I am invited to read some poetry at a community gathering tomorrow evening. It is an honor to be asked to join others for sharing poetry and prose in a public place. Words crafted and offered up to celebrate the joy and tragedy of our experience create a sacred space. I plan to read…
Walked into Starbucks this morning and over the subdued buzz of the room came the sultry voice of Stevie Nix. It was a love song: Dreams. I retrieved my computer from the case and placed it on the table, my mind (and heart) captured by the lyric of loss. This is a song of…
The topic was a challenging one. We seldom talk directly, think out-loud about the meaning and practice of the sex act in the lives of our peers. In past times, such discussion was taboo, unacceptable. Presently, mores have relaxed. A frank public discussion is possible. We yet lack sufficient vocabulary, and I am aware…
A very old fashioned argument: increasing value, not profit.Value is how much cash flow you generate over time – 10 years, 20 years. Sustainability is the main value creator. If you are not sustainable in business,then you have reputation damage that will make you sell lessbecause consumers buy less from business with low reputation.You…
We have to accept that we live on a ‘spaceship earth’, responsible and accountable for its conditions. Earth is no longer the impenetrable background/horizon of our productive activity: It emerges as a finite object that we can inadvertently destroy or transform to make it unlivable. This means that, at the very moment when we…
Capitalism thrives all around the world (more or less), from China to Africa. It is definitely not in crisis – it is just the people caught in this explosive development that are in crisis. This tension between overall rapid growth and local crisis and misery is part of capitalism’s normal functioning: capitalism renews itself…
The society of experience – the direct commodification of our experience itself. What we are buying on the market are less and less products, (material objects) that we want to own, and more and more ‘life experiences’ experiences of sex, eating, communicating, cultural consumption, participating in a lifestyle… ‘we become consumers of our own…
Since in our society, free choice is elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear as infringing on a subject’s freedom – it has to appear as (and be sustained by) the very self-experience of individuals as free. There are a multitude of examples of un-freedom appearing in the…
In capitalism,you cannot throw outthe dirty water of financial speculationand keep the healthy baby of the real economy:The dirty water effectively is the blood of the healthy baby.One should not be afraid to go to the end here:the global capitalist legal system itself is,in its most fundamental dimension,corruption legalized.The question of where crime begins(which…
While on the road, when I am not driving, and we are not talking – I plan to read more from Slavoj Zizek’s book The Courage of Hopelessness A Year of Acting Dangerously. Here are ideas from a paragraph in the first chapter. Today’s globalization, as a capitalist system, came to determine all conditions…
