"Her şeye rasyonel yaklaşmaya çalışırsan katılaşırsın. Duyguların seline kapılıp kürek çekersen akıntıya kapılıp gidersin... Yaşaması pek de hoş bir yer değil, şu bizim dünyamız."
“Approach everything rationally, and you become harsh. Pole along in the stream of emotions, and you will be swept away by the current… It is not a very agreeable place to live, this world of ours.”
MY CURRENT WEIGHT IS SIXTY POUNDS. I AM A BIG BOY.
The cause of our current social crises, he would have said, is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue. Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to
work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is...emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty. That, today, is where it is at, and will continue to be at for a long time to come.
those who hold social
power have a natural tendency to see the current situation as
universal since it benefits them.
THE CLASS PEACE BETWEEN Western overclasses and Western working classes was never more than a temporary armistice. Economic neoliberals like Fried-rich Hayek and Milton Friedman gathered in annual retreats in Mont-Pèlerin in Switzerland to dream of the overthrow of the new regime and the establishment of a global free market utopia. Marginalized by postwar “middlebrow” culture, with its deference to traditional and religious working-class sensibilities, cultural liberals found their own redoubts—the bohemias of the Left Bank of the Seine and San Francisco and Greenwich Village and countless college campuses with enrollments swelled by veterans and their children.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, thanks to what the social critic Christopher Lasch called “the revolt of the elites,” democratic pluralism in the Atlantic democracies had been overthrown and replaced by the current regime of technocratic neoliberalism—the new orthodoxy of the credentialed managerial overclass whose members simultaneously dominate the governments, corporate suites, universities, foundations, and media of the Western world. Neoliberalism is a synthesis of the free market economic liberalism of the libertarian right and the cultural liberalism of the bohemian/ academic left. Its economic model, based on global tax, regulatory, and labor arbitrage, weakens both democratic nation-states and national working-class majorities. Its preferred model of government is apolitical, anti-majoritarian, elitist, and technocratic.
