Thursday 7 March 2013

HCJ Lecture - The End(s) if Western Civilisation?

Weber - Bureaucracy - Charisma is a source of bureaucratic power (eg. Obama)

Main power in bureaucracy is legal - rules and laws - Lawyers

People worried that people from third world countries will take their jobs for less pay

Keynesianism - credit so people can buy things, government creating jobs to keep the economy going, keep printing money forever [problem: inflation]

Depression - Almost wiped out capitalism

Communism - Central planning, committees for everything, low quality goods

1950s - Era of American prosperity. Keynes is awesome, his system replaces neo-classical economics.

Keynesianism attacked - Far left: Maoism, third world-ism, ecology, feminism, transvaluation
                                                    Mao - third world is China, Brazil, etc, the new proletariat will rise            and destroy the first world (USA, Europe...)
                                     - Right: Racial discrimination, cultural decadence, economic parasitism (make people redundant with cheap machines), loss of national identity, globalisation as disintegration, relative and absolute economic decline of the west

The New Industrial State

Heidegger says that western civilisation is doomed - worships death, has no future, no vision of the future. Just produces trash [Hollywood movies, music, etc]

It is violent, as Heidegger suggested it would be - nuclear weapons, military spending

Anthropology - Women exist only to reproduce, true human is a violent Schopenhauerian monster

Frazer - The Golden Bough - the high priest of Nemi; and the observed behaviour of apes (rape of females by dominant male) is true human nature

Vietnam - First entirely bureaucratic-technological ware automate death machine. Defeat of the USA was the end of the enlightenment in the Heideggerian terms - not just a setoback but a complete malfunction of the civilisation.

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