Cvetan Krastev

#CritiqueAndHumanism

„Our quantitative obsession with what counts and what can therefore be counted and analyzed, has for too long excluded what does not count: subjective emotions. For nearly three decades, the religion of technology and Gross Domestic Product and the crude nineteenth century calculus of self-interest have dominated politics and intellectual life. Today, the society of entrepreneurial individuals ordered around the evidently rational market reveals unplumbed depths of misery and despair; it spawns a nihilistic rebellion against order itself.

With so many of our landmarks in ruins, we can barely see where we are headed, let alone chart a path. But even to get our basic bearings we need, above all, greater precision in matters of the soul. Otherwise, we risk resembling, in our infatuation with rational motivations and outcomes, those observers “in the middle of a rapidly flowing river”, who, Tocqueville wrote, “stare obstinately at some scraps of debris that are still visible on the riverbanks, even as the current is pulling us along and forcing us backward toward the abyss”.“

Pankaj Mishra

from the text “Politics in the Age of Resentment:

The Dark Legacy of the Enlightenment”

included in the collection The Great Regression