The demand to be authentic is so commonplace that it has lost its meaning. ‘Today, there is little premium placed on being authentic,’ writes the American philosopher Gordon Marino in his moving meditation The Existentialist’s Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age (2018). The increasing prevalence of social media constructions of ourselves, … Continue reading Performative Authenticity: Mass Society in Real Time
Category: Politics and Society
When the detained people who stormed the Capitol are prosecuted, my guess is the charges will have something to do with sedition, destroying property, or threatening lives. Democracy will be defended, but it is this terrorism that needs to be tried.
The crux of the problem of schooling outside the home is that it subjects children to each other’s arbitrary rule, instilling lifelong habits of submission to prevailing opinion.
There is a persistent feeling that self-isolating at home is like being herded into a ghetto; [We] had to be prepared for domination before efficient domination could occur.
"...depression and addiction are related phenomena, and ... they are symptoms of a more general malaise of which the world-ending consequences may be of our own doing."
I thought social media loved me for who I was, with its catered advertising and photo- and video-sharing capabilities; but really, it only loved me for the attention I gave to it.
Trumpism, Prophets of Deceit suggests, is the inevitable outcome of a social, economic, and political order that generates human needs that it cannot satisfy.
"...if mass society is experienced as a force that wears us down as individuals, then our belonging to community should build us up..."
"the seeming destruction of context is the modus operandi of a more inclusive background which could provide both meaning and beauty to our lives."
