Episode 1508
Leaving the Ivy Leage
Aug 30 2022
If you have kids, you love them. But it's not because they give you more money, more energy, more free time, more time with your friends. Quite the opposite. You have to make a sacrifice for your children. It's their neediness. It's the fact that they need something from you that elicits that love. And that's how social eros develops as well. When we start to open up to the need that other people have of us. So when people go out marching, for example, for free Palestine to stop the genocide in Gaza. They're not doing that because they're going to improve their wage packet. This old political consensus that people act on the basis of enlightened self-interest is nonsense. They're not doing it for an easier or more convenient life. They're risking arrest. The people in this country are being locked up. Even grannies for supporting called Palestine Action. So people take risks when they feel moved by that social eros that bond with other people who need something from them and they put themselves at risk. And that to me is a far more promising avenue for socialism and radicalization than ‘let's offer people some housing’, ‘let's offer people wage increases’. You know, that's a good start but there's nowhere near enough.
Richard Seymour returns to This Is Hell! to talk about his new book "Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization”, published by Verso Books. Seymour discusses the ideologies amplifying the contemporary right that is distorting modern politics into a nihilistic disaster nationalism.
We will have new installments of Rotten History and Hangover Cure. We will also be sharing your answers to this week's Question from Hell! from Patreon.
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Posted by Matthew Boedy
It was in ancient times when Sapperstein, a teenage pot-smoker, used to cruise up and down Woodward Avenue in the environs of Detroit. He would listen to classic rock on FM radio. His main concern at the moment in question was, “Is Jethro Tull heavy metal or heavy wood?” This was before the various metals became segregated into genres of their own: death metal, krautrock, nerdcore, etc. In a way, Sapperstein was ahead of his time.
He jolted to a stop, coming to full consciousness of the traffic around him just in time to avoid rear-ending a restored classic Pontiac GTO. He almost dropped his pipe. Unknowingly, he’d accidentally hit the “band” button. The radio was now tuned to an AM station. A male voice emerged, speaking in crisp, insistent salvos of rhetoric. “Feminazis,” the voice said. “Reverse discrimination,” it said. “Tree-huggers,” the voice of the man mocked in his flurry of affected disgust.
What was this disembodied spirit? It was infectious. It didn’t infect Sapperstein, but Sapperstein’s father became obsessed with it. Soon the voice was everywhere, and imitators flourished. The landscape of discourse changed for the worse as regulations were dissolved in the service of capitalism’s desires. This history-making voice went by many names, but we now know him as “Lush Rimjob or something, the drug-addict from Missouri.”
Within half a century, the Rimjob ethos had swept the world, and it was a short journey, from the bloviating bag of fecal matter who sprinkled his polemics with lies, to entire networks of so-called news based entirely on lies. That evolution is one of the many reasons, if not the key reason, we find ourselves in the Era of SuperTruth®.
The Sappersteins of the world, and everyone else from his historical context, eventually grew old and ceased to exist. There arose in the West capitalists lauded for turning intellectual property, usually that of others, to their own profit. And from among these so-called thought-leaders, success-gurus, and oracles of progress came one called Elon Kuru III.
Elon was a devotee of Kurtzweil, who predicted the advent of a “singularity,” when synthetic cognition would leave the minds of human beings behind, intellectually and physically. Elon believed he could join that elite mental rapturing. To that end, he had... read more
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