The Gift of the Negative: You Don't Have To Be Positive

Motivational speakers, gurus, luminaries of all kinds, will talk your ear off about how important it is to keep a positive mindset and push negative thoughts away. Only by staying positive, they say, can you achieve anything. This often carries with it – to the sorts of people who tend to write about this sort of thing – that you should dismiss criticism, that people who would question your course of action are simply “haters.” I was first accused of being a hater by a student in the Fall of 2010. I admitted to it immediately. In many ways, one could easily say that I still am. The student, needless to say, didn’t know how to respond. Apparently, to be a “hater” was the worst thing in the world, and someone taking that title and made a badge out of it was not something that he was really prepared to consider.

CommentaryCameron SummersSeptember 29, 2021Negativity, Ethics, Philosophy Comment

The Problem of Endless Deferral: On the Student Loan Crisis in the Age of Coronavirus

I think that there’s a very interesting and dangerous game being played with student loans. No, not the fancily-worded indenture agreements that some schools are talking about. This is a game of brinkmanship being played at the highest level.

Commentary, Written by: CameronCameron SummersSeptember 22, 2021Student Loans, Education, Politics, AmericaComment

Saying "No" to the World: The Sclerosis of the Modern State

There’s a lot of reason to feel gloomy about the world. It feels like we’re back where we started. This summer has been unprecedentedly hot and unpleasant in some parts of the world (the heat wave in the pacific northwest has been terrible, obviously – but some parts of Russia above the arctic circle recorded temperatures as high as 48 Celsius. That’s 118 degrees Fahrenheit.) What we see is that, throughout the world, but especially in North America and Western Europe, there is a dwindling of state capacity. We can see this in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, we have seen this in regard to climate change.

So Say We All: On Consensus and Unanimity

Recently, I’ve been looking at processes of consensus decision-making, and I’ve grown more and more skeptical of the idea of unanimity. It seems to me that, when everyone is in perfect agreement, there isn’t actually that much thought going on, and that the decisions reached are actually some of the lazier, less-interesting approaches.

Commentary, Political, Written by: CameronCameron SummersJuly 28, 2021politics, Consensus, Duties, RojavaComment

Masters of Delusion: On the big Other

The policies in question aren’t ignored per se, but there’s wiggle room. There always is. What a policy like a workplace rule or a statement in a syllabus is, is actually a limit. This is the line that you can get in trouble after crossing. You won’t necessarily, every single time, and under ideal conditions it will apply every time, but if you’re taking part in this enterprise, what you’re agreeing to is the fiction that this line matters.