Believing capitalism is bad licenses continued participation in it
Evidence
Capitalist ideology in general, Žižek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief – in the sense of inner subjective attitude – at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Žižek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal – we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 31
Categorization
- APHORISMS: A generalizable point: inner reservations license outer complicity rather than prevent it.
- XREF: connects to: Cynical disbelief masks an unconscious ideological fantasy structuring reality — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 30; Corporate anti-capitalist satire reinforces rather than undermines capitalist realism — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 29; Anti-capitalist protest becomes carnivalesque background noise without an alternative model — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 32 (+5 more)
Related
- Inner anti-capitalist belief licenses continued capitalist participation. (similarity 0.94)
- Private anti-capitalist belief licenses continued capitalist participation (similarity 0.93)
- Capitalism functions on performed belief rather than sincere conviction (similarity 0.81)