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If someone were to deny being able to see the mug in front of me, this would seriously upset my sense of us sharing a world together —it would call into question either my perceptual reliability or our basic capacity for mutual understanding. Such moments reveal how much our confidence in reality depends on its apparent availability to other minds.
There is, as one assumes there must be, a countervailing or centrifugal force that also operates in our society, but this returns to the countryside not the residue of the land’s growth to refertilize the fields, not the learning and experience of the greater world ready to go to work locally, and not – or not often – even a just monetary compensation. What are returned, instead, are overpriced manufactured goods, pollution in various forms, and garbage.
The World-Ending Fire
Wendell Berry
According to Žižek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal – we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.
Capitalist Realism
Mark Fisher
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