/lit/ - Literature

For a history on this phenomena, I remember reading an article that outlined how the notion of "opportunity" in the United States has changed over the years and come eventually to mean "social (economic) mobility," rather than the more civic-minded opportunity it evoked prior.

>>18609097
You have uncle Ted, I guess the taoists, and maybe the cynics. Yeah man, evrrything that yoir asking for is essentially fringe. Obviously most contemporary academics or experts are materialists.

>let’s mystify the material reasons why people are unhappy and the system is completely unsustainable into some secular-religious retard speak like “the good life” like neoliberal bureaucrats have done for the last 50 years, that’ll work

You’re in luck, there’s an entire genre of scam artists who write this shit for a living!

>>18609211
People are very obviously too alienated and losing financial prosperity to believe in any civic virtue that isn’t just obvious performance. Civics are a sign of a somewhat healthy society that can afford to have civics.

>>18609239
Based
Also, the privilege to not work the fields and die in your 50s is something that is still extremely important
Economic hardship brings mental hardship and, on top of that, richer countries have the opportunity to improve the lives of everybody

>>18609097
Yeah. I mean, none of these measures are qualitative to begin with. Having a moderately prosperous & educated society is good but you'd basically just be saying your favorite album is better because it sold more copies. It may be necessary, but not sufficient.

>>18609239
What's the fucking point to it all if you're this spiritually void? Just vulgar utilitarianism leading to people in hospital beds being fed through a tube and having their pleasure centre constantly stimulated?

>>18609300
If you're poor & live a life devoid of leisure you can't contemplatively immerse yourself because your attention is fractured constantly into vigilance about threats, debts & worries. I'm sorry but leisure time & material wellbeing are very conducive to spiritual flourishing when they aren't pursued to its extinction.

>>18609310
I guess you could say modernity proves this wrong but most people's living conditions aren't actually that good, suicide way up, drug use & overdoses way up, debts, bad prospects; "material" already invokes a pointlessly narrow strawman about how well you're doing at any one single moment, but this obviously is not how folks think about themselves in the world - they are also looking to the past & future & to others.

>>18609300
No. I’m not supporting nihilism. But being spiritually void happens in a consumer system and it produces people who don’t know why their lives are shit as they keep gorging. The only thing you can do is individually find whatever spirituality or “point” yourself and that can be anything you want.

You seem to have anxiety that there isn’t a one-fix immaterial or religious/cultural belief that can rationalize all this away and help people. I think you’d be happier if you stopped projecting that much spiritual power into people who can afford free time. People worry about this professionally and monetize making up social theories. It doesn’t have any material or spiritual impact. Life isn’t meaningless because retarded people lie sometimes to keep their fake job.

>>18609097
Aristotle discusses it
Early Marx
Agamben a little
Max Weber implicitly
Schumpeter very briefly
That's all i can think of off the topic of my head

>>18609310
OP already said some level of material sustenance is necessary.

>>18609097
Why is every 51.2 point at a different height?

>>18609239
>let's reduce the reason why people are unhappy to their material conditions despite the fact that even the most materially worst-off today are typically better off than the vast majority of the collection of individuals who lived any time in history farther than 200 years ago
you seem either disingenuous or retarded, but at least you show how deeply baked this mindset is in the culture today to dismiss a divergent perspective out-of-hand

>>18609279
This is not a choice between what we have today and working in a field to die at 50. Also consider the soulless and verging on inhumane treatment of many of those in end-of-life care at ASFs, SNFs, B&Cs, etc.

>>18609310
As stated in the OP, some level of material wealth is necessary, but again the exclusive primacy on leisure time and material well-being appears to me to be increasingly self-evidently counterproductive, even in its own framework. Self-denial is a virtue not many have today. Many people today that live "paycheck to paycheck" do so of their own volition in order to maximize their immediate material well-being and in doing so sabotage their prospects for the future, giving rise to your threats, debts, and worries.

Obviously it is different for the underclass that genuinely struggle for survival, as they are unable to achieve that threshold level of material wealth, but even their situation is often made worse by this "ethic".

Consumer Society by Baudrillard
Denial of Death by Becker
Consuming Life by Bauman
The Last Messiah by Zapffe
The Managerial Revolution by Burnham
End of Philosophy by Heidegger, at least a portion of it:

>The increase in the number of masses of human beings is done explicitly by plan so that the opportunity will never run out for claiming more "room to live" for the large masses whose size then again requires correspondingly higher masses of human beings for their arrangement. This circularity of consumption for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure which distinctively characterizes the history of a world which has become an unworld. "

I know there are a lot more. Maybe even Philippe Aries' Western Attitudes Towards Death/Hour of Our Death might help make some connection of the shift from religiosity to material ideation as the idea of death changed and moved away.

>>18609403
>you seem disingenuous or retarded

I’m correct you delusional reactionary mongoloid, neoliberal social scientists have been conducting theories on “unhappiness” for 50 years and refuse to engage with the obvious reasons why. Enjoy whatever pseudo new age self help garbage you fall for

>>18609403
also just had to lol at
>self denial is a virtue not many have today

People won’t masturbate because they read on the internet it gives them powers

>>18609310
That's kinda retarded. Happiness is relative. No matter what country or time period you live in, humans will generally always have the same fixed # of serotonin receptors. A medieval peasant would feel just as happy and sad as you are today. It's the Hedonic Treadmill.

>>18609450
Neoliberals are the ones who tend to think more products = better life though. It's justified in terms of GDP growth.

>>18609459
>Obviously some basic level of material (food, water, shelter) is necessary...
yep probably both disingenuous and retarded

>>18609418
>>18609350
Thanks for the lists.

Debord, Ellul, and Lasch haven't been named yet. John Edwards' On the Nature of True Virtue is a great look at transcendental virtue ethics as it relates to religious experience in general.

>>18609646
And I should mention obviously Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse

>>18609097
The Decline of the West chapter "Destiny and Causality". Spengler outlines the problem with applying causal thinking to the social sphere, which is essentially an attempt to mathematize it according to logic. But mathematics and causality can't be applied to something that is continually in motion in terms of feelings and desire like human society.

BUMP

Why does this board have such a rampant hatred for modernity and secularism?

>>18610271
What the collected wisdom of all ages does to a mf

>>18610271
Because it’s objectively shit.
Reject modernity, embrace tradition

>>18610271
Is the criticism not justified? Is the contemporary era not obviously exhausted of the type of cultural depth and spirit that any culture must be judged by, to say nothing of the spiritual desolation that so many of us feel, and the contentment that even the elite take in mere consumption of trash?

>>18609239
>>18609310
Scientists have found that material wealth is only mildly correlated with happiness and life satisfaction. Past a certain (fairly low) level of wealth, increases in material possessions do not correspond to proportional increases in happiness.
After that point your happiness depends much more on your physical, mental and spiritual health, having a loving family, a tightly-knit group of friends, romantic relationships, a sense of community and belonging, access to art and culture and a sense of purpose.
The thing about these neoliberalism that day Capitalism has lifted millions out of poverty and the “line go up = world gooder” line of thinking is that it ignores all those goods which are intangible and cannot be bought and sold as commodities. But boy do they try.
Capitalism has either done away entirely with them or replaced them with lackluster but easily commercialized substitutes.
The family had to be swept away because an atomized individual is easier to exploit, friendships have been replaced with social media, relationships have been turned into transactions on apps like Tinder, religion has been stripped of its spirituality and removed from everyday life but you can always pay to join a mega church, organic art and culture are no more but don’t worry because we can keep you entertained with more mass commercialized culture than you can ever hope to consume.
If all you really needed to be happy is material wealth why do rich people kill themselves?

>>18610406
Not only are we getting poorer materially but we’ve been ignoring the far more insidious loss of these things.
Material deprivation is bearable if you have those things, it’s how your ancestors survived so you could be here.
But if you live in a cubicle apartment and on top of that you don’t have any of the intangible goods mentioned above it’s absolute suicide fuel.

This is worth looking into for more information on the potential inability of the economy to replicate the growth witnessed from 1870-1970, and how that lack of real growth may necessitate drastic measures to prop up advanced economies in the future (culminating so far in the transition of the US into a financial economy with its concomitant problems).

>>18610271
>why do social outcasts hate the society which has cast them out

Think about it. Nowadays even the poorest can afford things like iPhones. Ivan from Russia and Joao from Brazil have laptops they use to pirate movies and shit up CSGO servers, but have their lives tangibly improved? No, they haven’t because what’s preventing from being happy is not just being poor but due to the political conditions associated with modernity.
You know what made Ancient Greece such a glorious civilization? Their values. The Greeks were not concerned with “profit” or “efficiency” they placed truth and beauty as more important values.
The average Greek, compared to us, lived in absolute poverty, yet they were probably happier than us. Only slaves worked in their society and they were a minority that did the tasks necessary to keep civilization running (the pandemic really showed pointless and unnecessary most jobs are since we didn’t collapse into violent anarchy).
Freed from the yoke of labor, the free citizens of the Greek city-states could dedicate their time to honing their craft in the arts or contribute to the sciences. No wonder then that their civilization achieved such sophistication in the oral tradition, sculpture, philosophy, natural sciences and more.
Our society instead is follows the logic of a capitalist economy, which is centered around producing more goods and services, our values being industriousness and efficiency. This however comes at the price of forfeiting your freedom, you become a slave to the capitalist mode of production.
If you asked me if I was willing to forfeit my tv, my iPhone and my laptop in exchange for not having to work a day in my life I would do it in a heartbeat.
To the slave, freedom is more valuable than gold.

>>18610537
>(the pandemic really showed pointless and unnecessary most jobs are since we didn’t collapse into violent anarchy).
This is an important point. False needs, despite their lack of social necessity, figure into the current system as any legitimate need does.

BUMP II BOOGALOO

>>18609097
This is an extension of the problems of modern social "sciences". Somewhere along the way social thinkers/intellectuals started to LARP as scientists to please their ego. And the field turned into pseudoscientific botched up statistics. I feel like this move is a core cause of modern problems. For eg :- a mathematical study of benefits or harms of diversity in workplace is essentially a pseudoscientific endeavour , because the system involved in this scenario is too complex to be analysed statistically let alone by ill trained social "scientists". While in the past social thinkers would have tried to intellectually discuss this issue , modern social thinkers are tryingto larp as scientists and doing a great disservice to their field.

Mostly deeply rooted of all the illusions which technical progress creates is probably that of the riches produced by it. At bottom, no one doubts that industry increases our riches, and that it does so all the more, the further industrialization is spread by technical progress. It appears that there are historical and economic situations encouraging such a conviction – there are periods of prosperity which seem to strengthen and support it, the most fruitful being those brought about by the head start in mechanization which a few European nations had secured. It was an advantage resulting from a position of monopoly which could not be maintained, which dwindled away as technical thinking spread around the earth. It would be as interesting to study the causes of these advantages created by technical progress, as it would be to determine the events which put an end to them. The common feature of every advantage of this sort is the exploitation of a propitious situation.
But what are riches? If we want to get to the bottom of the thing, this question must be asked. The notions on this point are full of confusion, owing to jumbled concepts. Riches, by definition, are either a being or a having. If I conceive of them as a being, it is obvious that I am rich not because I have much – rather, all having is dependent upon the riches of my nature. So conceived, riches are not something which alight upon man or fly away from him; they are an endowment of nature, subject to neither will nor effort. They are original wealth, an added measure of freedom which blossoms forth in certain human beings. For riches and freedom are inseparably joined together, so intimately that riches of any kind can be appraised by the measure of freedom they contain. Riches in this sense may even be identical with poverty; a rich being is consistent with a not-having, with a lack of material possessions. Homer means just this when he calls the beggar a king. Only such riches as are mine by nature can I fully command and enjoy. Where riches consist in having, the capacity for enjoying them does not necessarily go with them. It may be lacking – a frequent case.

>>18611946
Where riches are one with rank, they also have that strength that is subject neither to change nor chance. They are as lasting and stable as are those treasures that cannot be spent nor consumed by time. But riches that are a mere having may be taken from me at any moment. Most men, it is true, believe that riches are created by one's enriching himself – a delusion they have in common with all the rabble on earth. Only poverty can enrich itself. Poverty, by analogy with riches, is either a not-being or a not-having. Where it is not-being, it cannot be conceived as identical with riches which are being. Where it is not-having, it may be identical with riches: when a material not-having coincides with a rich being.
In all Indo-Germanic languages, riches are conceived as a being. In German, "rich" (reich) and "realm" (Reich) are of the same root. For "rich" here means no less than mighty, noble, regal, as one finds it in the Latin regius. And Reich is the same as the Latin rex, and the Sanskrit rajan, meaning king. Thus, riches in the original meaning are nothing else than the ruling, regal power and force in man. This original significance has been buried, particularly by the jargon of the economists who equate riches with economic having. But no one sensing the truth of the deeper meaning would want to accept so vulgar a conception. Possession of money, the sheer having of money, is contemptible, and it always becomes contemptible if it falls into the hands of that poverty which denotes a not-being. Unfailingly, the mark of riches is that they lavish abundance like the Nile. Riches are the regal nature in man which goes through him like veins of gold. Riches can never be created by him who is born only to eat up – the mere consumer.

>>18611925
The social sciences have additionally almost always had activist undercurrents, often openly.

>>18609097
>It reduces "the good life" to material prosperity, or to the consumption of goods and services, and implicit in it is the notion that the more prosperous and consuming of goods and services, the better the life. Any transcendental or non-materialist conception of life is disregarded.
Obviously "the good life" isn't actually a thing you can measure, it's just a made up concept. There's no "reduction" unless you're imputing meaning into metrics which aren't there. If you have a capitalist economy and something like GDP starts to contract generally speaking it's safe to say peoples life quality is decreasing but obviously there's no guarantee. If you want to take into account more variables you can. The thing is whatever you mean by "non-materialist concepts" tend to be not easily quantifiable since they just exist in peoples head.
>but reduction to capital accumulation blatantly ignores the spiritual desolation of the advanced American/European nations today as well as rising mental illness, suicide, and what might be referred to as social self-alienation.
Again you're just listing more already accessible statistics (mental illness/suicide). America is more religious than Europe and most of east Asia but they're also more materialistic in most regards so things aren't so simple.
>Where can I read nonfiction that tackles this problem, at least implicitly?
This is a very stereotypical take by conservatards and leftists and it's always a disingenuous rationalizations for a plan of extreme austerity for ideological reasons.
>>18610406
>The thing about these neoliberalism that day Capitalism has lifted millions out of poverty and the “line go up = world gooder” line of thinking is that it ignores all those goods which are intangible and cannot be bought and sold as commodities. But boy do they try.
You're going the opposite and implying a necessary negative correlation. Even in a non-capitalist economy you'd see similar issues. Most of what you see going on on the internet isn't a result of some capitalist conspiracy but the uncontrolled neurotic aspects of human beings.
>If all you really needed to be happy is material wealth why do rich people kill themselves?
Obviously material wealth isn't sufficient but do rich people really commit suicide at higher rates? No.
>>18610485
> the growth witnessed from 1870-1970
Well that's really a totally meaningless range of time since there's so many radical policy changes over that time. If you look at late 1800's growth rates they weren't that impressive from a modern perspective really and it was backed by large foreign immigration and higher domestic birth rates. Eventually immigration was constrained by government and birth rates started to collapse with prosperity but it's followed by a great depression which only gets offset by WWII and government intervention into everything which resulted in a temporary inflation in domestic birth rates.

>>18612495
>Well that's really a totally meaningless range of time since there's so many radical policy changes over that time. If you look at late 1800's growth rates they weren't that impressive from a modern perspective really and it was backed by large foreign immigration and higher domestic birth rates. Eventually immigration was constrained by government and birth rates started to collapse with prosperity but it's followed by a great depression which only gets offset by WWII and government intervention into everything which resulted in a temporary inflation in domestic birth rates.
In his book Gordon looks at the real, qualitative improvement of the quality of life (along with more conventional/"numerical" indicators) that resulted from innovations that drastically changed life or reduced the necessary toil. The widespread commercial availability of things like electric lighting, running water, networked gas and heating, mass-production of food, and the internal combustion engine are things that altered life in ways that are not possible to repeat (and yet which are not captured by mere examination of the numbers). Measures like the introduction of women into the workplace and the drastic shortening of the workweek are additional factors. His point is that future prospects for changes of this magnitude are relatively dim, and that the current focus on ICT (Information and Computer Technology) and finance are further evidence (indeed the continued prosperity non-financial sectors look increasingly wobbly). He also looks into the more conventional indicators for continued growth, but the primary thrust of his argument throughout the book is that many of the innovations in the "special century" are such that it would be naive to imagine that real, qualitative growth can continue unabated into the foreseeable future.
Ironically your abstractions and focus on numerics seem to be exactly what the OP is referring to.

>>18613653
>Ironically your abstractions and focus on numerics seem to be exactly what the OP is referring to.
Except it's the most clear. If you don't want the quantitative but qualitative changes you're still basically talking just about making things faster. If I can physically get from point A to point B or transfer/process data 50% faster than that's progress. There's been diminishing returns in most ways we have approached that but a technological revolutions similar to changing from horse power to internal combustion engines isn't outright impossible

>>18614283
It's not the most clear though; that's the point. It's not clear at all. It is more convenient and digestible than it is clear. An examination of qualitative changes and their prospects for growth may be more clear or enlightening. You said earlier
>If you have a capitalist economy and something like GDP starts to contract generally speaking it's safe to say peoples life quality is decreasing but obviously there's no guarantee.
The problem is that the inverted statement is even more tenuous and on higher resolution drops all pretense of truth value: there may be an association between higher GDP and higher quality-of-life but nobody would dare venture into any statement more concrete than that. Low GDP countries that catch up to the contemporary advanced country levels will have very different quality-of-life evolutions than those that were the first to reach a high level. Same goes for many purely economic indicators. On the atomic level a higher income only represents a higher capacity for consumption and leisure goods, it makes no pretense to quality-of-life unless conflating consumption with a quality life.

>>18614390
>>18614283
I should also note that along with Gordon's book is the well-documented and absolutely unprecedented decline in productivity growth that has occurred since the 1970s which challenges even the most fundamental assumptions of many economic models, frameworks, and understandings. It's a hot topic in academic economics. It's not exactly a fringe view.

>>18614390
>On the atomic level a higher income only represents a higher capacity for consumption and leisure goods, it makes no pretense to quality-of-life unless conflating consumption with a quality life.
It's not conflating anything... a higher capacity to consume is just that a higher capacity to consume, you don't need to impute anything more into that. Whatever you mean by "quality of life" isn't something you can really directly measure.

>>18614420
Productivity growth in advanced countries obviously slowed down as services became a bigger part of the economy... most jobs in the service sector can't become much more "productive" in technical terms. Why you don't have supersonic airliners or highspeed rail across America is a different issue.

>>18609097
Suppressed wages due to mass immigration = good

Higher wages due to low immigration = racism

>>18614770
That's a very reductive perspective on the decline of productivity growth, there's nothing obvious about it. Supersonic airliners and high speed rail would be innovations of degrees and not orders of magnitude; they're not going to increase productivity (to follow on that theme) nor are they going to fundamentally reduce the toil of living.