, there's no escape, except maybe through faith. Certainly not more banalysis
That first paragraph is a complex process to tackle.. but I will refrain to.
Going to what matter, yeah, if this faith it entails a certain resilience against this damned world. I'm all for it.
A related sad note:
"It is a terribly painful thing to feel oneself able to see and understand the truth about contemporary man’s situation, the total human crisis in which we must all realize ourselves to be involved, and yet to feel oneself powerless to act in a way which will effectively contribute to the spreading of such understanding as can alone enable man to resist the subhuman forces threatening to destroy him from within and to produce in him that complacent indifference which can make him accept destruction and non-being as his destiny. The evil of the modern world is entirely the result of lack of faith. The kind of faith that is lacking is synonymous with love: this is not the kind of faith that expresses itself in dogma or ideology which are always substitutes for it."
From a notebook in the David Gascoyne Collection
Where are these places?
In my case, Barcelona. An island of culture and sanity in a screwed world.
This sentence of yours made me chuckled - "If life is short why are you so slow in getting to it." I agree that the loneliness, depression, narcissism trends have been analysed to death by now. There's just so many different ways to describe how messed up we are and the fact that we have society to assign some blame to.
You mentioned A24 and that instantly brightened up my day. I'm a big fan of the studio too. So many masterpieces produced in such a short span of time. I have enjoyed their work with bolder narratives like Everything Everywhere All At Once, Midsommar, The Whale, Beef, Past Lives - unfolding human trauma stories in the most creative ways.
But you're right, I think that we like each other less. Whether it's from some of us having less tolerance, or that people are becoming more of an asshole. I mean, there's actually a book called "The Asshole Survival Guide" that came out in 2017 that teaches you how to deal with the ones in power. Assholes in power... I think that's the problem right there.