Trigger warnings, students who complain that learning about the Inquisition hurts their feelings, middle-aged folks who whine about the need to choose between the inconvenience of traveling for Christmas and the discomfort of explaining the reluctance to do so, extreme political apathy, the failure of all recent protest movements, frenzied pill-popping, the destruction of the concept of workers’ rights by bored amateurs, the shameless peddling of online learning – all of these phenomena stem from the same root. The absolute, extreme terror of being inconvenienced and the pursuit of convenience at absolutely any cost are the guiding principles of the citizens in the post-nation-state.
It got to the point where we are likely to have presidential candidates named Clinton and Bush. Nobody wants to go to the trouble of memorizing a couple of new names because that would just be way too inconvenient.
On a certain level it does make sense: the state is becoming increasingly irrelevant, so why not just replay the old and familiar elections with the old and familiar faces instead of wasting energy and time on coming up with new ones?
Clarissa's Blog 
Give me convenience or give me death. Wait that second option would be really inconvenient.
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“Give me convenience or give me death.”
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We are oft to avoid blame in this — ’tis too much loot —
That with devolution’s leisure and callous action
We do sugar o’er the Lord Sugar himself.
[ahem] 🙂
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I haven’t liked any of the previous proposed names (market state, liquid state, etc) but think “the convenience state” could have legs.
I had considered “the bubble state” since it largely seems from my old fogey vantage point to be about people wrapping themselves in portable force shields to keep others at bay, but I think “the convenience state” is the best so far.
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I like it the most, too, especially since it’s my own invention. 🙂
When the book comes out, I promise to credit the blog’s readers in it. I’m getting a lot more help with developing my ideas from the blog readers than from colleagues or students.
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Welcome to the Shiny Happy People’s Democratic Socialist Convenience Republic brought to you by McDonalds.
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:p Shiny Happy People Holding Hands
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We need another Gil Scott-Heron …
“Since when did George Dubya Bush become DUDLEY GODDAMN DO-RIGHT?”
“When convenience names the tune, you’ll sit on your ass before you’ll dance.”
“This ain’t really your life, this ain’t really your life, this ain’t nothing but a 7-Eleven …”
[ahem] 🙂
For those who don’t get it:
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When anyone mentions GS-H, it reminds me of this song, and while his version is really, really good, Esther Phillips’ version is … just one of the great recordings ever.
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Convenience state hmmm? Is it convenient to queue for hours to get the latest iphone, is it convenient to work for years to pay off credits and morgates of things you cant afford?
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It sounds like you believe that some sort of dire necessity forces people to line up for iPhones. 🙂
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I’ve queued for a lousy ten quid voucher at an EE shop …
Being in a queue for an iPhone seems relatively more meaningful. 🙂
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I would call it the learned helplessness state. Most people don’t view themselves as integral part of systems… but rather as mere pre-determined cogs and thus go for the esiest (convenient in your terminology) thing/action/thought to avoid the struggle. Why struggle if you can’t change anything? Of course you can’t describe the world in one sentence.. but if you were trying to get closest I think learned helplessness is the big theme.. with convenience merely being one of the key symptoms or resultant conditions.
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You’re all part of the COGS — the Cost of Goods Sold.
Now stop protesting and remove those barriers to commerce!
You’re raising the price of a pint of milk by a few pence!
Have you no decency? 🙂
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I think one of the worst signs of…can we call it decadence? is when you inform people that there are higher and lower levels of things and they freak out and bring out all their reflexively conditioned modern tropes against you. It doesn’t matter that these have no content or that their content is not relevant to anything you said. They will accuse you of being racist or elitist or….god forbid…egotistic (or its clinical sounding correlate, narcissistic) and so on. But there are still higher and lower orders of things. For instance, I used to be extremely ignorant about politics and philosophy and life in general, but I raised myself up to a higher level.
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I reread that article Clarissa linked to, and it is something I could have written had I been completely frazzled by a year’s events that had all but overwhelmed me emotionally. I would not want to make small decisions about such things as holidays if I were already at the end of my tether. I could have written such an article to vent, under those circumstances, but I would then not have expected it to be understood.
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Come on, you spent years trying to figure out your relationship with your father. I won’t believe that even at the age of ten you were capable of this impotent bleating on the subject of your relationship with him.
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I thought I mentioned that if I were really frazzled I might say something like this. I believe that you yourself have opined something very similar even on this blog. You mentioned that you had so much intellectual and administrative stuff on your plate that you couldn’t, as it were, choose what food you wanted to order on your plate. Was that you or someone else? i could swear that were you, or perhaps a Clarissa in a different incarnation.
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Choice of food and one’s relationship with one’s parents are in a different order of magnitude.
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As I said, I can imagine saying something weird like that if I were frazzled. But I didn’t read that article as being about one’s relationship with one’s parents.
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One of the deeper shamanic tricks — which is a very costly one, but sometimes necessary — is to simply take the violence on offer into oneself in a mode of emotional equilibrium. It diffuses that way, and after a very long time, finally it is gone. That is what my memoir is about in fact. (Sometimes I even lose track, myself, of how to understand it in articulated terms.)
But I had to cope with the generational violence my family had experienced in this way. Now, certainly, my father had extreme abandonment issues, which began when his father was killed in WW2 and then became most exacerbated by his loss of the Rhodesian war and the consequences for starting again that this brought about. Very, very sad things. One could use the crude modern parlance for similar sorts of emotional reactions to those that he developed, and say that he was “Borderline”.
But one cannot allow oneself to become equally thrown off balance when one is in association with such a person. That was HOW I learned to develop my whole ‘shamanic’ knowledge about what it is to be in or out of balance. Actually it is life and death in some instances just to stay IN balance.
So I learned all about psychological balance and equilibrium and how to maintain it, even when waves of crisis are rolling over me.
That is what I consider to be my shamanic endowment (as well as insights into how balances are maintained).
In the end, a shamanic type may need to bring an end to generationally infused violence by means of absorbing it and diffusing it, so that it no longer has any potency. That is what I finally managed to do. It’s what I write about in the closing passages of the book.
I’m going to write another book, which invokes similar principles of absorbing force and diffusing it, called “parachute landing fall”.
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The article Clarissa linked to, about people not knowing how to deal with Christmas, was a bit puzzling to me. My DH and I both have family overseas in the same city so traveling for the holidays is a non-issue. However, when we do travel, we do it separately, I usually add 2-3 days to a conference in Europe and DH goes on a brief vacation. As of a few years ago, both he and I have agreed not to have to visit each other’s family. I don’t go to see his brother and mom because I am there for 3 days and want to see my folks, and he doesn’t have to see my folks either. We never even tell the other’s folks when the son/daughter-in-law is visiting. It’s glorious!
I am sure people would take it against us, but I personally don’t care. I don’t know my husband’s family very well, and other then “you should visit them, because reasons” I don’t feel I have to see them. I know my DH feels the same about my family, and I understand (especially because my mom can be very overbearing).
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“As of a few years ago, both he and I have agreed not to have to visit each other’s family. I don’t go to see his brother and mom because I am there for 3 days and want to see my folks, and he doesn’t have to see my folks either. We never even tell the other’s folks when the son/daughter-in-law is visiting. It’s glorious!
I am sure people would take it against us, but I personally don’t care. ”
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I’m waiting for both American major political parties to run porn stars as their preferred candidates …
Before you protest too loudly, please remember the Italians actually elected Cicciolina. 🙂
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I won’t protest. At least, that would be refreshing.
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Ask the Italians how good Cicciolina was as a politician …
Odds are favourable that there will be very little praise.
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