By Curtis White

A masterwork on morality for the twenty-first century, either playful and profound

Trained relentlessly to paintings and devour, we make day-by-day way of life judgements that advertise company gains greater than our personal overall healthiness. We additionally locate ourselves operating extra, dwelling in fragmented groups, and neglecting our most simple religious and political values. As Curtis White places it, “In order to stay, you'll be requested to do what's no solid, what's absurd, trivial, demeaning, and soul killing.” even if we belong to the world’s so much prosperous society, in some way we by no means have the opportunity to invite: How we could live?

With his trademark humor and acerbic wit, White increases this impertinent query. He additionally debunks the traditional view that liberalism can resolution it with no drawing on non secular values. Surveying American pop culture (including Office Space and The Da Vinci Code) to demonstrate his issues, White urges us to resume our dedication to “human fundamentals” as articulated via Henry David Thoreau—especially unfastened time, domestic, and food—and to reclaim Thoreau’s spirit of disobedience.

Seeking creative solutions to his primary questions, White additionally interviews John De Graaf (Affluenza), James Howard Kunstler (The lengthy Emergency) and Michael Ableman (Fields of Plenty) approximately their perspectives of the nice lifestyles in our time.

“Curtis White has given us a courageous and valuable corrective to a couple easy tenets of left/liberal ideology. This wonderful new publication reminds us that the spirit of disobedience, rightly understood, is the very spirit of America.”
—Mark Crispin Miller, writer of Fooled Again

“A fabulous booklet, uncommon by way of the readability of its suggestion, the strength of its argument, the eloquence of its expression. White brings a superb gentle into the darkness that has descended upon the desire of a good American destiny, and his publication may be required examining for any citizen trying to find a fashion out of the mess that we have got made up of either the Christian ethic and the democratic spirit.”
—Lewis Lapham, writer of Pretensions to Empire

“Those who name on the US to act like a Christian state can be cautious of what they need for. As Curtis White indicates us, along with his ordinary penetrating research, this can be not often a objective suitable with conservative political perform, from international adventurism right down to Ten Commandments monuments at the courthouse lawn.”
—Thomas Frank, writer of What's the problem With Kansas?

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Extra info for The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work

Example text

I'd take a little quiet desperation at this point. ") But the potential for military,ecological,economic,and social dis­ aster is clear to us all,or should be. At the same time,people seem even more afraid of corporate capitalism's fragility. What frightens people is that it could all van­ ish tomorrow ... to be replaced by what? W hat rough beast slouches our way now? Aren't there worse things than Wal-Mart? ) about the possibility that it might all disappear! This anxiety is fed by the fact that all too frequently cracks in the edifice are obvious to all.

Until they do tell us "when," we're going to just keep snorting, I guess. While it would be wrong to dismiss the capacity of fear to sta­ bilize our relationship to corporate reality, it would also be wrong to 23 THE SPIRIT OF DISOBEDIENCE dismiss just how deep our spiritual dissatisfaction with the corpo­ rate life-world is. These two contrary impulses-hatred and fear, our civilized version of fight or flight-crystallize around jobs. Our problem with jobs is just what it was for Thoreau: What do we do with our human time?

Their parents don't. Politicians don't. Their teachers don't. Even their peers don't. The kind of work depicted in Office Space is sup­ posed to be the good work, the creative work in our new informa­ tion economy. It is the work we get to do because we sent all those nasty blue-collar jobs to Mexico and Southeast Asia. " So they laugh. And why not? It's a state of affairs worthy of Kafka. But there's also pleasure in this laughter because they have learned something about a contradiction in their world.

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The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake by Curtis White
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