Alain de Botton on status anxiety
Published:
February 1, 2015 at 10:45am
I’d consider this compulsory viewing, for insight into the mind of a substantial chunk of the Maltese electorate and their motivation in voting for one party or another, or not voting at all.
De Botton wouldn’t know the term, but what he describes is the build-up to the ‘hekk, hu go fik’ climax of emotion.
This is also good – I must confess to laughing out loud at the bit about the man in the red Ferrari only wanting to be loved. I don’t think Sandro Chetcuti has the imagination to understand just what a cliche he is.
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Awareness of choice availability happens somewhere along the line, or doesn’t.
Authenticity remains relative to class confines: in a dog show, however, a dog (generally a listed breed) can win best in class, best in show.
Are people really free?
“To reject materialism and to seek truth relentlessly” where there is no tacit acceptance of concept as dogma. Bohemian? Learned or lived? Copied or “authentic”?
The virtues of love, humility, goodness and kindness sought as ends in themselves not for any ROI.
Why do people depend on the approval of others?
Isn’t there enough internal confidence otherwise?
Do you get dressed for yourself or for others?
If we Maltese had to reject materialism and the notion that money is everything, what would be left?
Who would be left?
The Maltese do not subscribe to the art of materialism Tabatha.
Consider architecture up to the Republic and everything since.
One cannot ignore the conditions and sensation of space in consumer society. Behaviour follows spatial organisation diligently.
When the penthouse looking out is all that’s permitted, social dynamics are excluded and exclusive.
Indeed when, in ten years’ time, vast areas of PAPB habitat becomes the next wasteland, endless terraces of balavostri and glass fibre statues, parents dead or homed, where do we go?
Please elaborate. What’s PAPB?
“The Maltese do not subscribe to the art of materialism Tabatha.”
For this purpose, Jozef, take the simple version not the philosophical. The relatively superficial one: the notion that money is everything and that money can buy everything, that a wad of notes is a match for culture, (genuine) education and a replacement for taste.
That, most Maltese serve at the altar of.
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Indeed, to your closing question, where do we go – but higher? The attempt now to copy floating islands and land reclamation.
Another cycle. Other cycles. Spirals. Profits. Confusion. Disorder: Premature or forced “disengagement.”
Or as Muscat would have it: expansion and development. Foreign investment.
A c/o nation.
People like Sandro Chetcuti ignore who Enzo Ferrari was.
The cars he sold to the rich and famous were simply a financial instrument to produce the raw uncompromising brutes that left men dead in their mission to win.
He took it all in until Gilles Villeneuve.
Lamborghini honoured fighting bulls that made it out of the arena.
Submitted comment by mistake;
Both strong minded individuals, their legacy betrayed and no more than a money making machine for global groups.
This is the decade where the car, premier object of industrial production and materialism, no other as coveted and filled with ’emotional’ values, may be truly on the way out, at least in its erotic and heroic connotations.
And this time it may not be wishful thinking on behalf of the sharing caring and worse, condescending tree huggers.
The video you uploaded may be outdated in its tendency to pontificate. People have the right to consume without undue consequences.
The plausible revolution under consideration then is the detachment of our possessive instinct from the object via the physical elimination of the steering wheel and what it represents. And that cannot be underestimated in how we’ll behave and want.
Excess in corporate design language, loaded beyond recognition by teen minded computer stylists is slowly but very steadily giving way to a new aesthetic; One could divide the new way into two disparate philosophies but both reliant on a revision of the car’s fundamentals. Small and authentic IS cool.
Even because there is a major upheaval in favour of specialist cottage industries with no business plan other than authenticity in the social raison d’etre, remember that?
Unemployment and the ease with which technology can remove capital constraints on a permanent scale has seen to its revival.
The second timely phenomenon is that green efficiency, until now an emaciated and emasculated affair, finally found itself the stylemes to match, sci-fi retro and WW I and II in gaming
consoles.
That’s our parents and memory. They were good people, so shall we.
The third is premium brands’ carelessness with their values, leading to hundreds of videos of oil rich brats doing their very best to perpetuate the cultural divide in London and every other metropolis. It’s hip hop smack da bitch on our streets, Swarowski covered Mercs and all.
Definitely not what success registers in our minds.
Failure, always the risk, comes the moment moralistic tendencies overcome commercial considerations pushing producers of ideas out of the West.
Daimler Benz is, as we speak, studying the ethics of a self driving vehicle and where does the occupant, now a monitor on standby, enter to override the vehicle’s choice of victim in case of system failure and consequent fatal accident.
Does get those idiots away from Harrods.
Google’s vehicle, an intruder onto adulterated heritage, yet sadly a cartoon character, is at the moment the object of an ideological polemic between those who’d like to see it on the streets in proper clothes and those plein air enthusiasts whose tendency to hog everything considered their monopoly, geeks who’ll foolishly kill any commercial prospects by association.
The most documented precedent being the Toyota Prius, killed by Tom Cruise and the Hollywood fetish for scientology. Toyota, never a brand to betray its customer base by relegating them to mere consumers and not producers, just unveiled the prospect below. A city enhanced by mobility where the vehicle isn’t the object of the sale.
It’s the freedom instead to move around without owning thus the new status. The algorithms of the personal dynamics therein crucial to develop into real valuables as much as the computer chips managing the system. It may succeed in killing or as a minimum cannibalize demand for the second vehicle. As long as the apps work.
http://www.toyota-global.com/innovation/smart_mobility_society/news_and_events/grenoble/
Quite a long way from calling a car Smart simply because it had only two seats against the 60’s Mini’s four.
But those were the years of Tony Blair and Cherie’s inverted snobbery in Tuscany. Delusional and conceited.
2015 is the year of impossiblly garbled ‘power packs’ in F1, and the unstoppable rise of the Goodwood phenomenon worldwide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU-5yN9LrKY
Values and identity count, global carmakers who had it good with their labour cost blackmail never so nervous and inadequate.
The web instigates, filters and evolves materialism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E-tF-6PWU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtRz6UBLNrk
Guess who won’t be left behind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWWITF5fTMs
The ultimate luxury is time.