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261 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
In other words, talking about rational efficiency becomes a way of avoiding talking about what the efficiency is actually for; that is, the ultimately irrational aims that are assumed to be the ultimate ends of human behaviour. Here is another place where markets and bureaucracies ultimately speak the same language. Both claim to be acting largely in the name of individual freedom, and individual self-realisation through consumption. [...]
The poor, however, are so consistently miserable that otherwise sympathetic observers are simply overwhelmed, and are forced, without realising it, to plot out their existence entirely. The result is that while those at the bottom of a social ladder spend a great deal of time imagining the perspectives of, and genuinely caring about, those at the top, it almost never happens the other way around. [...]
Power makes you lazy. [...] While those in situations of power and privilege often feel it is a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don’t have to worry about, don’t have to know about, and don’t have to do. Bureaucracies can democratise this sort of power, at least to an extent, but they can’t get rid of it. It becomes forms of institutionalised laziness. Revolutionary change may involve the exhilaration of throwing off imaginary shackles, of suddenly realising that impossible things are not impossible after all, but it also means most people will have to get over some of this deeply habitual laziness and start engaging in interpretive (imaginative) labour for a very long time to make those realities stick.