While I still agree with oldhead talk about religion being the opium of the people, I think contemporary times have demonstrated it is not the only opium or even the leading opium at this point, and I often find myself agreeing more with liberation theology religious people than I do “this new tech treat is so awesome that there is nothing we can do about it so we may as well cheer the masses’ increasing precarity and hope and wait for the excesses and vanity projects of the rich to trickle down to the masses” bazinga defeatists.
Going to drop another Samir Amin quote about that phrase in particular.
Nevertheless, another reading can be made of Marx. The often cited phrase–“religion is the opium of the people”–is truncated. What follows this remark lets it be understood that human beings need opium, because they are metaphysical animals who cannot avoid asking themselves questions about the meaning of life. They give what answers they can, either adopting those offered by religion or inventing new ones, or else they avoid worrying about them.
In any case, religions are part of the picture of reality and even constitute an important dimension of it. It is, therefore, important to analyze their social function, and in our modern world their articulation with what currendy constitutes modernity: capitalism, democracy, and secularism.
Techbros and bazinga defeatists are firmly in the “inventing new ones” category. Even in your example, they are acting as if the new technology is some all powerful, inevitable, unstoppable force from above so they may as well worship it cheer on this technological progress. They have essentially in a way, reinvented the concept of God.
Techbros and bazinga defeatists are "firmly in the “inventing new ones” category. Even in your example, they are acting as if the new technology is some all powerful, inevitable, unstoppable force from above so they may as well worship it cheer on this technological progress. They have essentially in a way, reinvented the concept of God.
I lost count of how many people I’ve met that saw “progress” as some Civ game style bar that only crawled upward toward specific goal milestones. A lot of inevitabilists seem to see dae le singularity or even FALGSC as inevitabilities, and even otherwise self-described leftists can convince themselves that they just got to sit and wait for that progress bar to fill up and everything to just change in a way that suits them (while rhetorically shitting on people for being “afraid” or “emotional” for not sharing their toxic positivity).
I lost count of how many people I’ve met that saw “progress” as some Civ game style bar that only crawled upward toward specific goal milestones.
As much as I love the series, Civilization has done irreparable harm to the public’s understanding of history and how technology develops. People seriously think you can just invent saddles for horseback riding even if you’re in a place without horses. G*mers are going to need serious re-education after the revolution.
Ahh the idealistic idea that change/adjustment/progress is both inevitable and always positive. You’re going to hate me for this, but Samir Amin had something to say about that too.
The fact that these adjustments can be positive or negative argues in favor of an interpretation of historical materialism based on the concept of “under-determination.” I mean by this that each of the various levels of reality (economic, political, ideological) contains its own internal logic, and because of this the complementary nature of their evolution, which is necessary to ensure the overall coherence of a system, does not define in advance a given direction for a particular evolution.
Under late-stage capitalism, we have so many opium options available now, both literal and metaphorical.
