Next Two Reading Group Discussions Topics

April 6, May 5, all at 8:30 am PST

I want to focus our discussions of The Authoritarian Personality on two general topics for the next two months. Thank you to the participants for helping orient us with excellent questions and suggestions.

April 6: Why does private life and the question :

“Nowadays more and more people are prying into matters that should remain personal and private.”

How does this question fit into the profile of rigidity, submission, intolerance and their opposites that the survey was meant to measure. My question, more broadly is — why is it so difficult to organize politically around the question of privacy? Is it a purely PMC concern, since private life arises out of classic liberalism? I think this this an open ended question that Shoshana Zuboff tried to answer in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

John of the reading group shared this interview with Yanis Varoufakis about his new book on Technofeudalism.

May 5: Dune, and Dune 2: Another Reading Group participant suggested we discuss Dune and Dune 2 as addressing from the culture industry the problem of leadership and charismatic authority. I haven’t seen Dune 2 yet, but I do think in this election year about leadership and get to something on the question of authority and authoritarianism.

I actually think that the question of capital and primitive accumulation as the font of agency and authority is not exhausted — that there is a leader and a leading idea about being outraged by the technocratic status quo that has emerged which has enormous appeal to the masses (as opposed to the classes). We should try to understand this phenomenon here, in our group, in the hopes of creating a “how to be a lead in the age of social media” so that we can attract some philanthropic $$$ for the think tank or the Desert Institute for Social Research.

We can promise a deliverable!!! Appealing to the authoritarian personality, not as hard you think can be the by-line.