I noticed people started to use the idea of “no ethical consumption under capitalism” to just be completely irresponsible and just stop trying at all. I don’t think the point of that is to give up completely lol

  • LeopardShepherd [none/use name]
    ·
    11 months ago

    Oh my lord applying individual psychology speak to nations/states drives me crazy. Not a thing leftists do so they haven't co-opted it. If I have to hear the language of domestic abuse or trauma counselling or whatever the fuck applied to countries and geopolitics one more time I will explode.

    • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      Ah, not true the post-modernist left did in fact apply psychological terms to entire societies. Specifically, schizophrenia if I remember correctly from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Lacan also loved mixing psychology and sociology.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism_and_Schizophrenia

      Not the greatest fan of these works, but at least they are being specific and academic in their usage and have psychological training. Modern libs are bastardizing even that.

      Also I think it's much more valid to point towards a society as a whole as a social organism, and attempt to apply similar mental conditions to see if it makes any sense - at least in an academic thought experiment type of way, I don't think it has much explanatory power personally. However, libs instead just say "Trump is a narcissist. Putin is a sociopath. Kim Jong Un is a psychopath." etc. which is much more of an issue as they're just armchair psychologizing other people without any formal training whatsoever in order to smear political opponents. It's chauvinist, it's ableist, it's straight charlatanism

      • LeopardShepherd [none/use name]
        ·
        11 months ago

        Very interesting! I wasn't aware of these works and I can see what they are trying to get at, so yet another thing libs have to ruin. The examples you use at the end are definitely along the lines of what I was thinking about though.

      • silent_water [she/her]
        ·
        11 months ago

        my reading of that book was that Deleuze was suggesting it as a way to fight capitalist control over thought and behavior -- i.e. if you think and behave in a way that's non-rational, you can escape the capitalist mind prison. idk though, it's a very hard book to read because it takes post-structuralism farther than the post-structuralists did and adopts his own thesis. so it's entirely possible I'm misreading him. he expands, in a more elucidating manner, in Societies of Control, so it's worth reading that as context for the book.