Post-individualism
Severin Matusek and
Post-individualism
Severin Matusek and
This was illuminating. My notes:
Negative power is the way people have been control for most of human history.
Negative power means being controlled by prohibition or limitation, telling people you can’t do this or that. Today, people are controlled through positive power. Positive power tells you you can be whatever you want, you’re in charge, so you have no limitations. As long as you can put your head down, focus, grind, achieve your short term goals, set new ones and achieve those.
Authenticity is an ad campaign of neo-liberalism. It's a self absorbed nightmare. People now have to define themselves through themselves without any sort of help from the outside. Everyone is their own little personal project. Everything we learn is not just learning anymore. It's an investment in ourselves. Everything is about mentally optimizing yourself working, producing more efficiently with your mind.


oftentimes when folks think about existing in groups, their self sort of gets lost. But, actually, caring for yourself—and, maybe, reinventing the individual narrative that has been so Americanized into something that’s going to contribute to the group’s care—is what I’m getting at.
That ‘individual responsibility’ idea is present in so many messages from awareness campaigns: the idea that it is our duty to reach out to loved ones and services for help; the suggestion that mental health support should come in the form of a ‘service’ at all; the emphasis on individual tools like therapy, meds, self-help, mindfulness and apps to
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Reciprocity of thinking requires us to pay attention to who else is speaking alongside us. It also positions us, first and foremost, as citizens embedded in dynamic legal orders and systems of relations that require us to work constantly and thoughtfully across the myriad systems of thinking, acting, and governance within which we find ourselves
... See moresuffering is conceptualized in ways that protect the current economy from criticism—namely, as rooted in individual rather than social causes, which means we must favor self over social reform