Pointing Out
Pointing something out is a common, basic act. I might quite literally point at a fox and say “Look, a fox!”, but I could also just catch your eyes and glance in the direction of someone wearing neo-nazi insignia to alert you to them, or I might mention the funding a candidate received from the fossil fuel industry to express my views on their climate policies. These acts depend on us having a shared social context: Following the direction of my finger to notice the fox will almost always work, but if you happen to not be familiar with those particular insignia, you won’t notice the nazi, and if we do not share a view on the corrupting effect of political donations, you will not see how that candidate’s fundraising is at all relevant to their proposals for energy regulation.
Cultivate Wonder
Thinking begins in wonder. It is the ideal mood for noticing radical differences in the world, whether it is between people, institutions, generations, or even within oneself. Wonder allows us to see how amazing it is that anything is at all. In wonder, we are open to surprise. and our expectations don’t cloud our receptiveness to something as it is in itself. When our prejudices and preconceptions are challenged, we don’t feel threatened, but we can instead turn it over and consider it.
Faith
Faith is the belief in something in the absence of communicable evidence. It is not necessarily limited to religions: we all display faith in our day-to-day actions. A philosopher who doubts everything but carries on getting up every morning has faith. A couple that knows the divorce statistics and marries anyway has faith. A man who reads the climate reports and says we’ll find a technological solution for the crisis the way we always have had faith.
Listen for Callings
Capitalist realism individualizes people and focuses on replicable, transferable experiences. To the extent that an experience cannot be shared or recreated by someone else it is not scalable and monetizable, so capitalist realism will discount it. This leads us to shut down any emotional judgment (or any judgment that could be rejected as “non-rational”) that might arise in the form of nostalgia or unexpected joy. Interpreted as callings from the past, these feelings give access to a legacy of a community or ideology or way of being that has been hidden under layers of realism but is still available as a resource of common understanding and visions for a better future.
Parrhesia
Remember a time when speaking plainly was a confrontational, dangerous act. This may have been telling a friend or a superior about their bad behaviour. In these moments, you may have witnessed parrhesia. Parrhesia currently is most commonly translated as “speaking truth to power” and generally only used – somewhat obnoxiously – by philosophy professors publishing op-ed criticisms about higher education policy or the like. Properly understood, parrhesia is not just criticism, but a way of truth-finding and expressing that can helpfully complement other such forms.
Reading & Listening
We all read. Whether it’s a newspaper column, our friends’ promises, or a piece of art, we engage with a text or object or act and make sense of it. There isn’t so much one technology of reading as there are many ways of reading and becoming aware of the dominant forms of reading and their alternatives, as well as becoming competent in switching between them, makes you more apt at reading the world in general.
Seeing Death
In capitalist realism, things can seem like they’re either fundamentally unchanging from day to day or changing at such a large, impossible scale that one must get swept up in it. It can be helpful to personalise these changes by identifying the way they threaten one’s way of being – by facing one’s existential death. A threat to one’s way of being could be an accident that makes being a sports-lover impossible.
Speech Acts
We move in and use language with so little effort that it can be hard to look at what it does. The most common intuition for what language does is the conveyance of information. There is something I know (or something you asked for), I express it, we now share the information. Considered this way, language is the vehicle for interpersonal exchange. Another way of looking at language is to recognize that many times utterances are acts.
Thinking
There is more than one kind of thinking, in some sense, we have a choice. We can identify at least two kinds: calculative thinking and sober thinking. In capitalist realism, calculative thinking dominates and sweeps aside all others. As a result, we are losing sight of a more meaningful sober thinking and, as we lose sight of it, we lose the possibility of making a choice. Calculative thinking does what it says.
Thinking Something New
Both realism and anti-realism agree that human perception is limiting. The realists posit that we can only experience or comprehend part of reality. The anti-realists argue that it is impossible to make a statement about what we cannot perceive and so even saying that there is stuff we cannot perceive is to make a mistake. They point out that to even posit a limit of experience is to go beyond it.