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Tag: economics

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    Schmitt’s Friend-Enemy Distinction

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    1–2 minutes

    For Carl Schmitt, the “political” is not a subset of ethics, aesthetics, or economics; it is an autonomous realm ruled entirely by the distinction between Friend and Enemy.

    While morality judges “Good and Evil” and economics weighs “Profit and Loss,” for Schmitt, politics identifies the collective “Other” that represents an existential threat to one’s way of life.

    In this view, an enemy is not a personal rival to be hated, but a public adversary to be countered. Schmitt argues that the “emotivist” dream of universal humanity is a dangerous myth that masks actual power struggles. By defining an enemy, a group (tribe) attains its highest intensity and purpose.

    This dark realism transforms governance from an erudite, polite conversation into a hard, defensive necessity: the “we” is defined by the boundary of who we are willing to fight against.

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    Jevons Paradox

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    1–2 minutes

    Jevons Paradox reveals that slashing costs doesn’t linearly boost demand—it explodes it.

    Drop coal prices or cut flight fares by 40%, and usage surges 300%. Cheaper resources mean rampant consumption: transistors now embed in every gadget, no matter how absurdly.

    Beyond economics, apply to cognition: Heuristics shortcut costly thinking; AI eliminates them entirely, fostering deeper reliance and escalating use.

    Religion and ideology also offer pre-packaged frameworks that bypass deliberation for knee-jerk adherence—driving viral adoption.

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    The Entitlement of the Intellectual Class

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    1–2 minutes

    Academics, once seen as stewards of knowledge, now often bemoan funding cuts while dismissing the economic legitimacy of manual labor. (i.e., "How can a plumber charge that? I have a doctorate and don’t make that kind of money.")

    The academic’s work—rarified, selective, and self-referential—is defended as refined merit, while essential labor is devalued as common. This inversion of worth is telling.

    When intellectual production ceases to serve, becoming insular or extractive, society owes it nothing. Prestige does not guarantee relevance.

    If the academic’s output is neither needed nor wanted, its decline is not injustice—it is market correction. A livelihood based on public subsidy must justify itself in public terms.

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    Mistaking Mirrors for Kinship

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    1–2 minutes

    When others consume what we consume, wear what we wear, and drive what we drive, we mistake economic sameness for shared belief or allegiance. This commodified familiarity veils ideological divergence.

    Globalization conflates cosmopolitanism with empathy. We assume globalization of material is globalization of thought, ignoring that aesthetic similarity is not moral alignment and recognizing that uniformity of desire not only disguises but also precipitates fractured ethics.

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    Use vs. Consumption

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    1–2 minutes

    Byung-Chul Han distinguishes between using and using up—between utilization and consumption. To use something sustains a relationship; to use something up exhausts both the object and oneself.

    This is evident in our engagement with rituals and objects. When we consume without pause, we sever ourselves from continuity, from the world of presence and participation. The act becomes a fleeting burn rather than a lingering connection.

    True use integrates us into meaning; consumption isolates, leaving behind neither object nor self—only depletion.

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    The Cost of Parenthood in an Age of Serfdom

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    1–2 minutes

    Many educated individuals forego parenthood not from disdain, but realism.

    Burdened by debt and stagnant wages, they confront an economic architecture that defers adulthood and denies autonomy. To raise children responsibly is to possess time, stability, and capital—resources increasingly elusive.

    This isn’t mere delay; it’s structural disenfranchisement.

    The path to family is blocked by serfdom disguised as opportunity: endless education, precarious employment, and unreachable housing. What emerges is not immaturity, but recognition of systemic design—one that privileges subjugation over stewardship, and obstructs the generative act of creating a hopeful future.

    On the other hand, having children while acknowledging this is to embrace hope or faith in progress, or to maintain at least that it is not so dire as hyperbolic blog posts announce.

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    Curiosity: survival and surplus

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    1–2 minutes

    Curiosity arises from two states: survival and surplus. In survival, it serves utility; in conditions of surplus, it becomes playful exploration.

    Yet even playfulness may stem from survival (freedom born of overcoming), while surplus enables deeper insight (less pressing, less provisional, more contemplative).

    Is curiosity ever free from survival’s roots, the inherent drive to map and know the world that threatens you? Genuine curiosity may only emerge when survival fades, allowing idle wonder to evolve, yet equally, such contentment may dissolve (or pervert) the investigative impulse.

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    Middle Class

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    1–2 minutes

    The squeeze is on: the egalitarian equality we seek is the dwindling middle class.

    The conservative elite wealthy do not want their autonomy and voting to jeopardize their wealth expansion, while the progressive socialist poor do not want the middle class’s self-reliance to jeopardize state subsidies.

    Choked from both sides: fiscally and socially, the middle dissipates as everything moves to extremes.

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    debt-ocrocy

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    1–2 minutes

    Accessing capital finance (going into debt, being bought out) is considered normal for companies and individuals. Yet, when states, towns, or social support services access capital, the debt is paid back through public taxes, a version of plundering the citizens due to incompetent or unlucky government.

    Instead of allowing collapse, like small or medium-sized businesses (the large ones are bailed out), the capitalist devil’s bargain allows rich citizens to capture the state’s taxing power. Once embedded, the rate is hiked, forcing the nation to cover the inflated costs. OR the shareholders remake and steer the social services to their enrichment.

    It sounds more like a medieval oligarchy, legalized through lobbyists: we are all indebted serfs for sins we did not commit.
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    Affluent Apathy

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    1–2 minutes

    Money and protracted non-binding alliances have become our social immune system.

    Given wars, familial relationships, poverty, or climate change, we gesture support with one hand and throw money with the other, spewing placating platitudes as we retreat into our affluence.

    We build walls of resources around infections while we distance ourselves from direct contact, often through attenuated proxies and abstract language. The problem is that we neither excise nor subsume the toxin, the damaging agent. In our active avoidance, we never cure our spreading symptoms, leaving less and less ability to maneuver in a disease-ridden body.