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Achievement Society and the rise of narcissism, depression and anxiety - Byung-Chul Han
“Today we talk about positive power, neoliberalism, narcissism as a reaction to modern life, how technology makes isolation easier, and some tactics to find peace in the digital panopticon.”
Podcasts I’ve been loving lately <3
‘You know those hustler people on the internet.’ - Stephen West
Guy Debord - The Society of the Spectacle
“Why not affirm everything that is necessary about yourself and the world around you? What would happen?
You’re a desiring machine. Just as one example, short-term desires are often completely incompatible with long-term desires.
Nietzsche would say that you don’t have to deny either of those desires. You can affirm the fact that you want both of these things simultaneously.
In fact, you can affirm every desire that you have, you just don’t act on all of them.
Which is just to say that, to not act on the specific desires that don’t correspond with the values that you want to promote in your life, you don’t necessarily have to see them as evil.
You don’t have to feel guilty or ashamed of them.
You don’t have to see yourself as condemned to a life of pushing a boulder up a hill, under the magnifying glass of God, or the government, or insert whatever group you want.
In terms of your behavior or the impact you’re going to have on the world, you can live two identical lives.
One where you see yourself as a condemned victim, struggling and suffering against evil all the time.
And the other as a type of creature that affirms and embraces that there is something that is naturally a part of them that desires, that has values they want to instate in the world.
A creature that affirms suffering, because if any change they want to bring about for the better is actually a meaningful change, it will require overcoming resistance in the existing world.
They understand that these counterforces in their way are evidence of the fact that they’re actually changing something meaningful. (…)
The practitioner of asceticism will traditionally sit out in the cold, lay on a bed of nails, abstain from every type of earthly pleasure you can imagine.
They’ll strengthen the will to become a strong enough person to overcome the weakness written into them by the universe.
Whereas a practitioner of Nietzschean asceticism, if there was one, could engage more or less in the exact same set of behaviors,
but they would frame it more as an affirmation of values, an affirmation of a lack, an expression of the will to power, the overcoming of resistance for the sake of shaping the world to your desires.
The thinking is: yeah I want stuff in this world, why spend all the time that I have renouncing the fact that I want stuff? What if taking actions towards what you want is good for you?”
Source: Philosophize This!: Episode #159… The Creation of Meaning - Nietzsche - Amor Fati
Listen to this episode from Philosophize This! on Spotify. Today's episode is the first installment of a series on the great Cold War era thinkers Sartre and Camus. Today we lay the foundations for the line of thinking known as existentialism and focus on Sartre's view of freedom. Support the show on Patreon! www.philosophizethis.org for additional content. Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday. :)
Six episodes from this podcast discuss Sartre and Camus. Link below.
Sartre and Camus
On this episode, we explore the benefits and drawbacks of optimism. First, we examine the various motivations for pessimism, and hear what Winston Churchill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Marcus Aurelius have to say about optimism. Next, we think about the vastly different implications of optimism in our personal lives and optimism on a societal level. Finally, we find out why Voltaire thought it was preposterous to think that we’re living in the best of all possible worlds and why he said, "Optimism is the madness of insisting all is well when we are miserable." All this and more on the latest episode of Philosophize This! Support the show on Patreon! www.philosophizethis.org for additional content. Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday. :)
«If you’re a person who claims that the basis for why you believe the things you do is because you think they are true and not because they serve some useful purpose to you then you are instantly assuming a life long responsibility. A life long responsibility of putting your beliefs under a microscope. A life long responsibility of looking at them through an extremely critical lens. Of taking every piece of new information you get and weighing your beliefs against it. If you are TRULY concerned with your beliefs being true, you should never arrive at a belief and say that it doesn’t matter what anyone says to me, it doesn’t matter which new facts are presented to me, I will never falter from this belief. You can’t say that. No one said this was going to be easy. The easy way is deciding you are going to plug your ears and say “la la la” whenever someone tells you something that doesn’t correspond with your worldview. You’re not a bad person if you do this, but the enlightenment thinkers would at least want you to be honest that your beliefs are out of convenience, not out of a desire for truth.»
“Kant talks about human nature. He sees it as a really static thing. He thinks that…it is an inescapable aspect of human nature that we find ourselves constantly in this state of being pushed and pulled around between two things: one is our faculty of reason and the other are the animalistic desires we have. Sometimes we give in to those desires…other times we are able to use reason to overcome them and do the moral thing… The main point is that there is internal battle between reason and passions, that is part of our human nature.”
