Liminal Experiences in Late Modernity. A-Mazed Societies and Institutionalized Craving
摘要
This chapter is a critical reflection on the globalized, hegemonic complexes of economic growth, political power, and info-communication technologies. The enhanced focus on human-made threats in reflexive modernity has accentuated our experiences of helplessness and smoothed the way for control strivings. In the resulting discursive labyrinth of a-mazed societies, the tipping points in a crisis are less predictable and the changes affect unexpectedly large and chaotic systems. However, the arising manipulative, mainstreaming, and disordered contexts only imitate order through the continual control attempts. In the interim, such efforts seem successful but eventually they result in increasing levels of exploitation while decreasing global-level wellbeing and creativity—but without any meaningful goals. Unsustainable lifestyles, supported by consumerist craving, escalate conflicts and result in networked alienation, diminishing hopes and trust, and generativity frustration. Today’s tricksters construe threats or misuse the existing risks to consolidate and concentrate power through the mechanisms of moral panic and moral chills. The chapter comprises a brief analysis of the recent pandemic with a focus on subjects’ polarized communications in the virtual space. Governed by the affectivity of the crisis, people immediately co-created antagonistic groups of vaccine supporters and vaccine deniers, eradicating any other features of human existence and identity.