In Norway one of the parties have flirted with the Christian Democrats by saying that they are willing to make abortion more restrictive if they will be their friends. There has been a feminist reaction to that, which is good. They apparently had a demonstration where they dressed up as the Handmaid’s Tale women.

I can’t understand why naked totalitarianism is such a fascinating thing to people. If you live in Scandinavia or the US you don’t live in borderline 1984 or Handmaid’s Tale. That’s not to say that society could not move in an authoritarian direction. But authoritarianism in postmodernity won’t be a “boot stomping on a human face forever” or whatever the quote is. It will be much more subtle than that. It will be almost completely psychological.

Well, the thematics of presenting that possibility – an apocalyptic one – as a hopeful one, only can be hopeful if structurally there is a greater danger than even dying. At least in an apocalypse everyone would die, and you would see other people and you would be one of them, and there would be the real embodied feel of it. But… to be in a situation where you were unable to die, but trapped in this cycle of despair which Kierkegaard talks about, which to refer back to Marx, Weber and others may be no more or less than just the cycle of our boring daily existence without projects beyond these limited ones I have named: getting a boat, getting some new shoes, resoling the Reeboks, getting the kids in the “right” school.

Under such conditions moments may arise, Kierkegaard argues, in which – when we really face ourselves – the hope would be to find a way to die. It doesn’t mean you couldn’t commit suicide, but that wouldn’t even solve it. You would be too worried. You would say “What will the kids do after I am gone?”. See that wouldn’t solve it either, because what has structured you is this despair. It is you. That’s again why, you have a lot of therapists, but they can’t fix this Kierkegaardian problem. It is not a mere psychological problem, it is a structural condition of the self. My argument here is that under our modern conditions, it is quite general.

So, apocalypse movies – on this kind of account – will give us a social compensation for this inability, for this despair. Now they will also give us a thrill. Things could be otherwise, there could be the big bomb after all. I mean, it’s joked about. It should be. In a way… it’s one way to express this very despair. It’s joked about. The more frightening movies, as I say, are movies like Blade Runner. Where a very near future is presented in which you, like all other commodities, will be recycled. Where that is the greater danger – not to die a death in despair – but to live a life that’s not human.

http://rickroderick.org/107-kierkegaard-and-the-contemporary-spirit-1990/