Reddit reviews The Malaise of Modernity (Cbc Massey Lectures Series)

To begin with the end of your response.

I don't think eliminating people who don't want that would be enough, unless you are willing to go full Khmer Rouge. Most of the people who are pushing ideas that would expand state power and bureaucracy are not doing so to push state power and bureaucracy. It happens as an unintended consequence. Many of them might in fact believe that they are limiting it, for instance, by expanding freedoms, rights, and so on, and yet not realizing that to enforce these rights they will have to radically expand state power. This is why, instead, I am more interested in disrupting the ideological apparatus that keeps the who wheel rolling, not unlike what Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and so on did to the ideology that dominated before them. I mean, mass murder eventually happened - just further down the line.

Why does my preference matters? At the moment, it really doesn't. Look at me. I'm just a dude discussing semi-obscure writers on a fringe sub-reddit of a fringe movement. My ideas will only matter if I can one day present, argue for, and eventually rally others to my ideas.

I would also say that I am an impotent subject who desires not to be impotent. If I wasn't, I would just go on to enjoy life under modern capitalism like all the other subjects out there. After all, it's not an uncomfortable existence. Though for personal reasons I do hate it.

And now, for the actually hard question - who gives a damn.

Okay. This is a bit hard to tldr for the sake of a comment, but here goes. I really need to get reading and writing so that these things can be out there to provide further context.

So when I say "I don't want to see any more expansion of state power and bureaucracy'', I am saying the following things:

Negatively: I oppose further expansion because I consider state power, bureaucracy, and the legal-rationalistic model as understood by Weber has de-humanizing, alienating, and turning us into human resources to be taxed and managed. I disagree fundamentally with Imperial Energy's conceptualization of the state as a sort of super-predator, and rather follow Foucault in agreeing that it's basically a shepherd of individuals, an impersonal resource manager. This clashes with my conception of the good life and how we should lead lives as humans, and therefore I take exception to it and will fight against it.

To expand further, the modern state also more or less dissolves natural human relationships such as associations, guilds, and nations, leading to a general impoverishment of culture. In other words, the expansion of state power and bureaucracy is the expansion of gessellschaft and its attendant ills. An impoverished and bare life, despite our abundance of material goods. In the words of William Morris, an age of shoddy things.

Positively: I want a return to what Benjamin Constant called ''Ancient politics'', or a return to Aristotelian body politic. A return to gemeinschaft. All modernist political movement are repeating the same mistakes. We need a complete re-framing of the conversation. We need a new political and moral theory if we are to actually get ourselves out of this.

So let's be clear here: I'm just another disgruntled modern subject suffering from a certain malaise. The only difference between me and the next poor schmuck, however, is that I have been trying to 1) conceptualize and articulate the problems and 2) actually come up with solutions, proposals, and plans.

I hope I addressed your questions without shifting goal posts too much.

This on my Christmas list would get me some Britishness and my wife might make a man out of me when it arrives.

This would help me in my research and career

This pen scanner is the geekiest thing I've got

This book is phallic because it relates to psychoanalysis