*Adam Michael Krause* # Progressive Summary Impressively philosophical. Short and trenchant. Worth reading several times. Lots of connections. The essay on comedy made me think of Kenneth Burke. It's essentially an anarchist text. # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## The End is Near > Global capitalism is designed to generate the most profit for the fewest people in the shortest time. The Earth and most of its inhabitants are merely means to these ends. > And we have prepared ourselves in the worst possible way to handle our coming catastrophes humanely. We just lived through the bloodiest and most genocidal century in history. As a point of comparison, somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 people died in the Spanish Inquisition. That was pretty bad, but in the twentieth century, Stalin alone was responsible for ordering tens of millions of deaths. And that was just one bit of genocide in a century of genocide after genocide. Something has gone horribly wrong with humanity. We are not ready to handle our impending ecological disasters in ways that won’t involve massive bloodshed, suffering, and despair. And the weapons we have now could kill every living thing on Earth. ## What Is to Be Done? > Humans are social creatures. We live, work, and develop together. Social transformations come from collective endeavors. The best way to replace our dominant paradigm is to create and inhabit institutions that actually embody freedom, justice, and environmentally harmonious modes of being. This requires movements, which require groups of people. ## The Revolution Will Be Hilarious > Just as jokes require understanding and utilizing concealed connections for comedic effect, free societies require comprehending, tolerating, and putting those same connections to use. A mind that only perceives one correct mode of being is both inherently undemocratic and invariably humorless. > A comedic mindset can help us move from self-centered to multi-centered worldviews, can increase our understanding and tolerance for one another, and can teach us to develop and accept the widest possible range of non-harmful behaviors. > When two seemingly unrelated planes of thought are shown to intersect at an unforeseen point, the result could just as easily be laughter as insight. Comedic thinking can generate new ideas or even complete paradigm shifs with just a few well-chosen words. We can play various modes of being off one another, generating new ideas like a comedian creates punch lines—finding unforeseen points of intersection between seemingly unrelated things. > Even our most serious problems (or especially our most serious problems) can best be solved by implementing the attitude of openness humor makes possible. > An insistence on seriousness and solemnity almost always serves pretension and pomposity, and narrows the wider perspective that comedy and free societies require. It always seems to be those whose authority is the most arbitrary and absurd who insist on being surrounded by seriousness. They fear a joke may puncture the aura of importance they have created. Distrust anyone who distrusts laughter. [Wills 2006 - Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America](zotero://select/items/1_ZF4AGRUV) [Goldman 1931 - Living My Life](zotero://select/items/1_TT7EIAIF) "If you don’t want to dissolve in your own seriousness to the point where you become ridiculous to everyone, you must have a healthy awareness of your own human ridiculousness and nothingness. As a matter of fact, the more serious what you are doing is, the more important it becomes not to lose this awareness. If you lose this, your own actions—paradoxically— lose their seriousness. A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear sighted awareness of the temporality and ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action." – Vaclav Havel "Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny—it’s just mean." – Garry Trudeau, "The Abuse of Satire", in response to 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks. > Moshé Feldenkrais argued that any actual choice requires more than two options. Rather than going back and forth between just this or that, a third option (or more) introduces a higher level of nuance, and truly choosing becomes a possibility. > Capitalism forces humans to act as players in the game of commerce. What business wants, business gets. And what business wants are citizens whose survival is dependent on successfully playing the capitalist game—to be marketable beings who appeal to employers. We have been shaped by and for this reality. Freeing ourselves from it will not be easy. > create quasi-comedic fissures > using punch line-like moments of insight to punch holes in the present create holes in the wall of modernity # Quotes # References