1Rationalization & Alienation - How do these change our relations with nature
Alienation - the sense of self is tied to your usefuleness to the market economy, we are the commodity - I am a product based off of my usefulness that is purchased or rejected by society
Rationalization - Calcuability, effiency, and control become the drivers of human control
2The Iron Cage of Rationalization - "No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of it new prophets will rise, or if a rebirth of old ideas, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. We are specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart. We spin the wheel even if we hate it. "
Explain the meaning of this quote
New prophets - What are the new gods we are worshipping? Jeff Bezos, managing ourselves out of any problem we cause ourselves, billionaires, the American Dream, indulgence
Old ideas - sky woman, roman gods, mother earth, the connection and divinity of nature
Mechanized petrification/specialists without spirit - we have become deskilled as a society. We hire people, and then people for those people because we don't know how to do tasks for ourselves. Office cubicles are labor without love, we don't have passion, just the wheel spinning that serves the system because we need to.
We are proud to be wheel turners who do things automatically without thought
3Rationalization of society brings about
Deskilling of society - division of labor breaks things into small patterns of repetition to the point where we only have one skill
Irrationality - the weird rules of society like proving our eligibility at a DMV with 3 stupid papers
4New Prophets - Protestant Revolution - how did this set up the capitalist mindset and push us towards this weird grind culture?
Protestant revolution attached different rules to life and the attainment of entry into heaven - We can't ask for last-minute forgiveness and there is predetermination, but God sees your labor, so we rationalized extreme labor and exploitation as the way to prove ourselves worthy of heaven.
We also secularized the idea of insanely hard work as inherent value. You can never make too much money because of our current government
5Domination of nature - heteropatriarchy
We have gendered nature and labelled it as a woman because that is nurturing and makes it easier to control than if we called it father nature. Mother nature is something to be controlled and second to man
6Domination of nature- nature management
A socio-ecological regime that suggests careful management of risks is possible and protective
7Power and Hegemonic Ideology
Power is the ability to get individuals/ groups to conform to your will despite their resistance
Hegemonic ideology is when we take part in reinforcing power structures, even when the power structure//ideology primarily benefits those at the top of the foodchain