Philosophize This!

Mark Fisher compares how we are as a society to the character named Leonard in the movie Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan back in the year 2000.

We are living in a state of cultural amnesia to Mark Fisher, where we can't remember our past, which then makes it impossible to accurately diagnose the present, and even more difficult to be able to imagine a different social future that may be better off for people.

Mark Fisher has a famous quote. He says that to live in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture delivered to you through 21st century technology.

It is to have the ideas and the art of the 20th century shown to you in 4k or streamed to you with high-speed internet.

And as he said, Capitalist Realism is impossible to define in a single sentence.

It's easier for me to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.

It's a cultural logic that's accepted among people. Mark Fisher calls it at one point a quote, psychic infrastructure. It's a set of common attitudes that people have that clouds their ability to see the world accurately.

Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.

socialized losses and privatized gains

That's on you, right? You have to work harder. You have to change your life if you want to make that happen.

Michel Foucault writes a book released in 1975 called Discipline and Punish.

And in it he reintroduces Bentham's idea of the Panopticon and finally gives credit to just how influential this design for a prison has become over the years.

The prisoners themselves become active supportive participants in the very system that suppresses them.

We covered his book Manufacturing Consent on this podcast before and for whatever it's worth there are few philosophers, if any, who are alive today that will be remembered as being as prolific, as influential as he's been.

Manufacturing Consent, with many other references to Chomsky's later work entitled Media Control.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

make no mistake, the word media is just another word for company.

Journalists are not normally kept under control through top-down intervention, but by journalists' internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution's policy

I'm not saying that you think you're self-censoring. I'm sure you believe every word that you're saying. What I'm saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting.

kill out of joy

For the record, it is The Varieties of Religious Experience 1902.

Now think about the fact that both of these different ways of orienting yourself with reality imply the possibility of action.

We can see how great an antagonism may naturally arise between the healthy minded way of viewing life and the way that takes all this experience of evil as something essential.

To this latter way, the morbid minded way, as we might call it, healthy mindedness, pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow to the healthy minded way.

On the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased with their grubbing and rat holes instead of living in the light, with their manufacturer fears and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery.

we must therefore from the experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi godless creeds religions. And accordingly, when in our definition of religion, we speak of the individual's relation to what he considers the divine. We must interpret the term divine very broadly as denoting any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

In other words and this is a massive through line in Foucault's fifth book in 1966 titled The Order of Things and Archaeology of the Sciences.

There's a similar sort of thing in Foucault's book titled Birth of the Clinic when it comes to the way we treat patients and hospitals.

Tractatus

Tractatus

Tractatus

Like Marcuse himself points out in *Eros and Civilization*, technology is often an instrument for liberation.

Remember it's technological breakthroughs like birth control that even allow for the possibility of us reassessing cultural norms and carrying out the sexual liberation movement.

Herbert Marcuse, who we talked about on another episode of this series, writes what he considers to be the most important work of his life in response to Freud, titled Eros and Civilization.

What I want to do is talk about where Marcuse thinks Freud is coming from with his argument.

Not only that, but is all repression just sort of garden-variety repression, no distinction to be made when it comes to the severity of it?

Marcuse would say that we have a moral obligation to constantly scrutinize these cultural norms or else we run the risk of living in a much more repressive society than we need to be.

when Seneca writes his work On the Shortness of Life, famous stoic as we know,

He has a book called On the Shortness of Life, where it's all about the common human misconception that life is too short, where Seneca says that it's not that we weren't given enough time to live, it's that we waste so much of it.

I've been rereading Boethius this week.

the charge of Cyprianus is false, but if Albinus did that, so also have I, and the whole senate with one accord done it. It is false, my lord king,

everything is known not according to itself but according to the capacity of the knower

if I have fully diagnosed the cause and nature of your condition, you are wasting away and pining and longing for your former good fortune. It is the loss of this which, as your imagination works upon you, has so corrupted your mind. I know the many disguises of that monster, fortune, and the extent to which she seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with the unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion.

balance out the good things and the bad that have happened in your life, and you will have to acknowledge that you are still way ahead. You are unhappy because you have lost those things in which you took pleasure, but you can also take comfort in the likelihood that what is now making you miserable will also pass away.

one's virtue is all that one truly has because it's not imperiled by the vicissitudes of fortune

There is yet a much more important and profound kind of fallacies in the mind of man, which I find not observed or inquired at all, and think good to place here, as that which of all others appertaineth most to rectify judgment. The force whereof is such, as it doth not dazzle or snare the understanding in some particulars, but doth more generally and inwardly infect and corrupt the state thereof. For the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence. Nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture if it be not delivered and reduced. For this purpose let us consider the false appearances that are imposed upon us by the general nature of the mind.

He wrote a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy. It's a fiction novel that's about a dystopian future where society organizes things around a meritocracy.

And it's funny, you can hear that and be like, oh, oh my God, what could possibly be wrong with a society based on merit?

Well, Michael Young saw the problems that Sandell thinks are playing out in the real world all around us.

And then in the year 2034 in the book, there's a violent populist uprising of all the citizens that feel betrayed by the leaders of the society that they're a part of.

his sneezing's flash forth light, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn. It says later in the Bible, smoke went up from his nostrils and devouring fire from his mouth, glowing coals flamed forth from him. It says in Revelation later, and I saw a beast rising out of the sea with 10 horns and seven heads with 10 diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads

I know every single one of you guys has read Lord of the Flies.

Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

I mean, basically replace the entire opening sequence of the Harry Potter books with this section of Plotinus' life. I mean, come on.

Mother died today.