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Crisis! Anxiety! Liberty!
Dr Ashley Frawley joins me for a conversation about what she calls “the tendency to communicate social problems as emotional problems,” and how that degrades the power and autonomy of the individual while ignoring complex structural social issues.
Ashley is a sociologist at the University of Kent in the UK, a columnist at Compact Magazine, a regular contributor to Unherd, the COO of Sublation Media, and a Research Fellow at MCC Brussels. She is the author of the books Significant Emotions: Rhetoric and Social Problems in a Vulnerable Age, and Semiotics of Happiness.
She argues that people, rather than clamouring for solutions to unhappiness, lack of self-esteem, and poor mental health, have been taught to constantly monitor themselves, critique their position in life, and seek intervention by authorities and experts.
The result, she says, is “the politics of the void”: A society in constant crisis, obsessed with fixing people it assumes are broken, rushing from one wellness fad to another, placing on the shoulders of individual citizens the blame for social problems that have complicated external causes which conveniently remain unaddressed.
The increasingly widespread legalisation of assisted dying is a further sign of this trend, “a policy that reflects the fatalistic mindset of those who rule over us, leaders who can no longer promise a good life so instead offer a ‘good death’.”
We had a fascinating discussion, one that left me with much food for thought. I hope you enjoy it.
Find Ashley on X, YouTube, and Patreon as @AshleyAFrawley.
Visit our website at https://www.1984.today or find us on X as @1984todaypod.
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