Freedom, Possible and Impossible

"In our global capitalist universe, possible and impossible are distributed in a strange way, both simultaneously exploding into an excess. On the one hand, in the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is more and more possible (or so we are told): “nothing is impossible,” we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions, entire archives of music, films, and TV series are available for downloading, going to space is available to everyone (with money…), there is the prospect of enhancing our physical and psychic abilities, of manipulating our basic properties through interventions into genome, up to the tech-gnostic dream achieving immortality by way of fully transforming our identity into a software which can be downloaded from one to another hardware…

On the other hand, especially in the domain of socio-economic relations, our era perceives itself as the era of maturity in which, with the collapse of Communist states, humanity has abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality (read: the capitalist socio-economic reality) with all its impossibilities: you cannot… engage in large collective acts (which necessarily end in totalitarian terror), cling to the old Welfare State (it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis), isolate yourself from the global market, etc. (In its ideological version, ecology also adds its own list of impossibilities, so-called threshold values – no more global warming than 2 degrees Celsius, etc. – based on “expert opinions.”). The reason is that we live in the post-political era of the naturalization of economy: political decisions are as a rule presented as matters of pure economic necessity – when austerity measures are imposed, we are repeatedly told that this is simply what has to be done.

So, maybe, the time has come to rearrange our notions of freedom."

#SlavojŽižek #freedom #philosophy