u/Embarrassed_Green308

Hi all,

My recent post on the politics of bodies generated some great discussion, so I thought I'd follow up with what seems like the logical next step: the temporal dimension of masculinity.

I'd argue that for men especially, instead of wisdom and status, ageing now signals principally decline: diminished productivity, fading desirability, and loss of status. This is very much a result of the economic-social structures of our societies - and what I find fascinating is how depoliticized the celebration of youth became as opposed to the youth-cult in USSR for example (as with all arguments that paint with a broad brush, I very well know of individual counter-examples).

Here is the full article if this sounds like your cup of tea: https://thegordianthread.substack.com/p/aging-with-anxiety

If there are any perspectives on this, which you think I've missed, would love to hear them. Cheers!

Salutations,

I’ve been thinking a lot about how prior societies have handled collapse and tried to imagine alternatives to their existing systems.

I wrote two articles about this issue, the gist of my argument is that human societies used to build regular, collective rituals (carnival, Saturnalia, seasonal role-reversals) that let people actually experience and imagine social arrangements different from the existing one. This maintained a kind of cultural flexibility, so that when a given order collapsed, alternatives were already available.

Today, that capacity has been hollowed out: capitalism absorbs and sells back any apparent rebellion, mainstream political parties offer only minor variations on the same system, and most people cannot even conceive of something genuinely different (“easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism”).

I argue that we may be losing the ability to picture, and therefore navigate towards, anything beyond what already exists and if we want to recapture that, we need some radically new thoughts, or at least a radically different configuration of previously existing ideas.

Here are the pieces:
https://thegordianthread.substack.com/p/institutions-of-political-imagination
https://thegordianthread.substack.com/p/the-zombification-of-political-imagination

Where do you feel like most new thoughts about potential post-collapse futures are emerging? Do usual sources of political creativity remain potent or do we need to find new ones? Can alternatives emerge at all, or will capitalism co-opt them?

Greetings all,

I've recently written an article on the politics of male bodies and how the right seems to have developed a complete hegemony in this domain.

My argument is that the body has always been political, different social structures and political movements projected their goals unto the body, however, beginning in the 60s, the (broadly speaking) left essentially abandoned this field. And thus, you get the Andrew Tate-isation of the politics of male bodies.

If this is something that interests you, here is the full article: https://thegordianthread.substack.com/p/from-marxist-hunks-to-fascist-thugs

If there are any perspectives on this, which you think I've missed, would love to hear them. Cheers!