This chapter aims to account for the emergence, expansion, and consolidation of a "happiness industry" which is based on the commodification of happiness at multiple levels—ranging from positive psychological techniques offering individuals efficient self-management of their emotions, cognitions, and motivations, and including a wide variety of self-help literature, coaching and professional advice, pharmaceutical goods, body-shaping products, tourism and experiential marketing, and even cinema. It is argued that these happiness "emodities", namely psy goods and services aimed at increasing the happiness of individuals, simultaneously presuppose and target the construction psytizens. By coining the term psytizen, the chapter aims at stressing the psychologicist bias and individualistic kind of subjectivity that underlie the neoliberal discourse of happiness. It defends the idea that ideological and economic analyses should go hand in hand. The first part of the chapter addresses the...
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How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obligates people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children — some cultures oblige women to realize this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another — some cultures forbid them to realize this possibility.
Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.
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…Evolution has no purpose. Organs have not evolved with a purpose, and the way they are used is in constant flux. There is not a single organ in...
Nevertheless, there are deeper challenges including those that arise when the credentials and contexts you seek to present in the world don’t align with the way relevant verifiers and issuers have structured their systems.
Computer science may take solving the “problem of a global and universally trusted digital identity system — or, more specifically, lack of it,” as the ultimate goal (Bazarhanova & Smolander 2020).
The network self view envisions an enriched self and multiple possibilities for self-determination, rather than prescribing a particular way that selves ought to be. … Selves are not only ‘networked’, that is, in social networks, but are themselves networks. By embracing the complexity and fluidity of selves, we come to a better understanding of who we are and how to live well with ourselves and with one another. (Wallace 2021)
"We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are."
- Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
