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The Bonds of Debt
The credit crisis has pushed the whole world so far into the red that the gigantic sums involved defy understanding. On a human level, what does such an enormous degree of debt and insolvency mean? In this timely book, cultural critic Richard Dienst considers the financial crisis, global poverty, media politics and radical theory to parse the various implications of a world where man is born free but everywhere is in debt.
Written with humor and verve, Bonds of Debt ranges across subjects—such as Obama’s national security strategy, the architecture of Prada stores, press photos of Bono, and a fairy tale told by Karl Marx—to capture a modern condition founded on fiscal imprudence. Moving beyond the dominant pieties and widespread anxieties surrounding the topic, Dienst re-conceives the world’s massive financial obligations as a social, economic, and political bond, where the crushing weight of objectified wealth comes face to face with new demands for equality and solidarity. For this inspired analysis, we are indebted to him.
Written with humor and verve, Bonds of Debt ranges across subjects—such as Obama’s national security strategy, the architecture of Prada stores, press photos of Bono, and a fairy tale told by Karl Marx—to capture a modern condition founded on fiscal imprudence. Moving beyond the dominant pieties and widespread anxieties surrounding the topic, Dienst re-conceives the world’s massive financial obligations as a social, economic, and political bond, where the crushing weight of objectified wealth comes face to face with new demands for equality and solidarity. For this inspired analysis, we are indebted to him.
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
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July 14, 2017In fulfillment of the requirements of Jeffrey A. Bell's course, Ideas in Conflict IV - Twentieth Century. This essay addresses the common threads between the various works presented in the course, focusing primarily on Bonds of Debt:
An alarming theme ties together Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents with Bernays’s Propaganda and Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: the notion that the beliefs of individuals are controlled by the most powerful agents in society. For Freud, this antagonistic force is the will of society redirecting mankind’s instinctual drives. For Nietzsche, the same force is exerted by the “tyranny of paradoxical and illogical ideas” (Nietzsche 70) that redirect people’s resentiment back upon themselves. Bernays is probably most concerned with the controlling force of society, but he does not share the negative expectation of such a force, instead demonstrating the methods by which society can control public opinion. This same principle is present in Richard Dienst’s Bonds of Debt, except that it takes the form of the powerful creditors to whom all of society is indebted.
Dienst in Bonds of Debt is initially concerned with the power balance of society, behind which is the relationship between creditor and debtor. The actual group that controls society, therefore, is not the government, which is the actualization of the will of the people, but rather the big banks, the creditors of society. Thus, “the most fateful world-historical figures are not captains of industry or globetrotting entrepreneurs, let alone heads of state, but central bankers, fund managers, insurance brokers, and the legions of traders and fixers swarming behind them” (Dienst 3).
Nietzsche offered a similar creditor-debtor relationship as an explanation of one of the moral precepts that have come to define human morality in society. He describes the debt as creating the precedent for punitive measure in society, which he states originated from the desire of the wronged to be compensated. “Where did this primitive, deeply rooted, and perhaps by now ineradicable idea derive its power, the idea of an equivalence between punishment and pain? I have already given away the answer: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor” (Nietzsche 29).
The indebted and creditor classes in Nietzsche’s example expanded drastically from the original model, creating the moral concept that owing someone a debt and deserving punishment are essentially linked. This morality helps to reinforce the circumstances that benefit the creditors: the repaying of debts. This helps to explain how it is that enormous banks, the most significant of all creditors, come to assume a large amount of wealth, and thus the majority of the power in the country. The relationship between debt and power creates a positive feedback relationship that repeats itself over and over, each iteration adding to the wealth of the already wealthy banking industry.
One concern related to this scenario is that the economic infrastructure upon which everyone relies is controlled by money. With large banking businesses in control of this money, the source of power, they effectively control the flow of economic wealth. It is only natural, therefore, that such businesses would choose to direct the money to themselves, despite the fact that this creates extremely difficult economic conditions for the majority of individuals, who control relatively little capital. The public must work for stagnant wages while prices increase and the controllers of banks profit, which leads to economic issues like the one the world faces today. This economic trouble is what Dienst calls “a crisis in the way structures of credit seize, partition, and exploit the productivity of the multitude” (31), on a larger scale than ever before.
The wealth of banks comes at the price of the average individual’s standard of living. More and more people are pushed into poverty, but because of the moralistic prejudice against debtors, they have difficulty blaming the wealthy banking establishment for their own misfortunate, regardless of the fact that this is the very group responsible for the misery of many. Dienst himself admits that “although everybody on earth is surrounded by the evidence every day, it is hard to get a grasp on the dramatically warped contours of contemporary capitalism” (37).
Bernays’s Propaganda can explain that issue. The methods of manipulating public opinion that Bernays outlined have been perfected over time, to the point where most people now have no idea of the extent to which they are being deceived. Without propaganda, an informed democracy could never sustain such a great divide between the wealthy and the poor, as the poor greatly outnumber the wealthy and would pass legislation in their own interests to secure a decent living. Unfortunately, the wealthy power elite class, the lineage of bankers and their affiliates, controls the companies that control the distribution of ideas, and these ideas can be distorted to paint the true villains of the news stories in a noble light. As Bernays states, “small groups of persons can, and do, make the rest of us think what they please about a given subject” (Bernays 31).
By changing tactics over time, this elite class has evaded public recognition, devising a new false paradigm with each new scheme to win the favor of the public for measures that benefit only the privileged few. The most recent lie is the so-called trickle-down effect of the Reagan administration, the assumption that “a rising tide lifts all boats” when the reality is that “year by year, the mechanisms of accumulation have dumped greater shares of wealth into the laps of fewer people” (Dienst 48). In believing this fallacy, the American people based their assumption on an expectation that the information with which they were presented would at least be reasonably similar to truth. It was assumed that public policy would be formulated to aid people, not banks. At the inception of these ideas, the American people would have considered the idea that banks were shaping public policy to benefit themselves at the expense of the public to be a conspiracy theory. In today’s world, the hardened American public is hopefully a bit less naïve. Unfortunately, the deceptors have grown in experience as well as the deceived.
Regardless of the method used, however, it seems that it would be difficult to convince a majority of American voters, all of average means, to support a party platform that benefits only the privileged few and does almost nothing to help the primary body of constituents, common people. This, to a certain extent, is relatable to Freud’s idea of redirection of impulsive desires.
Freud’s general claim was that all basic desires originated from libidinal instincts. He concluded that society influenced individual psychology to transform selfish or destructive impulses into efforts that benefit society, while repressing the original “id” instinct in favor of the restraint of the “super-ego” (Freud 70).
In the same way, Americans possess a desire to live what is commonly called the American dream, which entails being financially successful. Unfortunately, the modern world is creating a situation where only a very small number of Americans can live this dream, while the rest live at or below the poverty line. The grand majority of the so-called liberal media teaches people the beliefs of the wealthy-favoring conservative party: that those who have a ridiculous amount of financial capital should be allowed to maintain and even expand their wealth endlessly, regardless of the consequences for normal people. This can happen because the media is almost entirely controlled by the same elite class whose ideas it supports. The result is that the gullible people of average means, a group of debtors, fall into the same voting category as their creditors, the craftiest and most resourceful class.
Dienst displays the evidence that the cause of the constant strife that our nation is senselessly involved in is the simple fact that the creditor class benefits from war. “Alongside debts imposed in order to make war, there are debts imposed in order to keep the peace” (Dienst 76). What Dienst means by this is that creditors are able to create debts through the instigation of war, which is expensive and requires that governments draw an enormous sum of money from banks, while at the same time debts are created at the end of the war that the losers must pay to the winners. This creates a stream of money flowing into the creditor class.
The reason war never ends is because it is simply too profitable for the people who control the public’s worldviews and the government’s policies. The great problem of war is not only that it results in destruction of property and loss of human life, but also that it results in the depletion of the government’s public funds. In the days of the World Wars, war was an industry that could at least create profits for numerous organizations, but now the banks control the flow of money and, instead of circulating the money, absorb it.
It is appalling that people can continue to wonder at the cause of the worldwide economic crisis in the midst of all of this evidence of the reality of the matter, even with the meddling of the creditor class. Obviously, there isn’t much money circulating in the economy, because a rich few control almost all of the currency and they are simply holding onto it instead of spending it. There is no sense in trying to stimulate the average American citizen into spending money he doesn’t have. This is problematic even for the bankers, if only as much as it creates the issue that bankers won’t be able to siphon money from the public when there’s no more left to take. A parasite that kills its host, as the creditor class is doing to the massive debtor class in the present, is an inefficient one.
The great talent of this parasite, however, remains its ability to pass itself off as a beneficial symbiote to its host. The spin applied to descriptions of large, powerful companies and banks makes them seem less like debt-hoarding tyrants and more like larger-than-life heroic figures, like celebrities in the form of institutions. The same wealth that causes us to associate public figures with positive desires is used to create positive associations with banks, who are by far the largest holders of money. Dienst outlines that “a whole repertoire of narrative and affective devices now invest the animal spirits of money with soulful transcendence, while the consumption of media products is supplemented by instant-feedback market satisfactions” (125). People have been thoroughly taught to believe that acquiring money is a good thing, and thus that those who have acquired the most must be the best. But what is to be done about the desire for individuals to have money for themselves, in a world where money is concentrated in the top one percent of the population?
In the process of showing wealth in a positive light, the media also teaches Americans to seek wealth for themselves, despite the impossibility of the task. People are encouraged to believe that they can live a life of luxury comparable to that of the elusive and wealthy creditor class. It is the very existence of credit and debt that allows America’s citizens to be deceived for so long, while simultaneously feeding in to the existing power schema. Americans can pay for things they can’t afford using debt, which also ends up putting money in the hands of banks, assuming that the borrowers can even afford to pay it back at all (and eventually, they couldn’t). “The precariously overleveraged financial sector… has suggested… a refusal to acknowledge that local or punctual events can any longer interrupt the world time of capital. To forestall any day of reckoning, every effort is being made to persuade us to live in a world nobody can really afford” (126).
Basically, the great flaw of the creditor elite is that they became so effective at misleading people into creating more and more debt without end that they developed delusions of grandeur, and came to believe that they could maintain this overinflated market bubble indefinitely. However, people can only use credit to pay for things they can’t afford for as long as the banks can afford to keep lending them money that they can never fully pay back. The steady trickle of monthly payments can only keep the banks hydrated until the reservoir runs dry. The seemingly inexplicable market crash of just a few years ago was simply the actualization of an inevitability that every one of us should have seen on the horizon, were it not for the media messages that clouded our judgment.
Even after the so-called “day of reckoning,” the creditor class continues to profit at the expense of the suffering poor who make up a far greater proportion of the population. Movements like Occupy Wall Street certainly demonstrate a growing awareness of how thoroughly the American public have been deceived, yet the government refused to recognize such demonstrations. This only continues to prove that government has, for too long, been beholden to bankers and not to the American people. The tremendous debt the nation has accrued is a method of insurance to keep it in the grasp of the banks. However, with awareness of the creditor class’s misdeeds growing, it remains possible that measures may yet be enacted to restore the balance of wealth to a more reasonable level.
People have long accepted the unjust imbalance of wealth in our nation. The elite creditor class has long kept its debtors under effective psychological control through the media, which serves as a tool to manipulate public opinion more effectively than ever before. However, growing public awareness and frustration with unfair practices may yet exceed the capacity of the elite creditors to keep the public under their control. A greater level of strain has been placed on the American public by the powerful few than ever before, with the inequality of wealth distribution at undeniably extreme levels. Support for individualism is strong in America, but not so strong that the majority of Americans would be willing to suppress their desire for success and happiness to live in poverty while celebrating the extreme affluence of only a few.
Undoubtedly, the creditor class will remain in control of the public even after rebalancing takes place. The disparity between the wealthy and poor may be reduced, but it will always exist. Those with money inevitably use their power to manipulate the less powerful. If the existing creditors are deposed, new ones will arise to take their place. The only method of achieving long-term fairness in the distribution of wealth is for the government to serve its people, not a minority of powerful private interests. The only way this can be achieved is to have a truly informed and concerned public. As long as the public is too slothful to question the messages that the media presents, or even to turn out and vote against a party that supports the interests of a wealthy minority, America will forever remain indebted to its creditor class.
An alarming theme ties together Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents with Bernays’s Propaganda and Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: the notion that the beliefs of individuals are controlled by the most powerful agents in society. For Freud, this antagonistic force is the will of society redirecting mankind’s instinctual drives. For Nietzsche, the same force is exerted by the “tyranny of paradoxical and illogical ideas” (Nietzsche 70) that redirect people’s resentiment back upon themselves. Bernays is probably most concerned with the controlling force of society, but he does not share the negative expectation of such a force, instead demonstrating the methods by which society can control public opinion. This same principle is present in Richard Dienst’s Bonds of Debt, except that it takes the form of the powerful creditors to whom all of society is indebted.
Dienst in Bonds of Debt is initially concerned with the power balance of society, behind which is the relationship between creditor and debtor. The actual group that controls society, therefore, is not the government, which is the actualization of the will of the people, but rather the big banks, the creditors of society. Thus, “the most fateful world-historical figures are not captains of industry or globetrotting entrepreneurs, let alone heads of state, but central bankers, fund managers, insurance brokers, and the legions of traders and fixers swarming behind them” (Dienst 3).
Nietzsche offered a similar creditor-debtor relationship as an explanation of one of the moral precepts that have come to define human morality in society. He describes the debt as creating the precedent for punitive measure in society, which he states originated from the desire of the wronged to be compensated. “Where did this primitive, deeply rooted, and perhaps by now ineradicable idea derive its power, the idea of an equivalence between punishment and pain? I have already given away the answer: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor” (Nietzsche 29).
The indebted and creditor classes in Nietzsche’s example expanded drastically from the original model, creating the moral concept that owing someone a debt and deserving punishment are essentially linked. This morality helps to reinforce the circumstances that benefit the creditors: the repaying of debts. This helps to explain how it is that enormous banks, the most significant of all creditors, come to assume a large amount of wealth, and thus the majority of the power in the country. The relationship between debt and power creates a positive feedback relationship that repeats itself over and over, each iteration adding to the wealth of the already wealthy banking industry.
One concern related to this scenario is that the economic infrastructure upon which everyone relies is controlled by money. With large banking businesses in control of this money, the source of power, they effectively control the flow of economic wealth. It is only natural, therefore, that such businesses would choose to direct the money to themselves, despite the fact that this creates extremely difficult economic conditions for the majority of individuals, who control relatively little capital. The public must work for stagnant wages while prices increase and the controllers of banks profit, which leads to economic issues like the one the world faces today. This economic trouble is what Dienst calls “a crisis in the way structures of credit seize, partition, and exploit the productivity of the multitude” (31), on a larger scale than ever before.
The wealth of banks comes at the price of the average individual’s standard of living. More and more people are pushed into poverty, but because of the moralistic prejudice against debtors, they have difficulty blaming the wealthy banking establishment for their own misfortunate, regardless of the fact that this is the very group responsible for the misery of many. Dienst himself admits that “although everybody on earth is surrounded by the evidence every day, it is hard to get a grasp on the dramatically warped contours of contemporary capitalism” (37).
Bernays’s Propaganda can explain that issue. The methods of manipulating public opinion that Bernays outlined have been perfected over time, to the point where most people now have no idea of the extent to which they are being deceived. Without propaganda, an informed democracy could never sustain such a great divide between the wealthy and the poor, as the poor greatly outnumber the wealthy and would pass legislation in their own interests to secure a decent living. Unfortunately, the wealthy power elite class, the lineage of bankers and their affiliates, controls the companies that control the distribution of ideas, and these ideas can be distorted to paint the true villains of the news stories in a noble light. As Bernays states, “small groups of persons can, and do, make the rest of us think what they please about a given subject” (Bernays 31).
By changing tactics over time, this elite class has evaded public recognition, devising a new false paradigm with each new scheme to win the favor of the public for measures that benefit only the privileged few. The most recent lie is the so-called trickle-down effect of the Reagan administration, the assumption that “a rising tide lifts all boats” when the reality is that “year by year, the mechanisms of accumulation have dumped greater shares of wealth into the laps of fewer people” (Dienst 48). In believing this fallacy, the American people based their assumption on an expectation that the information with which they were presented would at least be reasonably similar to truth. It was assumed that public policy would be formulated to aid people, not banks. At the inception of these ideas, the American people would have considered the idea that banks were shaping public policy to benefit themselves at the expense of the public to be a conspiracy theory. In today’s world, the hardened American public is hopefully a bit less naïve. Unfortunately, the deceptors have grown in experience as well as the deceived.
Regardless of the method used, however, it seems that it would be difficult to convince a majority of American voters, all of average means, to support a party platform that benefits only the privileged few and does almost nothing to help the primary body of constituents, common people. This, to a certain extent, is relatable to Freud’s idea of redirection of impulsive desires.
Freud’s general claim was that all basic desires originated from libidinal instincts. He concluded that society influenced individual psychology to transform selfish or destructive impulses into efforts that benefit society, while repressing the original “id” instinct in favor of the restraint of the “super-ego” (Freud 70).
In the same way, Americans possess a desire to live what is commonly called the American dream, which entails being financially successful. Unfortunately, the modern world is creating a situation where only a very small number of Americans can live this dream, while the rest live at or below the poverty line. The grand majority of the so-called liberal media teaches people the beliefs of the wealthy-favoring conservative party: that those who have a ridiculous amount of financial capital should be allowed to maintain and even expand their wealth endlessly, regardless of the consequences for normal people. This can happen because the media is almost entirely controlled by the same elite class whose ideas it supports. The result is that the gullible people of average means, a group of debtors, fall into the same voting category as their creditors, the craftiest and most resourceful class.
Dienst displays the evidence that the cause of the constant strife that our nation is senselessly involved in is the simple fact that the creditor class benefits from war. “Alongside debts imposed in order to make war, there are debts imposed in order to keep the peace” (Dienst 76). What Dienst means by this is that creditors are able to create debts through the instigation of war, which is expensive and requires that governments draw an enormous sum of money from banks, while at the same time debts are created at the end of the war that the losers must pay to the winners. This creates a stream of money flowing into the creditor class.
The reason war never ends is because it is simply too profitable for the people who control the public’s worldviews and the government’s policies. The great problem of war is not only that it results in destruction of property and loss of human life, but also that it results in the depletion of the government’s public funds. In the days of the World Wars, war was an industry that could at least create profits for numerous organizations, but now the banks control the flow of money and, instead of circulating the money, absorb it.
It is appalling that people can continue to wonder at the cause of the worldwide economic crisis in the midst of all of this evidence of the reality of the matter, even with the meddling of the creditor class. Obviously, there isn’t much money circulating in the economy, because a rich few control almost all of the currency and they are simply holding onto it instead of spending it. There is no sense in trying to stimulate the average American citizen into spending money he doesn’t have. This is problematic even for the bankers, if only as much as it creates the issue that bankers won’t be able to siphon money from the public when there’s no more left to take. A parasite that kills its host, as the creditor class is doing to the massive debtor class in the present, is an inefficient one.
The great talent of this parasite, however, remains its ability to pass itself off as a beneficial symbiote to its host. The spin applied to descriptions of large, powerful companies and banks makes them seem less like debt-hoarding tyrants and more like larger-than-life heroic figures, like celebrities in the form of institutions. The same wealth that causes us to associate public figures with positive desires is used to create positive associations with banks, who are by far the largest holders of money. Dienst outlines that “a whole repertoire of narrative and affective devices now invest the animal spirits of money with soulful transcendence, while the consumption of media products is supplemented by instant-feedback market satisfactions” (125). People have been thoroughly taught to believe that acquiring money is a good thing, and thus that those who have acquired the most must be the best. But what is to be done about the desire for individuals to have money for themselves, in a world where money is concentrated in the top one percent of the population?
In the process of showing wealth in a positive light, the media also teaches Americans to seek wealth for themselves, despite the impossibility of the task. People are encouraged to believe that they can live a life of luxury comparable to that of the elusive and wealthy creditor class. It is the very existence of credit and debt that allows America’s citizens to be deceived for so long, while simultaneously feeding in to the existing power schema. Americans can pay for things they can’t afford using debt, which also ends up putting money in the hands of banks, assuming that the borrowers can even afford to pay it back at all (and eventually, they couldn’t). “The precariously overleveraged financial sector… has suggested… a refusal to acknowledge that local or punctual events can any longer interrupt the world time of capital. To forestall any day of reckoning, every effort is being made to persuade us to live in a world nobody can really afford” (126).
Basically, the great flaw of the creditor elite is that they became so effective at misleading people into creating more and more debt without end that they developed delusions of grandeur, and came to believe that they could maintain this overinflated market bubble indefinitely. However, people can only use credit to pay for things they can’t afford for as long as the banks can afford to keep lending them money that they can never fully pay back. The steady trickle of monthly payments can only keep the banks hydrated until the reservoir runs dry. The seemingly inexplicable market crash of just a few years ago was simply the actualization of an inevitability that every one of us should have seen on the horizon, were it not for the media messages that clouded our judgment.
Even after the so-called “day of reckoning,” the creditor class continues to profit at the expense of the suffering poor who make up a far greater proportion of the population. Movements like Occupy Wall Street certainly demonstrate a growing awareness of how thoroughly the American public have been deceived, yet the government refused to recognize such demonstrations. This only continues to prove that government has, for too long, been beholden to bankers and not to the American people. The tremendous debt the nation has accrued is a method of insurance to keep it in the grasp of the banks. However, with awareness of the creditor class’s misdeeds growing, it remains possible that measures may yet be enacted to restore the balance of wealth to a more reasonable level.
People have long accepted the unjust imbalance of wealth in our nation. The elite creditor class has long kept its debtors under effective psychological control through the media, which serves as a tool to manipulate public opinion more effectively than ever before. However, growing public awareness and frustration with unfair practices may yet exceed the capacity of the elite creditors to keep the public under their control. A greater level of strain has been placed on the American public by the powerful few than ever before, with the inequality of wealth distribution at undeniably extreme levels. Support for individualism is strong in America, but not so strong that the majority of Americans would be willing to suppress their desire for success and happiness to live in poverty while celebrating the extreme affluence of only a few.
Undoubtedly, the creditor class will remain in control of the public even after rebalancing takes place. The disparity between the wealthy and poor may be reduced, but it will always exist. Those with money inevitably use their power to manipulate the less powerful. If the existing creditors are deposed, new ones will arise to take their place. The only method of achieving long-term fairness in the distribution of wealth is for the government to serve its people, not a minority of powerful private interests. The only way this can be achieved is to have a truly informed and concerned public. As long as the public is too slothful to question the messages that the media presents, or even to turn out and vote against a party that supports the interests of a wealthy minority, America will forever remain indebted to its creditor class.
January 3, 2023
Borçsuzluk insani bir durumdur. Borçluluk düzeni borç alanların üzerinde hüküm sürmelerine ve güç uygulamalarına sebep olmaktadır. Bretton Woods sonrası dönemde doların egemen olduğu bir düzen yarattı Amerika. Kendisi büyük cari açıklar verebiliyorken nerdeyse tüm gelişmekte olan ülkeleri kendisine veya IMF, Dünya Bankası gibi kendi yönetim ve denetiminde olan kurumlaa borçlu olmalarını sağladı.
Neoliberal politika, serbest girişimciliği insan özgürlüğü için ideal olduğunu söylerken sadece bu güce sahip olabilecek zenginleri kutsamakta ve ödüllendirmektedir. Diğer taraftan bu tarz bir özgürlüğün paylaşılan bir şey olduğu anlamına gelmez ve bu yüzden de insan refahının ilerlemesinin artık bir hedef olmayacağı gerçeğini gizlemektedir. Mevcut sistemi çağdaş olduğunu iddia etmekte ve bu sistemde muazzam zenginliğin sürdürülmesi uğruna geniş çapta fakirliğin üretilmesine ve sürdürülmesine sebep olmaktadır. Fakirliğe karşı savaş vermek günümüzde ister istemez özgürlük ilkesini davet eder.
Mevcut ortam ABD'nin dünya üzerindeki askeri ve ekonomik hegomanyasını arzuluyor, serbest ticareti ahlaki bir ilke olarak yüceltiyor ve herhangi bir tehdide karşı önleyici güç kullanımını meşrulaştırıyor. Ev sahibi olmak ve tüketim ürünleri stoklama daha iyi bir yaşama ulaşmak için tek mevcut araç olduğu sürece, dünya üzerinde gitgide daha çok insan elbetteki bunu hedefleyecektir.
Yazar anlaşılması zor bir dil kullanmış. Tercüme edenin ise finansçı olmadığı belli. Bu sebeple okuması, anlaması zor bir kitap olmuş.
Neoliberal politika, serbest girişimciliği insan özgürlüğü için ideal olduğunu söylerken sadece bu güce sahip olabilecek zenginleri kutsamakta ve ödüllendirmektedir. Diğer taraftan bu tarz bir özgürlüğün paylaşılan bir şey olduğu anlamına gelmez ve bu yüzden de insan refahının ilerlemesinin artık bir hedef olmayacağı gerçeğini gizlemektedir. Mevcut sistemi çağdaş olduğunu iddia etmekte ve bu sistemde muazzam zenginliğin sürdürülmesi uğruna geniş çapta fakirliğin üretilmesine ve sürdürülmesine sebep olmaktadır. Fakirliğe karşı savaş vermek günümüzde ister istemez özgürlük ilkesini davet eder.
Mevcut ortam ABD'nin dünya üzerindeki askeri ve ekonomik hegomanyasını arzuluyor, serbest ticareti ahlaki bir ilke olarak yüceltiyor ve herhangi bir tehdide karşı önleyici güç kullanımını meşrulaştırıyor. Ev sahibi olmak ve tüketim ürünleri stoklama daha iyi bir yaşama ulaşmak için tek mevcut araç olduğu sürece, dünya üzerinde gitgide daha çok insan elbetteki bunu hedefleyecektir.
Yazar anlaşılması zor bir dil kullanmış. Tercüme edenin ise finansçı olmadığı belli. Bu sebeple okuması, anlaması zor bir kitap olmuş.
March 26, 2020
This was never uninteresting enough to abandon, and took some interesting turns; but it was far too rooted in post-structuralist gobbledegook to actually land the thesis or have enough cohesion to matter.
“The mass mobilization of crowds through media spectacle is fundamentally conservative: it serves purposes defined from the top down, rather than serving as a means of expression from the bottom up.”
“The mass mobilization of crowds through media spectacle is fundamentally conservative: it serves purposes defined from the top down, rather than serving as a means of expression from the bottom up.”
March 17, 2019
A disappointment. Bloated with armchair "critical theory" intellectualizing and no substance. Skip this in favor of Piketty.
January 1, 2023
clickbait
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