Opinion and ideology are meaningful on a symbolic level defined by discourse and speech. One represents their thoughts to themselves as ideas and 'conceptions,' and then 'builds' those thoughts until he/she feels 'informed.' Information, however, is embedded meaning, and comes from the moods by which we inhabit and 'know' our environment. In a decontextualized information world, the primary way of thinking and feeling is cynicism, appearing as a mental attitude, but really a bodily disposition - a mood emerging from broken hopes and possibilities lost. The very existence of mass populations involves the separation of (private, personal) 'opinion' and (public, political) ideology, making it so that people can only think autonomously in isolation, and can only relate to others through a separate state-form. This experience involves becoming motionless, or bare life into which various 'properties' are deposited, lacking the relational qualities emerging from proper development. As Bernard Stiegler argues in For a New Critique of Political Economy, the de-skilling of labour within proletarianization was achieved by objectifying the embodied know-how and gestures of craft producers into standard units of time and movement. The 'teeming mass of worms,' as Nietzsche aptly put it, loses its ability to develop its potential - it lacks imagination (the dominance of the unreal and the Other replaces the sense of the yet-to-be-real), and no 'ecstatic' movement toward newness. Unattuned to each others' gestures and affects, which now appear insignificant, the masses cannot 'move' (or be a movement) and must be coerced by forces beyond their control in order to do anything. The long-term need for managers and executive directors giving orders is a symptom of a profound experiential crisis, when our embodied knowledge has been reduced to data and the creativity of actors is no longer socially encouraged. It happens when moods become permanently spoiled (stagnating in lethargic attitudes), when we start doubting everything and breaking everything down (over-analyzing), and when trust and communication disintegrate. Instead, we should look to a more therepeutic praxis, in which hope, imagination, and meaning-making will be encouraged because 'another world is possible' (and only thus, necessary).
The information paradigm is fundamentally flawed. Not only are we not informed enough to make rational choices in our best interests, we rarely explicitly think or premeditate our actions as the model assumes. We come with unconscious background experience revealed to us through practice, and this knowledge 'works' for us on the condition that we let it be in our unconscious (e.g., bodily posture that is linked to motor memory in carrying out a task). This relates to the distinction between savoir (know-how), and connaitre (truth/discourse) as kinds of knowledge. For example, when your computer doesn't do what it is supposed) to do, you may start asking questions about why this happened, and how it could work normally again, but otherwise, you are immersed in relation to it which are largely implicit. Our psychological preferences primarily exist in terms of dispositions and inclinations which can be activated via sense-experience. Much 'knowledge' is conveyed through feelings, moods, glances, gestures, and movements that reveal the situation at hand in terms of how it affects well-being. Therefore, it is impossible to calculate the transmission of information - or better, meaning - involved in split-second decision-making. And so, it is impossible to assume rational choice, whether on economics or in politics.
We should abandon the fundamental principles of a discipline - economics - which is based on the reduction of human beings to bare life (masses), i.e., to the desparate struggle for existence amid long-term scarcity. Only once this fear-inducing standardization is assumed can 'marginal utility' (self-interest) be imputed in these models. A seemingly humanitarian recognition of the need for self-preservation is used to support the very system which necessitates it, by means of profit-seeking. We need joyful wisdom, in all senses meant by Nietzsche and not more of the 'dismal science' of economic self-interest disguised as survival necessity. This is also part of a praxis in which knowledge and affectivity are able to work together, and in which the moods that practically serve us every day are trusted to guide action.
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