industrial living as a frozen dream, and our awakening

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As soon as I write that quotation I think of N O
Browns Life against death and his thesis
(extrapolating from Sigmund Freuds later social
pessimism) that industrial life as we know it (or
knew it) is based largely on the impulse to death
and destruction (or Thanatos, as Brown calls it)
and not sufficiently on life or eroticism (Eros or
Dionysus), i.e. not sufficiently on love. And as I
recall this image of industrial living as dreaming
I notice a great contrast between the dead forms
(of alienation, i.e. of living passively as a
consumer who is also a specialist producer) and
the livelier forms of living (perhaps via the
internet or its successors) free of specialisation
and economic goal-fixing. I saw in this vision
life becoming as changeable and as responsive to
individuals as are ones dreams, although still
driven by unconscious forces (whatever they are)
as dreams are said to be

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