Entry 5
"The cynicism of the compliance is essential..."
Excerpts from Chapter 7 of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative
"What this disavowal depends upon is the distinction between inner subjective attitude and outward behaviour I discussed above: in terms of his inner subjective attitude, the manager is hostile, even contemptuous, towards, the bureaucratic procedures he supervises; but in terms of his outward behaviour, he is perfectly compliant. "
There's a connection to this subjective attitude and outward behaviour with eating meat. Many are against the industrial animal faming practices, in that there is a recognition that it causes a lot of suffering, and yet many continue to buy meat, their "outward behaviour is perfectly compliant"
"Yet it is precisely workers' subjective disinvestment from auditing tasks which enables them to continue to perform labour that is pointless and demoralising."
Here, Fisher refers to the dual reality of having a subjective attitude that contradicts outward behaviour in reference to auditing and workspace, but he also connects that this same overlapping and contradictory truths is actually the engine of capitalism's core function, insofar, the tension between the two, or the disinvestment, is what makes complicity against your subjective belief the reason why you continue to function as a capitalist cog in the system.
"The manager's ==capacity to smoothly migrate from one reality to another ==reminded me of nothing so much as Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven."
"What differentiates Kant, Nietzsche and Freud from the tiresome cliche that 'life is but a dream' is the sense that the confabulations we live are consensual."
May 14 2026