Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

by Mark Fisher

Freedom, Spinoza shows, is something that can be achieved only when we can apprehend the real causes of our actions, when we can set aside the ‘sad passions’ that intoxicate and entrance us.

It really is a system not of moral guidance, but of emotional guidance.

Morality has been replaced by feeling.

MO post-modernism. A real

‘What people suffer from,’ Curtis claims, is being trapped within themselves - in a world of individualism everyone is trapped within their own feelings, trapped within their own imaginations. Our job as public service broadcasters is to take people beyond the limits of their own self, and until we do that we will carry on declining.

In a seeming irony, the media class’s refusal to be paternalistic has not produced a bottom-up culture of breathtaking diversity, but one that is increasingly infantilized.

Feeling > moraity modus leads to infantalism amongst thr population

For instance, in the case of teachers and lecturers, the tactic of strikes (or even of marking bans) should be abandoned, because they only hurt students and members (at the college where I used to work, one-day strikes were pretty much welcomed by management because they saved on the wage bill whilst causing negligible disruption to the college).

If, as Oliver James, Žižek and Supernanny have shown, unlimited license leads to misery and disaffection, then limitations placed on desire are likely to quicken, rather than deaden, it. In any case, rationing of some sort is inevitable.

Restrictions lead to quickened desire