Episode #203 ... Why the future is being slowly cancelled. - Postmodernism (Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism)
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Thanks to everyone who supports the podcast on Patreon. Thanks for giving me and my family a life every episode. Always going to keep doing my best here for you. I hope you love the show today. So I highly recommend listening to last episode on neoliberalism because everything on this episode is going to build off of that one.

We're going to talk about how the hyper-focus on the individual, the use of competition as the main organizing principle of society, the primary goal of getting the government out of the way of people innovating, how all this gets combined with postmodernism in a way that leaves us in a spot that Mark Fisher thinks is incredibly difficult to move away from if you wanted to.

And to just begin with an example of the type of instincts postmodernism brings about in people, let's talk about ethics for a second. Maybe one of the most fundamental questions you can ask in philosophy. What is it that makes something right or wrong?

By the way, going to be sprinkling in some episodes here soon on ethical reasoning, hoping it'll be helpful to demonstrate for people what philosophy can bring into these conversations, which is a lot. But the question for now is, what do you think the average person living in postmodern society would say if you asked them, how do you determine what right or wrong is in a given situation?

And I think most people, a good percentage of specifically young people alive today, if you pressed them hard enough on it, would say that they think that morality is something that's relative. They'll say, who am I to claim that one culture is better or worse than any other culture?

Their values make sense to them, my values make sense to me. I can't appeal to anything objectively better about mine than theirs. And I certainly, as someone born into a postmodern type of subjectivity, have to be very skeptical of any sort of grand narrative that's been constructed out there that tries to make claims about moral objectivity. Those don't exist to me, so therefore morality is relative.

And then if you ask those same people, okay, well, if that's the case, then how should we be treating other people or cultures that see things differently than you do? And again, for a lot of young people living in postmodern society, their answer is often that we should treat people with tolerance. And it makes sense. See, because in a world where every moral conclusion is equally valid to you, then of course you should be tolerant to people to be able to hold whatever positions they want to.

And with this tolerant relativism that's super common these days, well, it all sounds really great. And yes, there's people who would say that this is the pinnacle of moral wisdom. Everybody else out there is just a religious nutjob. Certainly people out there that would say that. But there's other people out there who would say to this person that this tolerant relativism is actually a glaring contradiction, that it's such a glaring contradiction that it actually becomes an indefensible philosophical position.

Because if every person and every culture out there is equally correct about morality, then that would mean that even the most intolerant cultures would have to be right as well.

Which then makes your additional belief that tolerance is the correct way to be behaving in the world. It makes it incompatible with true moral relativism. And again, some people would say that the reason young people would be the ones that you see holding this kind of position is because they oftentimes haven't really been tested yet in life where there's a line in the sand and they are forced to take sides and difficult moral issues that need a decision to be made.

In fact, on that same note, to some people, tolerant relativism, if you wanted to break it down, is really something you see mostly in privileged, wealthy Western societies. Because they would say the only type of person that can hold that position for very long are people that live in societies that are peaceful enough that they don't really have some group that opposes their entire existence that they feel the need to defend themselves against.

You know, they'd say it's funny how your moral relativism starts to fade a bit the second there's a dude with an ax sitting on your doorstep. You know, it's a pretty difficult act to pull off when your family's getting dismembered in front of you to be like, your beliefs, my beliefs, let's just call it has these has these. Why don't we?

Again, there's some people out there that would say that true moral reasoning only actually begins when someone declares a set of moral universals and then is mature enough to recognize the weight and complexity that comes along with doing something like that.

You know, as we talked about a couple episodes ago to Zizek, even within something like postmodernism, that on the surface is skeptical of any of these universals, in the sense that postmodernism is going to elevate difference and celebrates it as the most important factor, to someone like Zizek, this is not a postmodernist rejecting universals. To him, this is just creating a universal out of difference.

So from that perspective, another way to view this whole morality thing is that maybe it's impossible for someone to not be following moral universals. It's just possible for people to not be aware of the ones they're supporting or to live in a place that's peaceful enough to not require you to look at yours deeper. And again, it's interesting. That could be because you live in a really safe, peaceful country, but it could also just be you manufacturing a peaceful environment like that in your life by surrounding yourself with friends who all agree with you.

But anyway, as we do on this podcast, let's proceed from here as though this is the case, that a very important piece of making any sort of progress in the world is going to require people to declare certain moral universals and then be able to act on them without having to apologize for them constantly. Well, if that is true, then it would make total sense to Mark Fisher why the cultural logic of postmodernism leaves us in a place he thinks where we are completely stuck in the present.

In fact, at certain places in his work, he calls the Western world a society that has a memory condition. The Western world has what is called "interograde amnesia." Now, on the off chance you're listening to this show and you don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of memory disorders, the good news is there's a movie that can help illustrate his point here. Mark Fisher compares how we are as a society to the character named Leonard in the movie "Memento," directed by Christopher Nolan back in the year 2000. Maybe you've seen it before.

The main character is a guy named Leonard that can't form new memories. Importantly, in the movie he's also a guy whose wife was murdered not too long ago.

And he remembers everything about his life up until a certain point. But once he gets sick, no matter how hard he tries, he just doesn't remember anything beyond that. Now, in the movie, he's also trying to solve the murder of his wife. So whenever he gets a piece of information he doesn't want to forget that could help him figure it out, he tattoos it on his body. He takes a bunch of pictures. He makes notes about it. He is essentially a man that has a major mystery that he needs to solve that's super important to him. But

but is constantly living in this haze where he can't form new memories, has to be skeptical of everything around him, and lives pretty much every day in a state of confusion. And to Mark Fisher, this describes the life of a modern person maybe better than it first may seem. And it certainly describes the condition of society overall. We are living in a state of cultural amnesia to Mark Fisher, where we can't remember our past, which then makes it impossible to accurately diagnose the present, and even more difficult to be able to imagine a different social future that may be better off for people.

Think of the confusion that postmodernism often leaves people in. When you question grand narratives about the world you live in, and more than that, when questioning narratives and universals becomes something that's very important to you, that you're naturally skeptical towards,

then what comes at the cost of that oftentimes are things that traditionally have given people a clear sense of identity all throughout human history. That is, the metanarratives that unify societies together around certain common stories we all have about reality. As an example, think of how this applies to history as one of those common stories we usually have.

Consider the fact that there's one version of history that's taught to people in classrooms all over the world that centers the story of history around great wars that have taken place. You know, memorizing a bunch of dates. This is when Napoleon invaded Russia. This is when the Magna Carta was signed. In other words, human history is taught sometimes as just a progression of different great leaders seizing territory from each other. And there's a criticism of that view that's well-received in postmodern society that says, well, look, that's not the whole story of what humanity is.

We're talking about all human beings here, all of human experience. And when you think about it that way, human history is just as much the summer romance between two people that fall in love, or the life of a street vendor in 9th century Baghdad, the stories of a lighthouse keeper stranded in a lighthouse all alone in horrible conditions just trying to keep ships safe as they're passing through.

You know, this kind of person would say there's an infinite number of ways that history can be interpreted, and our responsibility is to subvert the existing narratives and tell the stories of the voiceless from the past. And again, this would be generally seen as a really nice sentiment to people living in a postmodern world. But what that also brings along with it, some people say, is a creative license to be able to reinterpret history and present it in whatever way you want, which often turns into presenting it in a way that just benefits whatever political ends you're trying to justify.

For example, in my country, the United States, the founding fathers of our country, I mean, who were any of these dudes with buckles on me shoes and powdered wigs? Like, what's the true answer to that question? Who were the founding fathers?

Well, in many cases in postmodern society, it all depends on what side of the political aisle you fall on. One side of it interprets history in a way where these men were some of the greatest political minds to have ever lived on planet Earth, launching the greatest experiment in nation building that has ever been launched. Now, it's also possible to see these men as slave owners and bigots and people that were actively complicit in the extermination of the Native Americans and much more than that.

But which one of these is true? And you'll see this happen when it comes to most of a postmodern subject's view of history, where depending on what story you believe about the recent past and the place you live in, that will determine the way that you see the present and then what you think the next best moves are for the future.

But if nobody can agree on what their history is, then history isn't a meta-narrative anymore that unifies a society. History just becomes this fragmented story that's used as an instrument to prove your political bias. Where the same events, the exact same historical figures, the meaning of them will completely change depending on who's evoking them. And here's the point.

History is not the only example of a metanarrative that's been deconstructed to the point that it no longer has the same unifying potential as in former societies. From shared rituals to community bonds, a shared conception of the truth more generally, most things that unify your understanding of what your culture is all about and who you are within it. I mean, there's a reason several modern-day philosophers have described the world we live in as one that is schizophrenic.

Because that's obviously not a clinical diagnosis they're making there. It's a metaphor for the type of experience that's often available for people, where there's a breakdown of these unifying metanarratives that help us develop a clear sense of who we are and an obvious defined position within the world around us with clear boundaries to it. Feeling confused, like you don't really know what's going on in the world and you don't know who or what to read to figure out what's going on.

And do you think the one thing that's for sure is that the people that claim to know what's going on are clearly idiots? And you feel like every year sort of blends into the next with no real prospects on the horizon for different ways of living that may come about in the future? This is a common complaint of people living in postmodern culture.

And it's because postmodernism, at bottom, is the critique of the critique. It is a reaction video to a reaction video about reality. It is fundamentally not about constructing any new cultural forms. It's about deconstruction. It's about the elevation of difference to the level of the universal. This is what makes the critique so effective.

But it also comes with certain social effects. It becomes very difficult to go external to yourself to find meaning in a postmodern world, or to declare universals and look to the future as a way out. So what happens is when people can't go external, they turn inward towards narcissism. And because they can't go forwards to the future, they go backwards towards nostalgia. And this is going to be the other part of this unique blend we talked about last episode that's going to lead us into the state of affairs called capitalist realism.

Where everything we talked about last episode with neoliberalism, the focus on the individual and the expansion of capital for the sake of capital, all this gets combined with postmodernism that puts people in a haze where they are confused and incapable of orienting themselves in time, let alone being able to imagine a different social future. To put it another way, we are stuck for Mark Fisher in a confused, narcissistic present moment with no conception of what the future should even be looking like.

And as he said, capitalist realism is impossible to define in a single sentence. The best way to show people what capitalist realism is, is to give them example after example that they can see in the world all around them. So that's what I'm going to try to do here, to show through examples how in this postmodern neoliberal vacuum that's been created, how we accept the false reality that capitalism is not an economic system. It's just simply the way the world is with no hope of changing it.

But again, let's give some examples that support that theory. Where Mark Fisher's coming from is that every era of thought, whether that's postmodern, modern, medieval, renaissance, whatever it is, every one of these eras of thought have artwork that's created during that time that corresponds to the thinking of that time.

In a sense, you can tell a lot about the thinking of a particular time period just by looking at the artwork that comes out of it. And many art critics out there agree that the type of art that typically comes out of a postmodern type of subjectivity is what's called pastiche. Pastiche meaning that it incorporates different cultural forms from the past, from other eras, and then remixes them together into an art that attempts to create something new out of them.

In other words, remixing, reinterpreting, sampling, resurrecting old cultural forms, warming them up in the microwave and then passing them off as something new and creative. This becomes a hallmark of postmodern art. There's an example I saw years ago to illustrate this point. I couldn't find who the guy was, but he has a brilliant example to show what Mark Fisher is talking about here. He just brought up a list of the highest grossing movies from the year 2019. Again, this was a few years ago.

So as I read this list, ask yourself, when were these cultural forms originally created? Number one of that year was Avengers Endgame, two was Lion King, three is Frozen 2, four is Spider-Man, five is Captain Marvel, six is Joker, seven is Star Wars, eight is Toy Story, nine is Aladdin, and ten is Jumanji.

Now, every one of those, except for Frozen 2, is a remix of older cultural forms, a remixing of art that was created during a different time where artists at that time were actually taking more risks and creating things that were new. I mean, even Frozen 2, you could say, with just a little interpretation, is just a remake of what Disney's been doing for decades. Not the least of which, it's a remake of what they did in the first Frozen movie.

Point is, this is not new stuff. This is old stuff being remixed in the present. Now, I want to give a couple more examples of this, but quick point, just so I can progressively build an organized case for Mark Fisher's point here. I've been working on my communication lately. Notice how these movies are all both older cultural forms that are being remixed, but how they're also movies that produce the most capital for the studios that make them by selling nostalgia. Just that. That's all I want to say. Okay, next example.

How about one from the realm of music? Mark Fisher would say that 50 years ago, right around the year 1970, there was a distinct sound that music used to have back then, as all music did from long enough ago. What he means is you can hear a song from back then, and you can be instantly reminded of a specific period in music. The 1970s sound very different than the 1980s, which sound totally different than the 1990s.

And that's because within those years, multiple creative, visionary, stylistic changes occurred in music where you can see it clear as day that Motley Crue sounds nothing like Nirvana and Nirvana sounds nothing like Huey Lewis and the News. In fact, you go back far enough, you pay attention, and there can be a difference between the music of the summer of 75 and the summer of 76. One year is sometimes enough to notice a totally different look on what music can sound like.

where you hear it and you're like, "Wow, wow, that's different. I'm gonna have to re-listen to this again to be able to fully internalize all this." Some people would say that's the experience of you listening to true artwork, is when you have that feeling. But now compare the level of change from 1970 to 1990, 20 years, to the 24-year difference between music from the year 2000 and 2024. Not as much of a change. Some people would say not much of a change at all. So what happened?

Mark Fisher might start to explain this by saying that it's almost like a lot of musicians are reinterpreting and remixing older cultural forms rather than creating anything you could call truly subversive or new. The examples here are everywhere. It feels weird even needing to single certain ones out, but I'll take ones just from the last few weeks of the news for the sake of having a discussion right now. Look just at the Eminem song that came out a couple weeks ago.

The chorus of the song is a remix of Abracadabra by the Steve Miller Band from 1982, with a guest verse from a character Eminem used to play back in his music in 1999, with constant callbacks to older songs and older music videos all throughout it. Look at Taylor Swift and the concert series she just put on that was the highest grossing concert tour of all time, made over a billion dollars. It's called the Eras Tour. It is a nostalgic remix of different eras of the last 20 years of her making music.

Look at Blink-182. Just dropped a new CD where both in form and in content, it is an almost constant reference to another period of their career 20 years ago when the world was a different place. Now I need to be clear here. None of this is saying anything bad about these artists. It may sound that way because it's saying that they're not creating anything new.

But hopefully by using three super talented artists like this as examples, it'll show that this is not a moral judgment that's being made. This is a cultural observation. The point is, these are generational artists of our time that are all selling nostalgia to their fans. So you have to ask the question, why is nostalgia something that's in such high demand during our time? One more example before we get deeper into this. Let's take this from movies to music to now video games. Another form of art you could look at in the world around you.

Ask yourself, when a team of game developers is sitting in the creative room coming up with ideas for their next game, and when they're left with a choice to either risk millions of dollars developing a game that at the end of the day may not even take off or get any sort of traction, and best case scenario, it's going to get roasted online by a lot of gamers that hold this kind of art to a high standard because they care a lot about it. It's an interesting question. Does the company risk the millions of dollars to be able to create something new?

Or do they take a classic game that they made a few decades ago and remix it with higher resolutions, new textures, an HD soundtrack? Do they do that instead because they know there's going to be a good percentage of people that already love that game that will want to experience that nostalgia for a different time? To tie all these examples we just gave together, Mark Fisher has a famous quote. He says that to live in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture delivered to you through 21st century technology.

It is to have the ideas and the art of the 20th century shown to you in 4K, or streamed to you with high-speed internet. Again, for Mark Fisher, we are caught in a perpetual state of the present. Postmodernism puts us in a collective haze, skeptical of grand narratives, not able to declare universals and create truly subversive artwork that gives us an entirely new look

And then this is met with market fundamentalism and the default set of values of capitalist realism that everything, including art, should be about the expansion of capital for the sake of capital. In other words, art, in our world of capitalist realism, is no longer about taking risks anymore. It's no longer about moving things forward. And the fact is these days, it is just good business for artists to sell people nostalgia.

And it's not because they're bad people. Artists sell nostalgia in our time because remembering pleasant moments from the past becomes high art if you're living in a society where people can't possibly imagine a different future for themselves. And if it's not obvious by this point, art is going to just be a micro example of all this. This same thing applies to the way we think about creative ideas when it comes to the realm of politics and making our societies better.

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Mark Fisher says, as one example, think of how this changes the experience of the way most people see time. Let's go back to our music example from before. Just a few decades ago, it was possible for somebody to hear a song and be brought back in their mind to the summer of 75. Oh, I remember listening to that song, they'll say. I was studying for my GED exam that summer.

And then I remember next year, the songs of 76. I was listening to those when I started my new job at the meatpacking plant. Good times back then in my life. Meatpacking plant, G-E-D. See, in a way, to Mark Fisher, this way of experiencing time is an important part of how human beings make sense of our lives. We have these snapshots in time that we remember that are distinct to a particular cultural moment. And then we look back on these moments and we use them as an important part of how we structure the narrative of our lives.

But what happens when we don't have the ability to use these anymore because everything is a remix of something old?

Well, as Mark Fisher says, the experience of the person living in this culture in the last 20 years or so is that time starts to become blurry. We live in a world, he says, where there's no criteria anymore for obsolescence, meaning there's no real point where you can look at something within culture from 20 years ago and say, no, no, no, that thing is old. All right. Old to the point that it's embarrassing now. I mean, with all due respect, Grandpa, get that CD out of my face that you were listening to from 20 years ago. We got to move on from this as a culture now.

No, in our world, things just become retro or vintage or fall into some other category. And by the way, fashion becomes yet another example of this culture you can see all around you that's constantly being remixed and recycled. People no longer have these clear boundaries between things that make them culturally obsolete. And when you combine that fact with us having no clear boundaries for what the truth is, you know, there's only different perspectives, morality is entirely relative.

When you combine that with history being used just as a tool to confirm political bias, when you combine that with the fact that we have no distinct moments in time to help us understand the narrative of our lives, this all leads for Mark Fisher to an experience of reality that can feel very blurry and confusing. It all leads to what he famously calls the slow cancellation of the future.

See, to Mark Fisher, we used to be able to dream about the future in past generations. All throughout history, people have imagined different social futures and then done things to bring them about. Even as recently as a couple generations ago, people still dreamed about a different world than the one they were living in. Technology, for example, people used to think of it as a thing that could allow us to imagine entirely different ways of organizing ourselves as people. You know, people used to think back in the 1950s, for example, what if technology could eventually make us so we don't have to work as much as we do right now?

Or what if robots could help us around the house so we don't have to do as many chores that we don't like doing? Or what if we could colonize the moon or other planets? You know, start spreading ourselves across the galaxy. Who wouldn't love them a little more of us humans on their planet? These were revolutionary ideas back in the 1950s.

But here we are almost 75 years later, and where are we? Well, we're more or less dreaming about the exact same stuff they were back then. Now, why is that? It's actually an interesting line of thinking. One answer you could give to that is to say, well, these people in the 1950s were just way ahead of their time, and they dreamed up the perfect future for us that we've never decided to deviate from. It's just taken us a really long time to bring all this stuff about. These are some big goals they dreamed up back then.

But another way of explaining that is to say that we have the exact same goals as they did today, because our political imagination has been depleted to a point that sadly, the most we can do these days is just remix and recycle our grandparents' ideas of what the future should be looking like.

Just imagine an alternative timeline in the last 50 years or so where the specific blend of postmodernism and neoliberalism we've been talking about was not the primary set of ideas that was informing people's thinking. It's worth asking, could there have been different social futures that could have gained popularity and totally reimagined what it is to organize a human society? Could that have happened if people were thinking in a different way? Or if people saw their history in a different way? If people saw their position in society through a different lens?

But it didn't happen, and that's because the way we see the future has fundamentally changed from the way former generations saw the future. Again, the future has been cancelled. The future to Mark Fisher has essentially become an aesthetic style that we tack on to things after the fact, where it's not really about the future in any sort of revolutionary sense or having anything to do with time.

Let me explain. He compares the way that we think about the future to the way we think about a font. Kind of a weird way to describe it, but the future to us is like a style of font. We think of the future as a style, the same way we think of something like Gothic as a style, you know, where you're scrolling through different fonts on your computer, you see a Gothic one, and you know it's Gothic because it looks a certain way. It has certain curves to the letters, it's bolded, no serif decorations. That's how you know a font is Gothic.

Well, the concept of the future has become something very similar for us to Mark Fisher. When we think of the future in our time, we just recycle and remix our grandparents' ideas of what the future was. Think of the popular movies that try to depict the future today. All they're really doing is they're just taking what futuristic movies were from decades ago, you know, robots, aliens, LED lights, electronic sound effects, you know, back when that kind of stuff was actually creative and imagining a different future, and

In theory, we could imagine something entirely different than that, but instead, we just throw this futuristic font onto a movie and we make something that looks, quote, "futuristic." In other words, we just take those older cultural forms and cobble them together into something that's a slightly different remix of what our grandparents were making. Again, just 20th century ideas delivered through 21st century technology. As I mentioned before for Mark Fisher, this is not just artwork, though. This extends to the political realm as well.

Remember in one of the Zizek episodes, we began by talking about the political categories of left and right, and how the right fundamentally is trying to preserve existing institutions or go back to a time when they think things were better, and how the left is fundamentally trying to subvert existing institutions and bring about a world that they think is better. Well, for people on the right, it's expected that there'd be an element of nostalgia to their political views. Again, for them, it's about the preservation of what's good.

But for people on the left in today's world, when you're living in a place where it's so difficult for people to declare moral universals and to construct new grand narratives and to imagine a different kind of social future,

Where is someone on the left supposed to go other than backwards towards nostalgia? See, we live during a time to Mark Fisher where even the revolutionary efforts of people on the left are just remixes of the revolutionary efforts that their grandparents tried. They have the same sort of tactics, same sort of slogans, same sort of communication style. And from one perspective, all they're really doing is trying to put a new spin on failed revolutionary efforts from the past.

and again, in a world where this is the best that protest culture can come up with, then effectively both sides of the political spectrum become a form of conservative nostalgia. Again, 20th century ideas delivered through 21st century technology. One way of thinking about it, in the language of Mark Fisher, and originally in the language of the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who first came up with this concept,

is that we live in a place where we are haunted by the past and the future. The world we live in is haunted by the ideas from the past that don't just magically disappear one day. In fact, they persist. They are reused by us in ways where they take on a new ethereal kind of meaning that's difficult to fully see sometimes.

But we're also haunted for Mark Fisher, not just by the past, but by the lost futures that were supposed to come about, but never did. What he means is the future worlds that were supposed to be better off for people, that former generations had imagined, those never came to pass. So in a sense, now we live every day of our lives stuck in this present moment, comparing it to the futures that never came and the injustices of the past. That is our fate to live in this time.

We live in a state of what Derrida and Fisher call the hauntology of the present, a mix between the words haunt and ontology. It's kind of clever. And there's a lot more to hauntology and Derrida's work. We could do an entire episode on it. But the point here today is how this concept enables Mark Fisher's description of capitalist realism, which is where all these points are headed.

Because when you consider everything about how neoliberalism, postmodernism, and all the ancillary ideas that make these into the primary modes of people's thinking, what is a person supposed to do when they're caught in this narcissistic, confused place? Well, what turns out to be a really common thing people choose to do as a defense mechanism is they just try not to think about it too much, keep their head down, and just focus on making money.

I mean, regardless of how confused you are or aren't, that becomes the thing that you really can't deny about our world. You either make money or you starve to death.

This goes on enough at the individual level, then on a more broad scale what starts to happen is people start to learn to accept the inevitability of capitalism. They learn to see capitalism not as the current socioeconomic system that we're using for society, something that can be changed if we want it to be changed, but instead, no, capitalism is more than that. Capitalism is just the way the world is, at a realism sort of level, hence Mark Fisher's name, capitalist realism.

As the French philosopher Alain Badiou once described our world, quote, "...we live in a contradiction, a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian, where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone is presented to us as ideal."

To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful, so instead they've decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect goodness, but we're lucky we don't live in a condition of evil. Our democracy is not perfect, but it's better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust, but it's not criminal like Stalinism.

End quote.

Once again, the mantra of our time that we're all supposed to be very proud of walking around all day is that, yeah, the system we have isn't that great, but at least it isn't any of that other stuff. In fact, show me someone out there that has a revolutionary plan for how to fix it, and I'll show you someone that wants to be a dictator or someone whose ideas are doomed to fail, you know, to get another hundred million people killed in the name of some utopian vision. This is the spirit of revolution of our time, you know, in contrast to the way former generations used to think about it.

And what this turns into, the further entrenched people get into this way of thinking, is that capitalism isn't just one way of organizing things among many. It is the way that human beings organize things naturally.

After all, they'll say, selfishness and greed, these are just things that are part of our human nature, not neoliberal values that have been incentivized in the recent past for the sake of economic growth. You know, forget about all the examples of human beings naturally helping each other. Screwing somebody else over and then saying, well, it's just survival of the fittest out there. This is just the natural way of the jungle, my friend. These qualities have been naturalized recently.

So what that means, if somebody wants to change things in any significant way, is that any revolutionary idea that comes along at this point is going to have to find a way to explain how their genius strategy is going to be better when it intrinsically goes against the natural instincts and desires of people, which are most perfectly embodied within capitalist realism, of course. The expansion of capital for the sake of capital. The

The things that make the quarterly profit and loss sheet of a company look really great, they expand the GDP, but make the lives of the people slowly worse. The employees stretched a little more thin, paid a little less, with the service provided to the customers just a little bit worse.

See, that's one of the interesting things about capitalist realism. It's one way to move beyond postmodernism, if that's what you wanted to do. See, postmodernism is always in reference to modernism, which means it always needs to be pretty good at critiquing the ideas of modernity or else it doesn't survive. And there's a lot of good ideas to critique in modernity. It's a full-time job, quite frankly. But when it comes to capitalist realism, it really just gets smuggled in the back door. It doesn't have to prove itself up against all the good ideas from the history of thought.

It just needs to be able to appeal to people that are in a confused, narcissistic haze. All it needs to do is say, forget about this moral confusion. Cash is king.

Stop thinking about all this morality stuff, which quite frankly is starting to bum me out a little bit. What you gotta do is declare the universal of expanding capital for the sake of more capital. This logic becomes the go-to strategy even when it bleeds into areas that have to do with the lives of people in ways where it just feels wrong to be using capital expansion as the main thing that we should be considering.

The examples of this are all the ones you've heard about a million times living in the world you do. Privatized prisons here in the U.S., is that okay? Health care, the water supply, food production. We talked about an example last episode of how we privatize depression and people's mental health more generally, where it's possible for it to become more about the manufacturing and sale of pharmaceuticals than it is about fixing the problem. What happens, though, when it's not about the person anymore and it becomes more about what looks exciting to people on a quarterly profit and loss sheet?

The point is, this whole ethos of the expansion of capital for the sake of capital absolutely thrives in the moral vacuum that's created by the unique blend of thinking that most people inherit these days. And for Mark Fisher, so does fascism too, by the way. Because if we live in a world where the system that's producing the problems is just accepted as the natural order of things and not something that we can politically restructure in a way that's better...

Then one common page out of the fascism playbook that everyone's heard of before is if you want to get elected and there's a bunch of problems in your society, just find some internal threat, you know, some group of people that are causing all the problems you see around you and run for office on a platform that you will get rid of that group and solve all the problems, you know, only to get in power and not solve any of the problems because surprise, it wasn't that simple in the first place.

This whole situation can really be something that starts to make people, especially young people, feel depressed. There's a new kind of depression that Mark Fisher talks about, something that's just emerged for people fairly recently in human history. He calls it depressive hedonia. See, as he says, in the past, people were depressed when they couldn't find enjoyment in anything around them.

But in today's day and age, with the realities of materialist consumer life and of the drug-like dopamine experience of constantly consuming one piece of media after another, just scrolling to the next thing in your feed, this becomes a new kind of depression, he says. It's uniquely available to people of this time period.

Where it's not that you can't find things that you enjoy, but that you live in a world that's so empty of possibility, where it's so difficult to wake up to a world where you feel an optimistic, meaningful connection to it. That again, as a defense mechanism, depressive hedonia becomes about just escaping into this constant stream of consumer experiences just to be able to temporarily forget about the world you live in. And to Mark Fisher, this becomes a pretty common place for people to find themselves in these days.

Now, Mark Fisher towards the end of his life was working on a potential way out of capitalist realism.

See, if what we've been talking about the last two episodes can be described as a problem that's created by a depletion of people's consciousness, which is the way Mark Fisher described it, by the way, then the solution to this problem would have to involve some sort of reinvigoration of consciousness, or a process of unforgetting, as Mark Fisher puts it. What he meant was that the structure of capitalist realism and the ideology we use to organize our experience, it forces us to forget certain things about reality that allow for capitalist realism to continue.

The title for Mark Fisher, as he was working on his last book, to describe this method of unforgetting was acid communism. So instead of capitalist realism, we have acid communism as an alternative.

Now, a couple things that need to be said here. The communism side of it was not calling for communism as people are usually familiar with it when it comes to the experiments of the 20th century. To certain thinkers in the post-capitalism space, by the way, it'd be more accurate to call those experiments by their individual names. Stalinism, Maoism, Leninism, etc.,

Reason being, there are the things we talked about at the end of one of the Zizek episodes, how communism was not for Marx and Engels a specific state of affairs that needed to be established in the world, but simply what they called that which abolishes the present state of things. So any nation building or extreme failures in nation building on the other side of a communist revolution should be attributed to the specific project for a post-capitalist.

For Mark Fisher, though, the word communism is much more intended to represent the attitude of us actually trying to find a different way forward that steps far outside the bounds of this neoliberal postmodern trap of thinking. Now, the acid part of acid communism is another interesting side of this. You ever read about the experiences of people that experiment with psychedelics in their life?

But without trying to put too rigid of a description on them, one of the common things you'll hear people report, if they do, is that after using them, they look around them, specifically at certain things we've talked about, like the hyper-focus on the perspective of the individual,

And they'll say that when they're in this place under the influence of psychedelics, that they just don't relate to that scale of reality as strongly as they do otherwise. A lot of people report having feelings of interconnectedness with everything, feeling one with the universe, part of a larger whole, feeling like, again, the idea of screwing somebody over and then saying, well, it's just business, man. That feels to them like an incredibly bizarre thing that's somehow been made into something people see today as normal.

Now, Mark Fisher wasn't somebody that used psychedelics. He didn't go around burning man selling these things to people. It just wasn't him. But as someone that was interested in ways to reinvigorate people's consciousness that had been depleted, he was intrigued by the ways that psychedelic culture was so diametrically opposed to many of the ways of thinking that are normalized in capitalist realism. And the same thing applied to feminism, too, as far as he saw it, and also socialism as a political strategy.

And notice he says at one point how each one of these things that opposes the current dominant modes of thinking are turned sometimes into a caricature of themselves. You know, it's possible for people to strawman each of these things. Psychedelic people are often thought of as losers that just want to get high all the time.

Feminists can be thought of as blue-haired people that just hate men secretly. And socialists can be seen as people who are just stupid and lack the skills to be able to compete in a capitalist system with all the truly talented people. In reality, to Fisher, each one of these offers a pretty strong place to begin if you wanted to imagine alternative ways of structuring human society, or if you wanted to find the origins of the things we're forced to forget about of human existence in order for the GDP to keep growing at the rate that it does. The bottom line for Mark Fisher...

is that a lot of us need to recognize the seriousness of the matter here. To him, we are immersed in a class war every day of our lives in the Western world, and many of us don't even realize that we're losing that war every day. There's obviously much more to his critique of capitalism, as well as an entire movement of psychedelic socialism that's emerged on the left along the same lines of what he was suggesting with acid communism. I want to reference more ideas from Mark Fisher and other post-capitalist theories,

But I want to do it while also giving some time to solutions that other philosophers suggest for how to fix some of these structural issues we're talking about by using capitalism itself as the system to bring it about.

So as far as the next few episodes go, along with the episodes on ethics I talked about, this is going to be where we're heading next. Promise this won't be the last time you hear the name Mark Fisher. And while I've tried to leave plenty for you to enjoy on your own if you wanted to read his book Capitalist Realism or any of his later essays, I hope I've done a decent job here of setting up how this unique blend of different ways of thinking that dominate the modern world, how this common trap for people to fall in, defines for him the plight of the time that we're living in.

Hope you enjoyed this one. Thanks for supporting the show on Patreon. And as always, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.