tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post2353524466061108374..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: In Which I Champion Inefficient Unprofitable Messy "Massarchy," Whatever That's Supposed to BeDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-88572996344146536152007-12-26T13:26:00.000-08:002007-12-26T13:26:00.000-08:00Will you read the full blog post? It's long and h...Will you read the full blog post? It's long and hard to explain.<BR/><BR/>Yes, profit is not the best indicator, but it is the best objective indicator available.<BR/><BR/>Massarchy is not necessarily democracy. (The blog post explains it better than I could.) A democracy has elections, but a massarchy is ultimately controlled by public opinion. A democracy could have symbolic elections, and it wouldn't be a massarchy.<BR/><BR/>Yes, I am a "he."<BR/><BR/>Why should you care about having a say in the world?<BR/><BR/><I>Public</I> opinion (basically politics)...<BR/><BR/><I>Politics is, recall, the ongoing reconciliation of the aspirations of the diversity of stakeholders with whom one shares the world. This worldly sharing is a thin and fraught matter, the "inter-esse" or being in the inter-subjective in-between in the midst of subjects, objects, and abjects that yields intelligible shared interests (think of the "interested" inter-implication of people by way of their shared dependence on the perishable environment, their shared vulnerability to criminal, military, and politice violence, their shared imbrication in global developmental circuits of production and trade, their shared susceptibility to interpretation via personal information accessible in online networks, their shared imbrication in history and diaspora), an interested inclusion thinner by far than the thick but indispensably more exclusive sharings on which moral identification or aesthetic sympathy depend for their substance.</I><BR/><BR/>Yes. It also has some bad effects that are mentioned in the blog post (mainly, politically convenient beliefs spread, even if they are wrong).<BR/><BR/><I>This seems an especially relevant point in addressing "peco's" concerns inasmuch as his preference for "profitable" governance that, above all else, "works" (a strong preference that seems rather curiously to refrain from indicating what counts as "working," apart from an insistence that whatever "working" means it certainly has nothing to do with pesky notions like "legitimacy" that bedevil my own political thinking), seems to connect with his worries about the messy opinionated masses of democratic "massarchies" as well as with his desire for more "efficient" modes of governance. Needless to say, whenever one calls up the unmoored non-contextualized value of "efficiency" in a moment like this it is necessary to remind ourselves that "efficiency" is always efficiency -- in the service of which ends among others? efficiency -- in the service of whose ends among others?</I><BR/><BR/>You can define "works" however you want, as long as it does not include "legitimacy" (it can include <I>anything</I> else). Efficiency in the service of the shareholders, and probably others if it helps the shareholders.<BR/><BR/><I>I have to say that the valorized attitudes toward "profit" and "efficiency" together with vilified attitudes toward "opinion" and "legitimacy" and "masses" in "peco's" account give me the queasy feeling that fairly straightforward rightwing reactionary bullshit is circling down the discursive drain here.</I><BR/><BR/>Rightwing reactionary non-bullshit...<BR/><BR/><I>I think it is disastrous to say the least to try to organize governance with an eye to parochial profit making rather than to the legitimacy of democratic process and informed, nonduressed consent. And I mean that word in the literal sense in which anti-democratic profit-hungry governance authored or at any rate incomparably exacerbated the disastrous occupation of Iraq, the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, and so on.</I><BR/><BR/>A democratic government would have the right goals but be inefficient in carrying them out. A for-profit <I>corporate</I> government would have an acceptable goal and be much more efficient. The blog post will explain it better...<BR/><BR/><I>An outright fetishization of so-called spontaneous orders and market machineries and profit-taking processes regarded as political panacaea seems to me to have been the principal intellectual (in stricto senso anti-intellectual) blight of the last 25 years or so. I believe that this market fundamentalist neoliberal tide is turning at last, and by way of conclusion I will offer "peco" and others of like mind the friendly advice that they will do well to attend carefully to the significance of these shifts as they continue to try to get away with whatever it is they are trying to get away with.</I><BR/><BR/>If I had to choose two forms of government, I would choose MM's idea and yours. I think I would prefer MM's idea, though.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com