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"Battle Royale and The Hunger Games are young adult novels in which governments force teenagers to kill each other. Comparing these books to classic works by William Golding and Robert Sheckley suggests that, while becoming more skeptical about governments, we've become more trusting about our own nature."
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At the close of the Korean War, it came naturally to Sheckley and Golding to portray people as the problem and government as the solution – Takami and Collins, writing in our times, begin with the reverse assumption, and to make this comparison is to sense how far, in the intervening decades, the pendulum of consensus has swung from Hobbes towards Rousseau. Books like Battle Royale ↑ and The Hunger Games ↑ would have seemed too subversive of adult authority to have been published or perhaps even conceived in the 1950s – but does this mean we have become less naïve, or just that we have become naïve in a different way?
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And what that means is that the single-minded devotion to work that Weber described no longer offers any reassurance that can help Protestants cope with the anxiety of uncertainty about their salvation. What Paul Krugman calls the Great Divergence — escalating economic inequality coupled with the divergence of productivity and wages — means that a Protestant ethic will only compound that salvation anxiety. Working harder and having nothing to show for it can appear to be evidence that you are not favored by God, thus heightening the fear that you are not among the elect.
So how, then, are Protestants to cope with salvation anxiety? For some, I think, the solution has been tribalism.
Tribalism allows you to know that you belong. It allows you to claim, with confidence, that you are among the righteous. It promises the assurance of salvation that Reformed Protestantism otherwise withholds.
"Fearful and flattened. That’s what our industrial growth culture wants and needs of its members, now that it is a global monoculture strained to its absolute limits. Unless exercised in a culturally-approved way (such as “competitive” sports, wars, or abuse of one’s work or social “subordinates”), or locked away behind closed doors where there is plausible deniability, anger is now met with quick and violent suppression. Peaceful but angry demonstrations are met with heavily-armed stormtroopers. Anyone who even discusses angry resistance to the ecological desolation of our planet, to the theft and pillaging of Earth’s resources for the benefit of a tiny rapacious 1%, or to wars over oil or ideology, is branded a “terrorist” and subject to “disappearance”, extraordinary rendition to torture prisons, and/or indefinite imprisonment.
Likewise, feelings of debilitating grief, which I think are perfectly normal in our terrible world, have been pathologized and are now treated with large doses of anti-depressants or, failing that, ostracism and/or incarceration or other institutionalization. Our industrial culture teaches us to self-victimize. We are to blame, we are told, for our own unemployment and poverty (due to personal laziness or lack of moral fibre). We are to blame, too, for our own chronic illnesses (due to our poor eating and exercising habits). Suicide is, of course, treated not only as a sign of irresponsibility, but as a crime."
"Over the last week, I have encountered three separate (and seemingly unrelated) attacks on democracy, written by residents of the US and Europe from highly-visible spots in the political-economic media system."
"Today we've become so aware of the downsides of innovations, and so disappointed with the promises of past utopias, that we now find it hard to believe even in protopia -- that tomorrow will be better than today. We find it very difficult to imagine any kind of future we would want to live in. Name a single science fiction future that is both plausible and desirable?
No one wants to move to the future today. We are avoiding it. We don't have much desire for life one hundred years from now. Many dread it. That makes it hard to take the future seriously. So we don't take a generational perspective. We're stuck in the short now. We also adopt the Singularity perspective: that imagining the future in 100 years is technically impossible. So there is no protopia we are reaching for. "
"While some psychologists — and many parents — have worried that a child who suffered a bad fall would develop a fear of heights, studies have shown the opposite pattern: A child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights.
By gradually exposing themselves to more and more dangers on the playground, children are using the same habituation techniques developed by therapists to help adults conquer phobias, according to Dr. Sandseter and a fellow psychologist, Leif Kennair, of the Norwegian University for Science and Technology. "
"A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima’s uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium. "
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Decades of research have found that risk perception is an affective combination of facts and fears, intellect and instinct, reason and gut reaction. It is an inescapably subjective process – one that has helped us to survive, but that sometimes gets us into more trouble, because we often worry too much about relatively smaller risks, or not enough about bigger ones, and make choices that feel right, but that actually create new risks.
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For 65 years, researchers have followed nearly 90,000 hibakusha, the name in Japan for atomic bomb survivors who were within three kilometers of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions in 1945. Scientists compared them to a non-exposed Japanese population in order to calculate the effects of the radiation to which they had been exposed. The current estimate is that just 572 hibakusha – a little more than 0.5% – have died, or will die, from various forms of radiation-induced cancer.
Research by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (http://www.rerf.or.jp/) found that the fetuses of hibakusha women who were pregnant at the time of the explosions were born with horrible defects. But the RERF found little other serious long-term damage – even genetic damage – from exposure to those extraordinarily high levels of radiation.
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