Exactly! “Perhaps Marx was right: capitalism really does end up sowing the seeds of its own demise — not because of ever-rising levels of productivity, but because of ever-decreasing levels of meaning.” Thank you for your UnHerd article.
loved the whole piece, btw! “ Perhaps Marx was right: capitalism really does end up sowing the seeds of its own demise — not because of ever-rising levels of productivity, but because of ever-decreasing levels of meaning.” YES YES YES.
Social media and universities have displaced the dominance of narrative western meaning-making tech and authority like traditional religion, newspapers, and cable tv. Marxist and social justice paradigms have leveraged postmodernism’s distrust of religious and nation-state meta-narratives, ushering in the culturally creative yet chaotic period of the last 50yrs, cynically conditioning college students and younger generations to ironically accept new meta-narratives like degrowth communism and climate doomerism. Like Angus Fletcher shows in Storythinking, we are storytelling creatures who use narrative as a tool as revolutionary as fire.
My feedback to your excellent article is that without coherent generational narratives to infuse meaning into modern labor, it is not that we are working harder than ever (though some are), it’s that our work means/matters less and weighs heavier on our mental health. It’s the myopic cognitive dissonance of being told you’ll save the world by spinning your wheels. And a threshold of major authority figures today are attempting to manufacture public consent under their version of this universalist narrative (politicians, corporations, universities, global orgs like WEF and WHO). But how long until gens X and Z apply postmodernist distrust toward degrowth communism and climate doomerism?
Exactly! “Perhaps Marx was right: capitalism really does end up sowing the seeds of its own demise — not because of ever-rising levels of productivity, but because of ever-decreasing levels of meaning.” Thank you for your UnHerd article.
Durkheim was my least favorite sociologist in grad school (so dour; called him Dorkheim) and also the most relevant in all the many years since.
😂
loved the whole piece, btw! “ Perhaps Marx was right: capitalism really does end up sowing the seeds of its own demise — not because of ever-rising levels of productivity, but because of ever-decreasing levels of meaning.” YES YES YES.
Social media and universities have displaced the dominance of narrative western meaning-making tech and authority like traditional religion, newspapers, and cable tv. Marxist and social justice paradigms have leveraged postmodernism’s distrust of religious and nation-state meta-narratives, ushering in the culturally creative yet chaotic period of the last 50yrs, cynically conditioning college students and younger generations to ironically accept new meta-narratives like degrowth communism and climate doomerism. Like Angus Fletcher shows in Storythinking, we are storytelling creatures who use narrative as a tool as revolutionary as fire.
My feedback to your excellent article is that without coherent generational narratives to infuse meaning into modern labor, it is not that we are working harder than ever (though some are), it’s that our work means/matters less and weighs heavier on our mental health. It’s the myopic cognitive dissonance of being told you’ll save the world by spinning your wheels. And a threshold of major authority figures today are attempting to manufacture public consent under their version of this universalist narrative (politicians, corporations, universities, global orgs like WEF and WHO). But how long until gens X and Z apply postmodernist distrust toward degrowth communism and climate doomerism?