Stephen Marche is Canadian, and his The New Civil War (2022) is written in the calm, reasonable tones one would expect from a Canadian. “The United States is coming to an end,” he begins. “The question is how.” Marche’s book is a discouraging read for anyone who believes that the United States is just going through a rough patch, politically speaking; Marche thinks we are kidding ourselves if we think the country can survive its current enmities and divisions. He insists that the USA can no longer function as a nation; it is a failing state, if not already a failed one, and it will either explode, implode, or, best case scenario, amicably reconfigure itself into four countries (Texas, California, North, and South). I am not usually susceptible to alarmism or to doomsday scenarios, but Marche’s matter-of-fact presentation tends to wear down even the most skeptical reader; “One way or another,” Marche announces authoritatively, “the United States is coming to an end. The divisions have become intractable. The political parties are irreconcilable. The capacity of government to make policy is diminishing. An underlying tribalism is shredding the ability of the political order to respond to threats against its own stability. The Constitution is becoming incoherent…The situation is clear; the system is broken, all along the line.”
It is difficult to dispute any of that; moreover, hope not being a plan, I have no solution to offer.
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Abolish Work is a 2016 anthology edited by Nick Ford, the express purpose of which is “to desecrate the temples of work.” David D’Amato establishes the book’s tone in his Foreword:
For the conniving sycophants of the political sphere, work is not only inevitable but desirable, not only desirable but holy. And among those afflicted with the political delusion, whether purportedly worried about coercion against the individual or social and economic justice, the salutary effects of more work — morally, psychologically, physically, etc. — are much touted. How little awareness they show of their shared religion, buried under the slogans of duty and self-denial, of twenty-first century slavery. Afraid of what they might see should they open their eyes, work’s prey cower and keep up the pretense of choice. Earnest employees itch to broadcast their schedules, each one more brimful than the last, proud, affected signals of just how busy they are.
D'Amato suggests that work serves purposes other than “productivity and efficiency”; it is at heart a “mechanism of control” that reinforces “existing class stratifications and categories…” He continues: "Premised on what David Graeber accurately calls “a hyper-fetishism of paperwork,” the bowels of our hellish corporate economy are simply bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake, a moribund world of anxiety and alienation. Quite contrary to the supercilious assurances of capitalist apologetics, work is decidedly not finely tuned for maximum productivity and efficiency; it is a mechanism of control, as concerned with maintaining existing class stratifications and categories as it is with producing iPhones and Nikes. Were efficiency (whatever indeed that is) its goal, work would at least appear very different from the bloated, wasteful monstrosity of the existing corporate economy, so dependent on the very kinds of compulsion that advocates of “free trade” purport to hate."
Thus is work necessarily predicated on a disorienting and Orwellian denial of reality.
Abolish Work is obviously just one more bit of Critical Thought meant to destroy the American Way of Life, a plot conceived by Marxist intellectuals to seduce the proletariat. But if America is on its way out anyway, why worry about its work ethic?
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The French author Emmanuel Carrere has won numerous awards for his work, fiction and non-fiction alike, on subjects ranging from Philip K. Dick to post-Soviet Russia; he was also involved in creating the brilliant French television series, Les Revenants. In The Kingdom, a book that is part historical novel, part memoir, and part theological meditation, Carrere grapples with the genesis of Christianity, with its “charms and foibles,” and with “the ragtag group of early Christians” who followed in the path of a man named Jesus (“an obscure religious freak who died under notorious circumstances”); all in an effort to understand how "normal, intelligent people can believe something as unreasonable as the Christian religion, something exactly like Greek mythology or fairy tales." Preposterously, to Carrere, modern Christians' "pie-in-the-sky ideas coexist alongside perfectly level-headed activities." Is such belief an instance of "double-mindedness" or does it suggest some profound truth inaccessible to ordinary reason?
Described as “blending scholarship with speculation [and] memoir with journalistic muckraking,” The Kingdom promises to be, like its author and its subject alike, both idiosyncratic and iconoclastic.
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They're called "books". They contain words printed, in ink, on paper.
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