This time a slightly different collection, some quotes and references taken from my recent conversation with PC. While the discussion traversed a wide range of issues, the fragments and references below relate to the challenges of how to deal with, and respond to, institutions corrupting, eroding, changing, and transmogrifying.
PC: It seems that every time something devastating smashes us, a year or two later, something with a completely different signature smashes us in a completely different way.
CH: Humans have a simultaneously amazing and horrible capacity for adjusting. We find ways to deal with very abnormal things, and life does go on. There is something remarkable in that, but it also allows for us to adjust down when that is perhaps not the response that we ultimately need.
CH: We are left with the sense that our institutions are not enough, our concepts are not enough, our frames are not enough, but not really knowing how to talk about that or how to act in response.
PC: There does not seem to be an action that individuals or groups are capable of which has the measure of the time in which we live. There is an incommensurability between all of these processes which are unfolding, the kind of cause and effect chains that are there, and what people - even well organised, well motivated groups of people - are capable of doing in the midst of this.
Some references
Daniel Alarcón, ‘A Pandemic Tragedy in Guayaquil’, The New Yorker (2022).
Nancy Fraser, ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care’, New Left Review (2016).
Alexei Navalny, ‘Only action against corruption can solve the world’s biggest problems’, The Guardian (2021).
Alex Hochuli, ‘The Brazilianization of the World’, American Affairs (2021).
Correct versions of butchered quotes
We must try to recover unreality. Reality no longer makes sense.
Robert Musil
One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.
Ludwig Wittgenstein