On the Fragility of Civilization
(This is part 2 in the No Time for Utopia series.) Doom has always been a major attraction for some, perhaps even many people. There are whole subgenres of extreme (heavy) metal built on the aesthetics of death, doom, and decay. But “doom” in the form of extreme pessimism about the (near) future is also increasingly common in discussions about climate change and its effects. In Stages of the Anthropocene I tried to look into the more distant future. Whether what I found is an example of “doom” in this sense is debatable – at least I didn’t predict human...
Rent, Debt, and Power
In 2009 Rolling Stone published an article by Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs. Taibbi writes: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” The statement is rather unfair to vampire squids, but aside from that detail the characterization is quite appropriate and, moreover, equally applicable to the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector as a whole. A revised version of this article is part of chapter 15 of A Buddha Land in This World (Punctum Books, 2022). In Killing...
Crisis and Inertia (5) – Derailing a Speeding Train
(This is part 5 in the “Crisis and Inertia” series.) In the first episode in this series I argued that societies and other social “objects” (cultures, beliefs, institutions, ideas, ideologies, and so forth) are as inert as physical objects. Social “objects” resist change – if they are moving in a certain direction, they resist a change in direction. The second notion in the tile of this series is “crisis”. A crisis is an event that changes a social object’s momentum – that is, it’s path, speed, or direction. Crises come in several kinds. A minor crisis produces a (nearly?) immeasurably...
You Are a Zombie
For reasons that are somewhat mysterious to me, zombie movies remain fairly popular. There has been a notable change in the genre, however. A few decades ago, zombie movies were probably best classified as a sub-genre of horror, while nowadays they seem to be a variety of disaster movie – particularly, a variety of end-of-the-world disaster movie. Picking up on this subtle, but telling genre shift, Brad Evans and Henry Giroux write in Disposable Futures, a book on the role of (depictions of) violence in contemporary society, that the zombie figure “speaks to a future in which survival fully colonizes...
A Toy Model of Production Costs and Supply
In Economics as Malignant Make Believe I showed that the derivation of the supply curve in mainstream (neoclassical) economics is nonsense because production costs are nothing like they are assumed to be. This made me wonder, however, what would happen if you’d use a more realistic model of production costs – What would production and supply look like then? This isn’t that hard to model, so I built a simulation model on a free afternoon. In the following, I will first explain the model and after that I will discuss the results of running the model at different settings as...
Crisis and Inertia (4) – Economic, Political, and Cultural Crises
(This is part 4 in the “Crisis and Inertia” series.) While climate change constitutes a major if not terminal crisis for civilization (and possibly even for mankind) and certain technologies may also become existential threats in the wrong hands, there are many other crises and threats that seem to be less severe. All economic, political, and cultural crises appear to fall in this “less severe” category, for example – at least, it doesn’t seem likely that another economic crisis or the gradual collapse of democracy will lead to the end of civilization. Nevertheless, they are crises in the sense adopted...
The Hegemony of Psychopathy (Excerpt)
This is an edited collection of excerpts from my book/pamphlet The Hegemony of Psychopathy that was just published. (It can be purchased in paperback or downloaded for free in PDF format at the publisher’s website.) * * * The Holocaust has received surprisingly little attention from social and political philosophers. This is surprising because the scale and extent of the atrocities involved in the Holocaust should be impossible to ignore. If we humans can do that, then that makes a difference — or should make a difference — for our beliefs about the ideal society, for example. At the very...