Special Edition Post – Cindy Bruchman’s post IMO: I Can’t Write & James Lindsay’s ‘Stakeholder Capitalism and the End of History’ podcast.

I just finished reading fellow blogger Cindy Bruchman’s post IMO: I can’t write. Cindy wrote:

When I was working on my MFA in Creative Writing, my first manuscript concerned an African American family in 1900. I asked my mentors, “How do I realistically create African American characters? How do I know how they felt?” Their answer for portraying people of color, gender, Jews, Asians, and Native Americans was to reveal the universal qualities intrinsic to us all. I took that to heart. So I created a Native American character in my second book. In the third novel, I’m creating Jewish sisters and exploring Japanese racism in the Pacific theater of World War II. Apparently, that’s a big no-no.

In the last decade, there is a backlash to my privileged life as a white woman. In fact, I am told, I am unqualified to write about diverse characters because I will inherently instill tropes and stereotypes that are insulting. Read entire post here.

This very sad post reminded me of the podcast by James Lindsay I just heard last night titled Stakeholder Capitalism and the End of History:

In 1844, Karl Marx explained that Communism, “as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement” is “the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution’. In 2016, 172 years later, Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum put forth a bold future-casting video proclaiming that by the year 2030 “you will own nothing, and you will be happy.” These, of course, are the same assertion. Flashing back, in 1964, in the book ‘One-dimensional Man’ Herbert Marcuse explained that to move forward with the Marxist project, socialism had to figure out how to become productive without abandoning its core values and capitalism had to be reined in to curb its inherent unsustainability...

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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand