teetotaling

Apparently, psychologists now know what makes people happy. What a relief!

I don’t know either. But:

“The first pattern of bad faith is what Sartre calls the metastable concept of transcendence-facticity. On the phenomenological level, this consists primarily in deferring the moment of decision. When a person is confronted with the challenge to choose, the usual tendency is to postpone the moment of decision for in so doing, he avoids the responsibility corresponding to his choice” (Patterns and Inevitability). Political agnosticism [when not authentically chosen] is a form of bad faith aka failure to address political issues amounts to supporting the status quo.

And, our democracy is [possibly?] crafted to encourage political agnosticism in the populace (or to promote popular default acceptance of the status quo). “As usual, almost half the electorate did not participate and voting correlated with income. It remains true that “voter turnout is among the lowest and most decisively class-skewed in the industrial world” (Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers). This feature of so-called “American exception- alism” has been plausibly attributed to “the total absence of a socialist or laborite mass party as an organized competitor in the electoral market” (Walter Dean Burnham)…These “reforms” have the natural consequence of marginalizing the majority of the population, as decision-making is transferred further to unaccountable private power systems, while a “virtual Senate” of investors and lenders can exercise “veto power” over government decisions, thanks to financial liberalization…Democracy is to be construed as the right to choose among commodities. Business leaders explain the need to impose on the population a “philosophy of futility” and “lack of purpose in life,” to “concentrate human attention on the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption.” People may then accept and even welcome their meaningless and subordinate lives, and forget ridiculous ideas about managing their own affairs. They will abandon their fate to the responsible people, the self-described “intelligent minorities” who serve and administer power —which of course lies elsewhere, a hidden but crucial premise. From this perspective, conventional in elite opinion, the latest elections do not reveal a flaw of American democracy, but rather its triumph.” (CHOMSKY…