Lynn Paramore: Our Economic System is Making Us Mentally Ill

By Dilip -

If you’re unlucky enough to reside in a town where data centers house computer servers storing everything from financial data for giant corporations to military secrets, you’re likely to find that a loud, whining noise becomes life’s agonizing background. The sound peaks and subsides, but it’s always there, never allowing you to fully relax. Eventually, the stress of this kind of ambient noise can wear you down, doubling your risk of mental illness, as well as increasing your risk of diseases like heart attack and stroke.

Living in an economy dominated by neoliberal principles can feel kind of like that: a background hum of constant psychological stress. The sense of precariousness never really goes away. Instead collectively of sharing the risks of life, we’re increasingly saddled with the heavy burdens of existing in an overwhelmingly complex, modern world. We’re lonely individuals, fighting to stay afloat no matter what our situation. There are a few lucky winners, sure (and even many of them are psychically damaged), but most of us are forced to battle in an unrelenting struggle and competition for rewards. Hunger games, status games, power games, the list goes on and on….

https://scheerpost.com/2022/03/28/our-economic-system-is-making-us-mentally-ill/


Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist?


Jill Lepore: Is society coming apart?


WHITNEY WEBB: Wall Street now monetizes nature


Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion (1921)


Sam Kriss: 'Neoliberalism' isn't a left-wing insult but a monstrous system of inequality


Defying capitalism and socialism, Kumarappa and Gandhi had imagined a decentralised Indian economy - Venu Madhav Govindu & Deepak Malghan


Society of the Spectacle / 'इमेज' - 'Image': A Poem on Deaths in the Age of Covid


Ravi Bhoothalingam: Coronavirus and the Mandate of Heaven


George Monbiot - Asymmetric force: Pegasus spyware is the latest tool autocrats are using to stay in power


George Lakey on Capitalism, public health and the Nordic model


Lynn Parramore: The perverted dreams of western modernity and capitalism may be exhausting themselves


Dilip Simeon: What is corruption?


Tanya Gold - How materialism makes us sad


Marina Hyde: The question every politician should be asking is, what does Mark Zuckerberg want with us?


Siva Vaidhyanathan: Facebook has just suffered its most devastating PR catastrophe yet / Jonathan Freedland: Is Facebook the tobacco industry of the 21st century?

 

Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)


"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever" - George Orwell’s Final Warning


George Orwell: Literature and Totalitarianism (1941)


George Orwell - Freedom of the Park (1945)


George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940)


J.K. Rowling asks us to remember George Orwell


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