Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
These are posts on culture from the blog Base and Superstructure. Mostly the focus is on American culture. But there might be a few posts on broader, international issues.
My readers don’t live under a rock. So, they surely know the Delta variant has given way to Omicron in the last couple of months. At first glance, one might expect this to shake up public debate. Maybe people evolve with the evidence, see things in a new light, and so on.
Well, that didn’t happen. Omicron mostly locked people into their previous biases and hardened their attitudes on the pandemic and public policy. Let’s take a look at how this is working out.
LinkedIn has a lot of haters these days. Why? According to critics, it combines the worst features of Facebook (lack of privacy, mindless chatter) with the worst features of the business world (corporate politics, self-promotion, professional class propriety). To boot, LinkedIn doesn’t even do the things it’s supposed to do, i.e., it usually doesn’t help you network or land a job.
I’ll admit I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with LinkedIn. I just know it sucks and I don’t like using it. Do I still have a LinkedIn account? Yes. Will I get rid of it? Probably not. But I rarely use it, and I don’t expect that to change.
Not long ago, I watched a LinkedIn video that defined a ‘thought leader’ as “a person who helps people make difficult choices by being a decision leader.” As a philosopher, I wasn’t too impressed with this display. And as a definition of ‘thought leader,’ that’s about as unhelpful as it gets.
But I think it shows us a few things about business jargon and the nature of the ‘business intellectual.’ What does it show us?
By now I’m sure many of us know that the choices we make are far more complex than popular debate suggests. Almost everyone agrees on the need for consent, on at least some notion of ‘consent.’ But whether and how we consent – and what kind of consent we need – remains less clear.
I might approach these issues in a million ways. But here’s one way. I recently re-read a blog post on Feministing. The post covered a 2014 study in Psychology of Women Quarterly on gender and choices about body hair. It turns out that a woman’s decision to remove (or not remove) body hair is a pretty complicated one. In particular, the social pressures involved cloud the matter of whether and how women consent and make choices.
I wrote my last update on the COVID-19 data near the height of the delta variant phase of the pandemic in late August. At the time, case numbers were still rising. Since then, they continued rising until September 2. And then they started an extended decline. Let’s revisit the topic of COVID-19 and see where we’re headed.
Readers looking for my full history of posts on the topic can find links here: March 2020, August 2020, January 2021, August 2021.
© 2026 Base and Superstructure
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
