Peter RuddFiled under: brave new world | Tags: acquisition, Age of Anger, anger, autonomy, competition, egoism, Enlightenment, happiness, individuality, means testing, Pankaj Mishra, progress, rational, Robert Musil, technocracy
We are homo economicus in a post capital malaise – a thick stew unlovingly conceived, with bitter ingredients, forced on us, and permeating everything.
We are naturally human, made to work and think as machines; naturally intuitive, forced into extreme rationality; naturally modest, made to be egotistic; naturally cooperative, made competitive; naturally sharing, made acquisitive; naturally collective, made individualistic; naturally imaginative, made rational; naturally curious, made means tested.
We have the formulations of who we really are – simply the opposite to those devised by the technocrats. We need only to resist them and take on again the mantle of our true natures.
Our current disregard of non-economic motivations is even more surprising when we learn that less than a century ago, the Enlightenment’s “narrow rational programme” for individual happiness had already become “the butt of ridicule and contempt” – as the Austrian modernist writer Robert Musil observed in 1922. Indeed, the pioneering works of sociology and psychology as well as modernist art and literature of the early 20th century were defined in part by their insistence that there is more to human beings than rational egoism, competition and acquisition, more to society than a contract between logically calculating and autonomous individuals, and more to politics than impersonal technocrats devising hyper-rational schemes of progress with the help of polls, surveys, statistics, mathematical models and technology.
Welcome to the Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra
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