There is a classical view on slavery that goes like this: You are responsible for your own slavery if you do not kill yourself rather than become enslaved. If you think this is a terrible belief that justifies slavery, then you are in good company with most people today. I feel it too, but this is usually where the conversation ends when it should be just the beginning.
If you would not blame a slave for slavery, then how do you feel about workers today? Do you buy into the narrative that the only way out of the working class is through dedicating oneself to studies within the schooling system and then a life of hard work and saving while putting all of one’s primary effort towards a career?
Future Horizons Foreclosed
Our goals and aspirations are the directions we try to go in life. These crash into an unavoidable principle called reality. “The best laid plans of mice and men...” is an expression used to make light of how plans get predictably foiled by reality. When we fail to deliver on our promises, or when our goals come into conflict, we blame ourselves or others.
We need to stop blaming ourselves and others. Blame games might feel good in some sick way, but blaming ourselves is not the same as taking responsibility. Nor is blame constructive or realistic.
I used to blame my parents for everything until I had lived on my own long enough. After a certain point I could only really blame myself. Then I discovered, way too late, the concept that changed everything.
With the concept of timenergy, as well as of its structural stultification, I now have no patience for blame games. No patience for resentment-mongering. No patience for the usual “oh it’s all their fault” narratives fed to us by confirmation-bias serving media.
Corporate or bureaucratic forms of corruption hurt us and our possibilities, but corruption is not the most important issue of our day. The political party you hate is 100% corrupt and hypocritical, of this I do not aim to dissuade you. But any kind of thinking that likes to get to the root of a problem must go deeper.
Nothing worth doing can be done in a passive way. No relationship worth strengthening can be done so simply with throw-away moments when convenient. In-depth understanding does not come from consuming YouTube videos sporadically anymore than one can be said to master the guitar by playing Guitar Hero. No language or skill can be mastered on a random throw-away weekend, and no relationships that matter can be sustained without routine sacrifice that puts others first.
Today there is much talk of “emotional labor” and “emotional intelligence.” These twin terms are most commonly employed by people who invest great importance in the attention we pay one another, the ways in which empathy is practiced and communicated, and ultimately, the health of our relationships and sense of self.
Those who push back against these terms see an agenda that prioritizes hyper-sentimentalism while privileging hyperbolic sensitivity as a form of activism. What results is a seeming culture war between hypersensitive people who just want to have their feelings acknowledged and callous insensitive people who are entitled to their opinions. Some say we should be able to all agree to disagree, whereas others insist that disagreement is itself violence.
Depending on where you are coming from it is easy to dismiss either, or both, sides of such debates as mundane, scripted, and ignorant. As with all such matters though, each side has its little insight of truth. For not only are we indeed entitled to our opinions, but we also need to learn how to understand and communicate with one another. We cannot speak truth to power, nor will our opinions count for much, if our experiences lack conceptual elucidation and the means for interpreting or relating to others.
Just as one cannot learn the violin on a random weekend, you cannot be said to have built a relationship with someone who you have never had a deep conversation with. And deep conversations are not one time events, either. Deep conversations only acquire depth in the context of ongoing dialogue and serious consideration.
Serious consideration is not done in a moment, but is done in solitude—or as Sherry Turkle would say, the “virtuous circle,” which exists in the dynamic between solitude and solicitude (genuinely being-with-oneself vs. being-with-others).1
Without time spent unplugged from the hustle and grind of daily life, you never develop a sense for who you really are, what you are capable of, which talents and values are worth prioritizing. Without this space of freedom opened up by the absence of necessary labor, socializing, and incessant distractions, you don’t get to learn how to be with yourself, and if you cannot get to learn how to be with yourself, how could others?2
It is in the space of solitude that we develop empathy and reason, which are the necessary conditions for any kind of considerate reflection on one’s relationships. All of this has its conditions of possibility undermined by the fracture of repeatable time from energy.
Bringing this back to the culture war torn between things like freedom of speech and religion, and diversity and inclusion, all either presuppose relative timenergy or are just words. For the professional managerial class (PMC), saying the right words becomes a form of what Catherine Liu calls “virtue hoarding.”14 People with the relative timenergy to develop sophisticated awareness about relationships, diets, and other consumer lifestyle choices feel more deserving of success because they have individualized (privatized) The Good Life.
Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, thought that free public education and libraries would make it so that working people could better themselves and get a leg up in the world. He imagined that most people could better themselves and cultivate their human capacities and understanding during the evening or weekends. What he and the rest of the ruling class fail to understand is how “free time” during the evening or weekend is nothing but “garbage time” if it lacks energy. The point of the average work week is that it leaves us with time-without-energy.
Our values, right to left, have no possibility of finding meaning, traction, or depth without a society that protects and provides the fundamental basis for freedom, learning, or dialogue. This is something the Founding Fathers took for granted that has since been lost.
Thanks for reading!
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Author bio:
David McKerracher (M.A.) is the organizer for, and founder of, Theory Underground, a teaching, research, and publishing platform by and for dropout workers with earbuds and burnt out post-grads who want to understand The Situation as a means towards figuring out the conditions of possibility for The Good Life. McKerracher’s background is in critical theory, political philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology. All of McKerracher's work revolves around a single question: What is the Good Life? McKerracher's questioning into the conditions of possibility for living The Good Life led him to an M.A. thesis on “Timenergy, the existential basis of labor power.” This work draws heavily from Marx and Heidegger. McKerracher developed this concept further in his first book called Waypoint: Timenergy, Critical Media Theory, and Social Change, and his second book simply titled Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Because “Timenergy Theory” requires a more robust theory of libidinal economy and ideology, McKerracher has spent the last few years learning Žižekian and Lacanian theory of ideology from his compatriot Michael Downs. Instead of pursuing a doctorate, McKerracher founded Theory Underground, a vehicle for cultivating the kind of research and conversation necessary to take timenergy theory to where it needs to go, the long-term goal of which is to pave a way forward for humanity to maintain the conditions of a robust cultural plurality, harness automation-for-all, and ultimately, explore the universe.
End notes:
I go into “the virtuous circle” a lot more in chapter 2 of Waypoint: Timenergy, Critical Media Theory, and Culture War. Sherry Turkle introduces this idea in her work Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015).
Catherine Liu, Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class (2021).
ps of course, the pmc children are probably lacking passion, not from merely a lack of struggle, but! because they are put thru an industrial schooling process which vampyrizes their soul...
i do want to say...yeah theres truth in that mythos but.
...
🫠
sweet
its hard to know what to say to people when they do believe this for themselves ... though the guy who said that, was very open minded ...those feelings run deep...and maybe there is some truth to the struggle... but. yes. what to reply 💙💙💙 it made me think of the pmc children who lack passion