Peter RuddFiled under: brave new world | Tags: demoralization, morals, The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel
There is a difference – a big one – between people living alienated in a cold modern world and people living alienated in a cold modern world whose radical systems are actively working to deepen the alienation.
The profound crisis of human identity brought on by living within a lie, a crisis which in turn makes such a life possible, certainly possesses a moral dimension as well; it appears, among other things, as a deep moral crisis in society. A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system …. and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.
-Václav Havel ”The Power of the Powerless“
from Notes from Dystopia blog
Filed under: brave new world | Tags: economy, Guy Debord, market fundamentalism, social life, Society of the Spectacle
Here is the slippery slope states of being brought upon homo economicus – the economic man. From I am to I have to I appear to be. Is there another, more dematerialized reality yet to come?:
The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual “having” must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. At the same time all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it. It is allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not.
-Guy Debord “Society of the Spectacle”
coromandal 