Triangle Common Good

Come join Triangle Common Good in reading Omar El Akkad's One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against.

Winner of the 2025 National Book Award prize for non-fiction.

“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”

One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This is a "breakup letter with the West", serving as a personal reflection on how the West's support of Israel's genocide in Gaza changed El Akkad's views on the West, going from someone that immigrated believing in the project of the Western, liberal "rules-based order", only to slowly find that he no longer believed the West could be trusted to embody the values it claimed to have. In the process, the book also touches on critiques relevant to more than Israel and Gaza. Namely, Akkad also critiques the liberal center, the entreat to support the Democratic Party as the lesser evil, and the hypocrisy of free speech defenders and heterodox intellectuals in their silence during cancellation of authors, students, etc seen as Palestinian supporters.

El Akkad is an Egyptian born journalist who moved to Canada in his teens, later becoming a journalist covering the war in Afghanistan and Middle Eastern politics. His two novels, American War and What Strange Paradise, would later garner a variety of awards.

A Note: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a topic with a politicized and contested history, which has now merged with fault lines in American politics. However, in line with the book's goal of encouraging a moment of reflection that speaks truthfully about the reality of the present, we will limit how much the discussion gets bogged down in conflicting narratives of the centuries of historical background involved in the region.

What exactly is "postmodernism?" Come join Triangle Common Good in beginning to understand this question as we discuss the first chapter and an essay summary of Frederic Jameson's influential Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Stage Capitalism in preparation of studying postmodernism more this year.

Frederic Jameson's Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Stage Capitalism is an influential analysis of what it means to exist in a postmodern culture, what about postmodernism makes it a break from modernity, and why understanding that we do exist in a postmodern culture is necessary for imagining new political futures. The book itself can be an intimidating read due to how much it references a massive amount of art and cultural discourse. For this reason, we will only require you read the attached first chapter and summary essay. You're still encouraged to read the whole book if you like! In particular, the essay provides a readable starting point that will give us some basic understanding as we explore postmodernism more. The concepts raised in this discussion will guide our picks for the rest of the year as we work through the project of understanding our current political moment and how to advocate for something different.

The essay is written by Ira Chernus, a Professor of Religious Studies at UC Boulder. The influence of his religious studies helps him understand why the concept of totality or meta-narratives are so important to understanding part of what postmodernity is responding to in its rejecting of modernism.

Required Readings:

What if the future to worry about is not the future of 1984, but the future of Brave New World?

Come join Triangle Common Good in reading Neil Postman's seminal Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. This will be part of continuing our exploration of what it means to exist in a postmodern culture by exploring how television changed our experience of culture and reality.

Normally, we provide a summary of the book and author. For the case of this book, Postman's own quote provides a compelling summary:

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

Supplemental Resources:

Come join Triangle Common Good in reading David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. We will connect this theory of unmeaningful work to our ongoing discussion on what it feels like to live in our current society.

David Graeber was an anthropologist who gained the reputation as the "anarchist professor". His career began with studying how societies decide what to value. His book Debt: The First 5000 Years, which argued that the invention of debt - rather than trade - birthed the modern capitalist economy, marked his turn to a focus on historical anthropology. He would go on to publish The Utopia of Rules, and before his death, The Dawn of Everything. All of which would sell well and receive positive critical appraisal. His advocacy work included participating with Occupy Wall Street, coining the phrase "We are the 99%".

Bullshit Jobs is a book-length expansion of a viral article he wrote for a niche radical magazine called Strike!. The article would end up netting over a million views for the small site, resulting in a book deal. In the book, Graeber expands on the five types of bullshit jobs he sees in the world, tying their existence to society transitioning to work that was based on paying someone for owning their time, rather than the tangible results of their work. This kind of alienation from the meaning of work also includes a switch to jobs where your role is to enforce managerial rules or process, encouraging in individuals a kind of passive, submissive mindset and identification with the values of the managerial class.