Triangle Common Good

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 a reputation as the "anarchist professor". He began his career 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 a turn to a focus on historical anthropology. He would later go on to publish The Utopia of Rules and The Dawn of Everything. Botch of which would sell well and receive positive critical appraisal. Meanwhile, 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 to expand on the article's premise. 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.

Come join Triangle Common Good in reading Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power from Byung-Chul Han. This is a short work of 80 pages.

Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean born philosopher whose short, punchy books focus on exploring how the era of big data and smart technology has resulted in a loss of space for narratives, rituals, and contemplation and boredom. In particular, his work Burnout Society would garner him more public attention in recent years.

In Psychopolitics, he argues that self-optimization and a regime of "positivity" are leading to a mental collapse that can be tied to the ways in which data encourages existence in flow states. We will consider this in line with our discussion of postmodernism as encouraging the experience of "kaleidoscopic flows" that don't provide space to stop and contemplate the flow of feelings or imagery.

"It is impossible to subordinate human personhood to the dictates of positivity entirely. Without negativity, life degrades into 'something dead'. Indeed, negativity is what keeps life alive. Pain is constitutive for experience. Life that consists wholly of positive emotions and the sensation of 'flow' is not human at all. The human soul owes its defining tautness and depth precisely to negativity...Now the only pain that is tolerated is pain that can be exploited for the purposes optimization. But the violence of positivity is just as destructive as the violence of negativity. Neoliberal psychopolitics, which the consciousness industry it promotes, is destroying the human soul, which is anything but a machine of positivity...Healing, it turns out, means killing"

You will find below a link to a copy of an approachable reader on his works if you want to explore more or need help understanding his ideas.

Come join Triangle Common Good in reading The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein.

Naomi Klein is an author, activist, and filmmaker who first reached public awareness for her book No Logo, which critiqued modern branding and the power logos hold as symbols today. Most recently, her book Doppelganger received attention for its unique story of the impact of epistemic rabbit holes on changing ideologies by comparing herself to a right-wing parallel she is often confused with.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism looks critically at the history of implementation of neoliberal economic reforms in countries that had recently experienced the shock of war or disaster. This includes looking at the testing of economic policies in Chile after the CIA-backed coup of their democratically elected leader resulted in the installation of dictator Augusto Pinochet. Milton Friedman would serve as an advisor to Pinochet, with several of his students serving as economists on Pinochet's administration, as Pinochet implemented a series of reforms that privatized and deregulated their economy. Pinochet would go on to be responsible for the "disappearances" of thousands of political and social critics.

In her ground-breaking reporting from Iraq, Naomi Klein exposed how the trauma of invasion was being exploited to remake the country in the interest of foreign corporations. She called it "disaster capitalism." Covering Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, and New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment" losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq...