There are few things as stimulating as someone challenging my most cherished beliefs. A recent example was Stewart Brand arguing for nuclear power, GM crops, and megacities (Whew! Three cherished beliefs in one go). At most, I’m won over and develop a new position on the subject. At the least, processing the counter-arguments leaves me with a more deeply reasoned and clearer opinion on the issue at hand.
It happened again this week: I read an Observer book review of Renata Salecl’s The Tyranny of Choice. My life is based on working toward happiness. Just the other day I finished a book by someone doing the same: a New York writer who spent a year exploring who she really was, making choices about how to spent her time, and disciplining herself to follow through. The result: more happiness. But Salecl writes about another person’s eerily similar project.“Using… the advice contained in… self-help books, she set about cleaning her home, losing weight, becoming a better partner and parent and generally cultivating a more serene approach to existence.” But for her, the result was less contentment plus panic attacks. Too much choice, and the imperative to do better, says Salecl, bring anxiety and dissatisfaction rather than freedom.
And, darn it--it’s stimulating but also a little galling--if I wasn’t faced with the chance to test yet another of my bedrock beliefs this week. I hold that gainful employment should be a human right. Right? No, argues Douglas Rushkoff in a CNN.com opinion piece. Given that we collectively already have more than enough “stuff,” and technology is eroding the need for humans to produce more of it, “Are jobs obsolete?”
Rushkoff says that the fundamental problem isn’t finding work for people. It’s an issue of how we organize ourselves. Communism didn’t work (it “sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised”), but the current alternative--libertarian capitalism—is swelling the suffering underclass. The policy toward the have-nots appears to be “cut social services along with their jobs and hope they fade into the distance.”
Salecl, according to the Guardian review, “argues that capitalist society uses the ideology of choice to keep the wheels turning and also to safeguard its very existence: if we’re wrapped up in our own private desires, we have no time to think about choosing a new, improved way of structuring society.” Which is fine, except I think my happiness depends on everyone else being happy as well.
Do you have any ideas for a better way to organize society?
--Julian
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