Are you Ready, Citizen, for the 21st Century?

Via  ConstellationW.com, video by Michael Cartier, with help from his friends, mine too. You might call it, "The Soul of Man under Post-Capitalism." I suspect that soul of the future will be mostly manufactured, as advertisers and marketers delve ever deeper into the ways self is formed in society. Maslow's pyramid and happiness studies will dominate the soul creation by the double bottom line Soul Snatchers in Wealth Bondage. Google ads on blogs are a good indication of how these things go.

Comments

[Jon Husband]

Cher M. Phillippe Cubeta.

Nous visitons votre site web en fonction de notre mission comme protecteur des droits et libertés de nos citoyens du nation de Québec.

Nous avons noté que vous avez incorrectement cité les travaux d'une de nos citoyens, M. Michel Cartier, comme les travaux d'un tel Michael Cartier.

Nous ne sommes pas conscient des ouevres de ce Michael Cartier, mais nous serions tres heureux d'en prendre connaissance et de rentrer en contact avec lui si ces ouevres et son energie appuyerons l'avenir de Québec.

(just teasin' ...)

[Jon Husband]

"appuyeront", non pas "appuyerons"

[Phil Cubeta]

You are no doubt right, and you are good to correct me. I was not saying he is working for WB. I was saying he may be relying on a force of history that is actually moving in a direction not to his liking, yours or mine. The myth of progress in history dies hard. Web utopianism dies hard, even as we see how the web has actually played out, within the frame of the page stippled with Google Ads. If we want a better world, we have to make sacrifices for it, as you have. It is consoling to think that history, or ephochs, will do it for us. But I think we have to do it ourselves, each of us, and in small groups. I think history is against us, and ends badly.

[Jon Husband]

They say art imitates (and sometimes foretells) reality.

I recently watched a (pretty bad) movie titled Cold Souls in which a snazzy MRI-like machine extracts peoples' souls, which are then placed in cold storage .. basically, it's post-modern psychotherapy .. the souls are mainly extracted because people are troubled and stymied by feeling "heavy" or hindered, or whatever.

The arc of the movie's plot then moves to a Russian-led (the bad guys) black market in souls, and then it gets worse (as in goofier) from there.

But hey, where there's a (potential) market, there's a way, no ?

BTW, are the conversations one has with the therapist in the course of psychotherapy a market ?

[Phil Cubeta]

The progression (not progress) I see is from:

1. tribes with shared myth and ritual
2. peasant under local noble
3. citizen
4. Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Red China
5. Civil rights revolution. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. Hands held to sing "We shall overcome."
6. Assassination of leaders who might have created a more moral country.
7. Rise of Crips and Bloods, drug wars, commercialization of rock 'n roll, commercialization of the identity through focus groups, branding, and playing back to people their own little myth of the self. The Regan Revolution to self, money, free market, no civic responsiblities.
8. Retreat of progressives from struggle, and into the delusions of double bottom lines, or success to significance, or other self flattering views that require limited sacrifice. Business battening on the narcissism of consumers. Prozac and halcyon and other cures for anomie.
9. Brief moment of hope on the internet, pre-business models for the net. Irreverence, wit, truth told outright or in fables. Formation of pre-polictical groups based on hashing out shared undertandings in conversation with newfound friends. Investiture of the web with sacred qualities.
8. Happiness studies, Maslow taught in B-School, Google ads, face book, walled gardens, ownership and optimization of social networks or tribes.
8. The soul of man under postcapitalism, a postmoral identify formed within a tribe on a reservation of affinity, largely online, owned by billionaires who work closely with politicians to optimize the matrix.

Say I am right about the future steps. Say that history unfolds like that, as a dystopia. Does that make it right? Why must we bow before history? Many a civilization has come and gone, many that produced higher quality humans than does our own, higher quality art, better music and literature, more nuanced mythology, greater freedom-as-excellence, more liberty-as-active-citizenship. Why must it be the future that saves us? Perhaps it is the past. For me it is.

[Jon Husband]

You cynic, you ;-)

I wish I could foresee a better world, a world we want.

But I don't, and I can't.

I guess I need a soul extraction ?

Wait, maybe I've had one already, thanks to The Society of the Spectacle, The Tapeworm Economy and Looting Main Street ?

[Phil Cubeta]

Soul on Ice, remember that one? Eldridge Cleaver, written in prison. A former leader of the Black Panther Party, he is today best remembered for inventing the Cleaver Sleeve, a codpiece, for becoming a conservative Republican.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldridge_Cleaver

[Jon Husband]

Yes, I remember Soul on Ice. Read it in my last year of high school in suburban upper-middle class Conn. Had a real impact on me.

He certainly covered a lot of various ground in his meanderings. I am bedazzled that Cleaver became a Christian Republican. I guess that's one path to reclaiming, or thawing out, a soul.

[Phil Cubeta]

Each decade presents its own opportunities for the social entrepreneur.

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

Just as it presents opportunities for social artists like you two trouble makers.

Wealth Bondage presents itself as all encompassing, the chasing after scarce money is so ubiquitous that we often forget that each time we participate that way it is a choice. Each time we do this we lose a little bit of soul until it is so weak that it cannot complain.

Recovering out soul is related to recovering our sovereignty, our capacity to choose, to say no to "rules" that are pressing on us from above. Time to make our own rules.

[Phil Cubeta]

I may yet become a counterfeiter, in the spirit of Andre Gide.