Overview for essay

On Personal Responsibility and Careerism

For decades, we've been hearing how everyone should 'take responsibility for their actions,' and that we are each responsible for our 'success' (or lack thereof). And because these statements are rather broad and simplistic, it's served to foster a kind of reflexive denial of same in others. Today, we're still stuck in that false dichotomy, which leads us to ignore a few pretty serious questions. Namely, what to make of the fact that, especially when we are performing certain roles within institutions, we are actually encouraged not to take responsibility for our actions, and not to think about how we feel about what we do. And that seems to me a pretty important question to ask, both because of how much of our life we spend playing such roles, and because it relates to how we think and act at other times. I'd like to explore this issue here, and see where it leads us.*

Linking (Neo-)Liberalism, Identity Politics and Bureaucracy

Both David Harvey and Noam Chomsky have already done a lot to analyze and explain the rise of neoliberalism. Both agree that it should primarily be understood as a political project, aimed at discouraging, and keeping 'ordinary' people from participating in politics, after the events of the 1960s.* But where Harvey's account of the start of the counterrevolution only includes the conservative response, Chomsky points out that elite liberals were just as disturbed by what they termed "an excess of democracy". He notes, describing the Trilateral Commission's The Crisis of Democracy:


Some thoughts on "How to Turn Litter into Money": Linking Promises, Money and Violence

Reintegrating the dismal science

There are a number of ways to explain what money is, and what it allows us to do. Sadly, the "origin story" that we were all taught in school is a very misleading morality tale, in which exchange of goods is presented as a wholly separate sphere of life. Supposedly, humans were stuck with a so-called "barter economy" until they invented money. This is a complete fairy tale, and this matters a great deal.


In The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin convincingly argues that a large part of what drives reactionaries is the desire to silence and repress (or, in academese: deny voice to) others, who they call or consider inferiors. This partly from a strong belief that their putative inferiors have no right to speak (or to be heard), partly from a fear that loss of personal status if the latter are heard or successfully organize themselves; and partly from a conviction that society can only function properly when everyone 'knows their place'. I found Robin's explanation intuitive and thought-provoking, and it led me to wonder what the analogous desire and world-view were of those who the media refer to as 'the (center-)left' (called liberals in the US, liberal or social democrats elsewhere), given that I knew that the overwhelming majority of in no way subscribe to the ("radical") egalitarianism, inclusiveness and solidarity that I take as central to leftism.