{"id":11817,"date":"2021-06-25T09:57:14","date_gmt":"2021-06-25T16:57:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=11817"},"modified":"2021-06-25T09:57:37","modified_gmt":"2021-06-25T16:57:37","slug":"ls-crises-paranoia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2021\/06\/25\/ls-crises-paranoia\/","title":{"rendered":"Ls&Cs: Utopias; Crises; Paranoia"},"content":{"rendered":"

A sidebar article in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine interviews Rutger Bregman.
\nHow to Think Like a Utopian<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Bregman is a young Dutch historian who wrote UTOPIA FOR REALISTS (which I blogged about here<\/a>) and more recently HUMANKIND: A HOPEFUL HISTORY<\/a>, which argues that cooperation has been a key factor in humanity’s evolution.<\/p>\n


\nKey para from the NYTM piece:<\/p>\n

\nTo engage in utopian thinking, you can\u2019t be myopically focused on the present. There\u2019s nothing inherent about our current political, economic and social realities; people made these systems and can make them anew. To envision something novel, read more history and less news. A sensationalistic daily news cycle can constrict your ability to see the world as anything but dangerous, violent and mean. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing as anti-utopian as the product that we call the news,\u201d Bregman says. Let your interests be expansive. Read philosophy and psychology. Look around and think, It doesn\u2019t have to be this way. \u201cTake something like poverty; why does it exist?\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019ve heard things like \u2018the poor will always be with us,\u2019 but is that really true?\u201d What if poverty weren\u2019t taken as a given? Sometimes it helps to imagine what future historians will make of us. What will they see? How will they judge us?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014 \u2014 \u2014<\/div>\n

In contract to optimistic thinking is paranoid, pessimistic thinking, from conservatives.<\/p>\n

NYT: Is the U.S. in Crisis? Republicans Want Voters to Think So.<\/a><\/p>\n

Because there are always voters who can be stoked into fear and outrage by the purveyors of panic and alarm (Republicans, Fox News).<\/p>\n

\nThe coronavirus pandemic is receding. The economy is gradually climbing back. And according to recent surveys, a wide majority of Americans is feeling optimistic about the future.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, the Consumer Comfort Index, a polling measure of Americans\u2019 confidence in the economy, hit its highest level since before the pandemic.<\/p>\n

But as our congressional correspondent Jonathan Weisman points out in a new article, House Republicans are pushing a much different interpretation of what\u2019s going on. During a news conference they held on Tuesday, the buzzword was \u201ccrisis\u201d: It was used about once every minute for nearly half an hour. Republican leaders are arguing that the economy, national security, the U.S.-Mexico border and more are all in peril.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014 \u2014 \u2014<\/div>\n

This reflect a general mindset that is forever with us. <\/p>\n

Author Gregory Feeley on Facebook: “The animating force behind conservatism in America is not love (of anything) but fear.”<\/p>\n

And we recall the writings of Richard Hofstadter, from the 1960s, two books called; Anti-intellectualism in American Life<\/b> (1963), and The Paranoid Style in American Politics<\/b> (1964). From the latter:<\/p>\n

\nThe distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a \u201cvast\u201d or \u201cgigantic\u201d conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade. The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms\u2014he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is why conservatives, including the religious, are more prone to conspiracy-thinking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A sidebar article in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine interviews Rutger Bregman. How to Think Like a Utopian. Bregman is a young Dutch historian who wrote UTOPIA FOR REALISTS (which I blogged about here) and more recently HUMANKIND: A … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,16,26,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservative-resistance","category-culture","category-links","category-social-progress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11817"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11819,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11817\/revisions\/11819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}