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RE: The Politics Of Consumerism: The Cult Of Celebrity
Damn good post: you spelled out the issue clearly.
Your discussion of hedonism dovetails well with Sam Francis' writings. In his Leviathan and its Enemies, he said U.S.-style managerialism - "soft managerialism" - promotes five interlocking values:
- Scientism, the belief that social sciences can be used to manipulate people into desired behavior with the same reliability as physical-science manipulation of matter;
- Meliorism, the belief that government intervention can solve any social problem;
- Utopianism, a secularized Heaven as a guiding star for meliorism;
And....
- Cosmopolitanism, the belief that human being are at heart the same - i.e., interchangeable;
And of course....
- Hedonism
These five values, constituting the canons of a secularized civic religion, provide the ideological support for soft managerialism.
No wonder we complain so much about gaslighting. Gaslighting is a technique of manipulation, which the ruling class has a real talent for.
Ah scientism... the dream of Auguste Comte- he foresaw a day when the social sciences would eclipse the hard sciences in importance. "Climate Science" tells me that day may be upon us!
Yeah! That's the name to drop, all right. Funny: after chewing over the theory of the managerial revolution, it struck me that the first ideologist for it was none other than August Comte. Odd that he 'saw' managerialism before the railroad industry, the industry that kicked off the managerial revolution.
I'm not saying that he was wrong in everything... just mostly.
I'm not saying he's right in anything! Tbh, I think he just got lucky. When I encountered his thought, through secondary sources, I was well-primed to reject it. :)
It's the old "blind squirrel" scenario!
Yeah, plus I prolly was unclear. Compte was a straight Utopian; he had no idea that the technique of modern management even existed.
Blind squirrel.
Then it was the blind squirrel effect! I never spent too much time on him... when I discern that somebody is "out there" in a utopian or otherwise nonsensical way- I move on to more reasonable stuff.