We cannot do anything about climate change because of the pseudocertainty effect: "what is at issue..are competing claims of expertise and prophecy in human affairs. An expert posseses the truth in a particular domain (in this case climate science). The problem, he believes, is how to transmit the truth to the rest of society. This is a problem of "communications." The prophet (politician for example), for his part, believes that there is no truth independent of the way in which it is transmitted. For him, the objectivity of cognitive mechanisms or of crowd phenomena is no less important than the objectivity of climate science. The falut of the IPCC (Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change) - if in fact it is at fault - lies in its failure to decide between these two attitudes." (The Economy and the Future - JP Dupuy 2014). This sounds very complex, but this short book helps move these circular debates around using logic. Which means hope. .. the goal: "to devise, by means of scientific modeling and philisophical inquiry into the aims and purposes of mankind, an image of the future that is sufficiently catastrophic to be repellent and sufficiently credible to produce behavior that will prevent it from being realized, barring an accident."
As a Canadian who has lived in Europe as well as America, I experienced more sameness than difference. As Saskia Sassen writes, global metropoles of elites all have the same culture really. You can get a craft beer everywhere now. As I write from St. Petersburg, I can say that it too fits this, but, there is a sense of alienation - in a good way - wherein people ..don't even imagine what you are thinking or judge what you are up to .. it's hard to describe - like they do in the West. For example, there are signs everywhere for masks but few wear them, and I do sometimes and sometimes I do not. No one really notices. Vs in the West there is a mask fetish as it stands for one's inner moral position or something. That space - the space we all inhabit most of the time of our own fantasies and stuff we say to ourselves - remains inviolate here. I am not saying anything else about the problems in this country which are legion and I don't want to wade into that here - but on a subjectival level, in the context of 2021, I feel calm here.
Similar story; was tested in Grade 5. Question: Did anyone else in your family have it? My mother and grandfather did. I had a very weird, one might have said traumatic childhood (kidnapped; lived in truck; orphanage; bizarre family) so I can also so vividly remember these painful times. I thus got really into horror (made a feature film; wrote a book) for catharsis. Each detail in my work - from what I wore, the art in the room, the people I met - writing it out helped soothe? maybe is the word, the images. I also did years of therapy. The hardest part for me has been accepting that others cannot do this. I spent the first half of my life getting enraged at how careless everyone is. Further, raised in the 80s in traditional gender roles aka housekeeper/cleaner, I am tyrannized by disorder/mess/everything where it should be. I now realize that needing lists and forgetting each detail of a special event isn't cruel/selfishness. I am ashamed of how cruel I was to partners due to my solipsism. How has this effected your relationships? I can't say I'm grateful but more I respect what it is and how it can be useful and not detrimental to my relationships and all of our struggle to survive.
Lacan/Zizek "a pervert is someone who knows the meanings of your actions better than you do" and that "perversion is on the side of power." (perverts sustain the power of the Big Other) - your friendly neighbourhood analytic philosopher
Yes! I grew up on Donahue and the Geraldo Rivera show and Mory too. Those shows ratings were entirely built upon outrage. Social media is an iteration which allows all of us to join the audience. Tho I do admit for a romantic longing for 90s internet. It was total discovery and horror and obscenity and surprise but zero outrage. It is hard for me to be mad now about anything online now after spending hours on Cult of the Dead Cow and having my art downloaded by thousands of East Germans to jack off to. It's confusing and the lies I tell myself, but those were good times. The solution is not censorship but meaningful engagement with how human subjectivity is actually constructed vs the dissonance between individuated sovereign subject we are told we are and how we need each other to construct an ideological order/a safe polite backdrop we all agree on so we can privately go on about our lives.
Youtube is now an owned Public Commons. In order to communicate we must pay rent to corporations as our commons is privatized. When the internet began it was public commons because no one owned it.
There is no functional Economy and this is due to the policies in place that the outgoing generation supported or, in the least, did not violently protest. So, in that way it is expected. To watch from the cupola of privilege that we in the West resided in, the horrors of the world and think that, eventually that brute Market Logic would not fall upon us was incredibly cruel and naive. It is here now; as soon as you open the dimension of hollowed out and marked for death human - for example the entire Global South - it is only a matter of time before it comes to us. (Fanon; Mbembe)
This is what real estate is for; they are and have been all my life stocks. We are ruled by Market Logic so that everything becomes quantified (Mbembe Necropolitics) including the Public Commons of Human Shelter.
These deadlocks of thought have a resource that is differended (not available to the discussion we are having for ideological reasons) but I will attempt a provocation: Philosophy. Precisely Graham Harmon's Immaterialsm and the analysis of form and the process of Duomining: This preoccupation with objects and forms cuts against the grain of most recent avant-garde theorizing in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Usually objects are either dissolved downward into material components and sub-individual, blob-like masses (“undermining”), or they are dissolved upward into holistic networks of relations, events, and practices (“overmining”), or both of these at once (“duomining”). Form, for its part, has been so marginalized by the repeated waves of materialist theories that it is usually mentioned only in the context of mathematical formalization (for recent examples see Badiou 2006; Meillassoux 2008), precisely the opposite of what object-oriented philosophy means by form: a surplus beyond any access, mathematical or otherwise.(https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315641171... )
The horror memoir book I wrote made me realize that part of the reason I am where I am - mostly content - is because of my stepfather. I sort of recoiled off him and, in that way, while my peers are in mid-life crisis I think folks like us had a early life crisis that can, if we are lucky to build a non-blood family, make the second half of life smooth. Thank you too!
Why do we do nothing about climate change? We cannot. Why this deadlock? We live by Market Logic, which has no bearing on reality but is our symbolic reality because everyone acts as tho it is true, chasing admiration while simultaneously remaining completely blind to the entire process. Market Logic interdicts all human priorities. We need to think more; do less.
Yes. An excellent book on Market Logic is JP Dupuy Economy and the Future: A Question of Faith. It is philosophy but it is, vs Zizek or Lacan, an easy read. It is a very precise, logical argument that to debate here will end polemics.
My relationship with horror, I associate with my childhood asthma. We did not have drug coverage so I did not have inhalers so from 4 I'd be up all night (1970s) watching TV. Horror movies were the only thing that distracted me, filled me with adrenaline, to unspiral my attacks. I was very allergic to cats; my stepfather's coke buddy had two Persian cats. The strangers who took me fomented in me hope for people in a way that I never would have had given my upbringing. Also, my mother was Lacanian child psych major and raised me without a Big Other etc. Told me, when I asked about church weddings on TV soap operas, what is it and she told me that it was just a silly TV thing. I believed this until I was fairly old. Cities - for example Toronto where I lived for 20 years - were hard to make friends in. At the same time, if you have always been urban, rural areas can be hard to parse socially. I really appreciate the non-judgment on horror. Thank you.
I left home at 15; my story is complex, but abusive stepfather is the quick summary. It was the best thing I ever did. He forbade my mother and sister from seeing me and so I have not seen my mother who remains with him. I did meet my sister again, who had moved to England, 5 years ago. She is 9 years younger than me so we did not recognize eachother. She still is in contact with them and suffers anxiety and depression. I did years of therapy and healed via my work ( horror film maker/writer ). I have sisters and parents now that are not blood, but they mean more to me in a way because they are not obligated by social norms to support me. I hope that one day, when my stepfather is dead, I can again see my mother before she is. She is an interesting and brilliant person, but my connection to her is more like an old friend who I sadly fell out with.
It is because the only logic we have left is Market Logic and the only ethical barrier we have left between us and violence is The Economy. The Economy is entirely faith based. And our faith is waning, and among younger generations, is gone. To survive in Market Logic we must act as though we believe we are fully individuated and on our own with bootstraps tugged. But how we actually live is totally, globally interdependent. The pandemic, on top of this, insists on it. This is the source of cognitive dissonance. ( JP Dupuy The Economy and The Future)
I lived in Colombia in '95 right after they legalized cocaine and weed. It was funny, there was all these fake police harassing the Europeans by getting a street kid to place a jar of actual weed (not cannabis) beside them on the beach (this was in Santa Marta) and then showing them their tinfoil (really) badges and demanding to go to a bank machine to get money. It was a past time to watch it. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/07/world/use-of-drugs-is-leg...
I'm GenX and in my youth in Toronto I'd only go to the Fox and The bloor movie theater and they only played old things. I have not been to a theater in years after walking out of 10 movies in a row for so boring/silly.