Blame Theory

Has an obsession with economic growth turned us all into mindless, spiritually deadened consumers? Do we need to discard this metric and replace it with more holistic accounts of well-being? Ashley and Geoff examine the negative views of economic growth found on both the left and the right, and conclude that neither economic growth nor its detractors are going away.

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Ashley and Geoff discuss “The Concept of Enlightenment,” the first section of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.

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Ashley Frawley and Geoff Shullenberger discuss Geoff’s article “The Frankfurt School Myth,” A.J.A. Woods’s book The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, and Ashley’s own gripes with the School.

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Ashley Frawley joins Geoff Shullenberger to discuss her essay, “Jeffrey Epstein’s Necrophilia—and Ours,” and the significance of Epstein’s interests in transhumanism, eugenics, and related subjects.

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Geoff Shullenberger and Ashley Frawley discuss the career and thought of the philosopher Nick Land, accelerationist, neoreactionary, and advocate of “paleo-liberalism.” Read Geoff’s recent profile of Land here.

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Ashley Frawley and Geoff Shullenberger discuss the long afterlife of eugenics, from sociobiology and The Bell Curve to today's online right.

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In conversation with Geoff Shullenberger, Ashley Frawley explains how eugenic thinking and practices emerge out of the crisis of liberalism.

Geoff Shullenberger and Ashley Frawley discuss Andrew Doyle’s new book The End of Woke, which Ashley reviewed in Compact.

Ashley Frawley joins Geoff Shullenberger to discuss her Compact column, "How Society Got a Sex Change," and its relevance to the evolution of liberalism.

Geoff Shullenberger and Ashley Frawley continue to explore the crisis of liberalism. They begin by discussing recent reversals around free-speech debates in the United States and the odd fact that ostensible post- and anti-liberals have often positioned themselves as defenders of a central liberal value: free speech. They then begin to explore the postliberal critique and other blame narratives that have arisen around liberalism in recent years and ask whether the problem with liberalism is that it grants too much freedom, or too little.