Americanism
Donations to the NRA increase 30% the year after a school shooting occurs in a county.
The subtitle of James Pethokoukis’s recent book The Conservative Futurist is ‘How to create the sci-fi world we were promised’. Like Peter Thiel’s famous complaint that ‘we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters’, the phrase captures a sense of betrayal. Today’s techno-optimism is infused with nostalgia for the retro future.
Theodore Roszak, who coined the term counterculture in his 1969 book The Making of a Counterculture, later defined its unifying characteristic as ‘the rebellion against certain essential elements of industrial society: the priesthood of technical expertise, the world view of mainstream science and the social dominance of the corporate community’.
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journals.uchicago.eduWhen men feel their masculinity is threatened, they are 24 percentage-points more likely to want to buy an SUV. They are also willing to pay $7,320 more than non-threatened men for the same vehicle.
Liana Finck, https://www.instagram.com/share/BAH3jPX0WY
Loneliness, flakiness, isolation, canceling
‘In the technocracy, nothing is any longer small or simple or readily apparent to the non-technical man’, wrote Roszak. ‘Instead, the scale and intricacy of all human activities – political, economic, cultural – transcends the competence of the amateurish citizen and inexorably demands the attention of specially trained experts’. Technocrats might ... See more
This idea of progress acknowledges that as soon as we have something, however well it meets our original desires, we see its flaws. ‘Form follows failure’, in the words of civil engineering professor Henry Petroski. Dissatisfaction drives progress. ‘Since nothing is perfect’, writes Petroski, ‘and, indeed, since even our ideas of perfection are not... See more
The world of tomorrow - Works in Progress
Workplace Burnout is Nothing New - JSTOR Daily
daily.jstor.org
“Neurasthenia” was once the diagnosis used to refer to a spectrum of symptoms, from fatigue to depression to anxiety. Also called nervous exhaustion, nerve deficiency, or nerve weakness, it was a burgeoning problem when the term was popularized by neurologist George Miller Beard in 1869. He didn’t characterize it as a curable disease, but as a distress signal from a brain assailed with and overcome by the hefty demands of a fast-paced, urban life. (The condition was also called “Americanitis.”)
Gurwinder on Substack
substack.com