If our fantasies are simply reflections of our subconscious drives, of the things that we want and hunger for, then the horizon of human life is more limited. If these fantasies are not, then to reduce them to mere reflections is a violence, and to allow this same violence to be perpetrated upon our future is similarly horrific and something that must be struggled against.
Read MoreThis isn’t simply a finger-wagging moralizing, though: it’s not simply that you want bad things – on a similar level to the “carrot” of the fulfillment of our propagandized desires, there’s also the limitations forced on us by everything else. Look: not everyone who eats fast food is under the impression that it’s something good or at least neutral – someone may be utterly convinced that it’s poison and still feed it to their kids every day because they have no other option.
Read MoreA right is a particularized (and reified) liberty or freedom. By “particularized,” I mean that your freedom of speech doesn’t give you freedom of movement or freedom of worship. Each one is a specific thing. By “reified”, I mean that it is an immaterial thing that’s treated as a discrete object that one is able to possess: presumably, we’re endowed with these rights at a certain time (by our creator, or at age of majority.) It’s specifically, in my opinion, the reification that’s the problem with “rights” as a concept – it’s something conceived of as separate from the person, rather than as an attribute of the person.
Read MoreI am far from an expert on international affairs, and I’m not yet ready to do a book roundup of my own – which will be heavily featuring Japanese literature in translation, in pursuit of a semi-scholarly project I’m working on – so I’m a bit at a loss as to what to write. Hence, I’m going to be continuing my series on Murray Bookchin’s Ecology of Freedom.
Read MoreWhile this might seem like I’m saying the Bookchin was living in the past, even in his own time, I mean something very different: I get something of the sense that the rest of us took a bad turn, and he continued for a while on a much better course, writing letters to us from that alternate timeline we missed.
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