“Surplus repression” was how philosopher Herbert Marcuse characterized the fate of humankind under industrialism. The workplace repression of instinctual freedom complemented the psychological repression of infantile sexuality.
Work is an ordeal of alienation. Robots can do it, and soon robots will. A change in human consciousness impends.
Soon, Pat Kane writes, we will need to recover the idea of play. Not play as the industrial leisure of golf, but as the glory extinguished in childhood, the anarchic energy and creativity.
Guests:
Pat Kane, writer, activist and author of the upcoming “The Play Ethic: Living Creatively in the 21st Century.”