I found this fun and interesting. It's a bit long, but it felt like there was a lot to build out. Doing that reading while not knowing where things are going is tough, but I found the reward, the synthesis of different sides, to be a surprisingly good conclusion to the piece.
And just having the pleasure of this paragraph, I think, will impact me forever:
> Most people I spend time with — leftists prone to anxiety and depression — are skeptical of "self-improvement." Many of us, following the critic Mark Fisher, think that depression reflects an encounter with the harshness of reality, rather than a merely pathological distortion. We definitely want to feel better, but we don’t want to be hijacked by acronyms or worksheets or positive thinking in the process. We try to attribute suffering to crappy world systems rather than personal deficiencies. We find ways to trust that our negative emotions signify something other than our own inadequacy — that they contain a deeply rational response to the world’s irrational injustice.
> We try to attribute suffering to crappy world systems rather than personal deficiencies.
> We find ways to trust that our negative emotions signify something other than our own inadequacy — that they contain a deeply rational response to the world’s irrational injustice.
Believes suffering is caused by impermanent and changeable features of the world, and that the only alternative is a personal "deficiency"? Believes negative emotions are rational and arise due to clear causation by external forces? I've heard that one before.
What the article calls "dialectic" is called "non-dualism" in Buddhism; the author has gotten to the point where they recognize them, but maybe not to the important part which is to remember they aren't real. (Note that something being real or not real is also an incorrect dualism.)
I'm not even sure I can follow what I'm reading. It complains that evil capitalists started manipulating people in the 20th century so they wouldn't want to unionize, and that savvy leftist psychologists realized that these same skills could be used to self-manipulate patients into not wanting to cut themselves?
I found this fun and interesting. It's a bit long, but it felt like there was a lot to build out. Doing that reading while not knowing where things are going is tough, but I found the reward, the synthesis of different sides, to be a surprisingly good conclusion to the piece.
And just having the pleasure of this paragraph, I think, will impact me forever:
> Most people I spend time with — leftists prone to anxiety and depression — are skeptical of "self-improvement." Many of us, following the critic Mark Fisher, think that depression reflects an encounter with the harshness of reality, rather than a merely pathological distortion. We definitely want to feel better, but we don’t want to be hijacked by acronyms or worksheets or positive thinking in the process. We try to attribute suffering to crappy world systems rather than personal deficiencies. We find ways to trust that our negative emotions signify something other than our own inadequacy — that they contain a deeply rational response to the world’s irrational injustice.
Fisher died by suicide in 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fisher
But not before encouraging everyone to blame things on "capitalism" which even Marx would have said would be solved by more capitalism.
(Namely cost of living in Anglo countries, which is largely caused by their practically feudalist land usage policies.)
> We try to attribute suffering to crappy world systems rather than personal deficiencies.
> We find ways to trust that our negative emotions signify something other than our own inadequacy — that they contain a deeply rational response to the world’s irrational injustice.
Believes suffering is caused by impermanent and changeable features of the world, and that the only alternative is a personal "deficiency"? Believes negative emotions are rational and arise due to clear causation by external forces? I've heard that one before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_marks_of_existence
What the article calls "dialectic" is called "non-dualism" in Buddhism; the author has gotten to the point where they recognize them, but maybe not to the important part which is to remember they aren't real. (Note that something being real or not real is also an incorrect dualism.)
Marcuse wants to have a word.
I'd encourage you to flesh out this comment. I've never read Marcuse, and I'm curious what you had in mind.
Long reads can be fine, different readers might need to pull in different parts of the context.
I'm not even sure I can follow what I'm reading. It complains that evil capitalists started manipulating people in the 20th century so they wouldn't want to unionize, and that savvy leftist psychologists realized that these same skills could be used to self-manipulate patients into not wanting to cut themselves?