Rather than summarizing the key points of the podcast episode, I decided to write a short manifesto. Would love to hear your thoughts below!
The case against self-discipline:
Self-discipline is entangled in the logic of the technological age. This age is not defined by individual technologies, but rather by social structures that are hierarchical, utilitarian, calculative, and temporally linear (i.e. defined by outcomes and ends).
Self-discipline is the method through which technological control is internalized. First, it assumes a hierarchical split between a higher self (master/disciplinarian) and the the lower self (the slave/child), which is then treated as a tool to be used, manipulated, and shaped by ends of the master.
This hierarchical structure requires self-objectification, self-manipulation, and self-punishment. Until we escape the master-slave hierarchy of self-discipline, we cannot build more equitable societies.
In addition to its hierarchical presuppositions, self-discipline assumes a temporally linear structure, requiring that satisfaction be delayed in order to attain a future goal or outcome. In fact, many psychologists maintain that the ability to delay satisfaction is the mark of a mature individual.
They are wrong. Delaying satisfaction prolongs suffering in perpetuity, as one never arrives at a future when pleasure is finally merited. The master-slave structure of self-discipline requires continuous progress in order to maintain friction between the two parts of the self.
To embrace pleasure—in fulfillment and delay, challenge and ease—is to release the inner hierarchy into a natural dissolution, healing the rift between master and slave. Only then can true desires can begin to speak.
Pleasure as radical praxis:
Disrupting the domination of techno-logic, pleasure resists the hierarchical, means-ends, outcome-oriented structure of self-discipline.
Without denying self-difference, the practitioner of pleasure cultivates self-intimacy and integration.
They build containers for habits to grow ( i.e. specific times and places to perform a task) and then train a gentle curiosity on any resistance to that task, integrating even resistance, tension, and difficulty into full presence.
Pleasure is merely full belonging to presence, without reference to past guilt, future outcomes, or moral imperatives.
This requires a basic trust in the goodness of one’s desires and the natural activity (even productivity) of the body.
Systems of control and manipulation are external mirrors of the internal master-slave divide. Healing this divide—whether internally or externally (as one always corresponds and responds to the other)— disrupts hierarchical systems of domination and control.
Thus, the integrative, self-intimate paradigm of pleasure should form an essential piece of revolutionary ethics.
Note: For more on the characteristics of the technological age, see, among others, Heidegger's “On the Question Concerning Technology” and Marcuse's "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology."
Where would opening to guidance of nature, of the universe, of God or Goddness or whatever word you like, fit in?