Being about the same age as Mark, when he was alive, I understand completely where he's coming from. The values instilled in our generation, in terms of what was understood as a social/political/economic contract between government and it's citizens, from our parents and grandparents are gone and there was/is no preparation, no socially cohesive alternative to mitigate the psychological effects on individuals of my generation.
I just want to honour Mark Fisher for making complicated, bleak, maligned, macro perspectives and dynamics of the globalised world accessible, "grokkable".
Not many people have such a sophisticated understanding of the modern world. This is getting to the core of the problem, people's false belief in the ego. A potential solution: non-dualism.
The anarchist style of prefigurative politics, building communities and networks of mutual aid, has one advantage in that it can provide some kind of alleviation from our feelings of perpetual anxiety, if only because of the communal nature of such activity.
It makes sense that William Gibson would have given up science fiction, because what was dystopian in the cyberpunk imagination during the 1980s in terms of state failure, libertarian corporate tyranny, private armies and the annihilation of privacy and the social safety net, all came true, and therefore are no longer science fiction. I was thinking about this with the release of Cyberpunk 2077. It's absurd that this kind of a world is being presented as taking place in the future, and without significant climate change consequence. That dystopia happened, and huge numbers of people, including game developers and science fiction fans, didn't notice, and just took it as natural and acceptable. Cassandra got ignored again, so why should she carry on trying to warn?
I generally agree with most of his outlook, but I’m gonna make a wild assumption based on his comments and say that perhaps his ideology prevented him from investing in the better aspects of therapy or finding a competent therapist, perhaps one who isn’t solely about CBT. Like yes yes, it’s a symptom of a fucked up system, but here we are, and if there’s a way out of depression, it’s not gonna be by only reading Marx and slagging off therapy. Like I said, my political and philosophical views are pretty in line with his, but I went through many years of therapy and gave it a real chance, I did indeed talk about “mommy and daddy” as he says, and it prevented me from ending it all. Here he claims looking for and finding this political/philosophical truth saved him, and yet we know how soon after this he killed himself. We do live in a capitalist hellscape, but therapy can be an avenue of connection that keeps one from spiraling into the bleakness of philosophy. What good is “truth” if you’re too dead to contemplate it?
