> First off, I hope you realized my rant on morality is power, ethics is
money, was supposed to cheer you up. You know a kind of locker room
pep talk--indirectly.
I think I've lost my sense of humour. It might have slipped on that ice donut and skittled away onto the road. Tragic to be sure. At least I've still got my gloves though.
> For some reason, I've never understood, people's eyes glaze over, that
absolute moment when the detail of an issue is concrete, specific, and
has the most consequences. Why? It is a mystery.
Transference? Identification? Psychic Thermidor? I think Marcuse proposes an interesting idea, the psychic thermidor... the idea that when [complex] freedom seems closest, there is something that causes us to turn away... like an intellectual panic button. We blink. Zizek isn't too far from this either, and provides an interesting explanation - the abyss of freedom, which we sometimes have an opportunity to glimpse, is both terrifying and beautiful. In any event, it's deep.
> But I have a theory, naturally. It has to do with their emotional
> registers. People need to feel something about an issue to be
> interested, so you have to find a way to present them with that hook,
> that something that they can feel, so that they can then follow the
> implications embedded in the concrete detail. But the fair thing to
> do, is find what is at the 'bottom' of an issue---those features that
> have the most fidelity to the substance. The media (and establishment
> power structure) is very good at this, but of course they go straight
> to a manipulation of emotive forms, while fidelity goes out the
> window.
There's a provocative thesis, if you figure out what the media is manipulating, you've figured out the object cause of the pendulum.
> Cheer up.
Ah, the externalized voice of my interior moral universe. "BE HAPPY!"
i got betta, ken