The Predator Class and Savage Capitalism
René Lenoir (1974) according to Amartya Sen was the originator of this specific term – at least in France, of ‘Social Exclusion’.
Musing this night on the present insanity from Covid to Totalitarianism in the Liberal West. The Predator class creates this living nightmare.
ROMANO GUARDINI was summoned to the office of the Third Reich's Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust, in January 1939 and told that he could no longer serve as the University of Berlin's professor of Philosophy of Religion and Catholic Worldview. Rust's explanation: "when the state itself has a worldview, there can be no room for a chair of Catholic Weltanschauung at the University." In a "cordial" conversation, Rust proposed various ways by which Guardini might be able to retain his professorship, e.g., by offering courses on Dante's Divine Comedy. The meeting ended with Rust's assurance that he would explore Guardini's alternatives. A few days later, the Minister of Educa- tion telephoned Guardini and asked him if he would be willing to retire without the academic rank of professor emeritus and also without a pension. The Catholic scholar immediately said yes. When the spring semester began in March, Guardini's courses no longer appeared in the curriculum, and the University's administration said nothing about his dismissal. It was as though the renowned lecturer had never taught at the University of Berlin.
According to Guardini, the Jewish-Christian tradition has generated two notions or models of person. One model presents a person as a "knowing and acting subject." In part by the ability to relate to oneself as an "I." A person is an individual who knows both the exhilaration and the burden of standing alone, making decisions, and bearing their consequences. But by itself this notion does not fully express the complexity of what it is to be a person. It must be complemented by the model of person as a social being. In this view, being a person entails "I-thou" relationships;
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This text below was written in 2015. If written today in the harsh light of the Covid insanity - well, judge for yourself.
This sense of expulsion, eviction, exile: the twilight-zone effect that one no longer belongs to one’s roots, one’s country and place of origin; and, yet, does not belong anywhere else, either: that one is a permanent exile from the earth, caught in a stasis and void in-between the living and the dead, a ghost inhabiting two worlds. He says this is happening to us all now. Visibly in the actual refugee camps, and invisibly in all countries where one is excluded from the fantasy worlds of the predatory elite who act as overseers from their gated communities and securitized enclaves. Maybe we are all exiles now, those of us on the left who exist in-between the lost object of utopia, and the actual dystopian futures that exist around us in the realms of oppression. Not belonging, a non-belongingness – a discordant inharmonic dissonance of the dissident.
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015/06/25/the-predator-class-social-exclusion-and-savage-capitalism/