Impossible to Believe

The notion that 21st-century people believe in something is self-evident. Each of us has political, religious, and social notions and beliefs - a simple given of contemporary life. But while many have watched with horror as ordinary people in the US and around the world express ideas and beliefs that are demonstrably unsupportable, it's apparent that the very notion of belief is in question. Impossible to Believe focuses on several key sites of belief, such as contemporary religion, politics, and popular culture, to question and examine how these sites have been upended and supplanted. This analysis begins with Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and extends these ideas into the twenty-first century, taking account of how things such as digital culture and contemporary debt relations continue to cause spectacular life, penetrating our deepest core and proliferating over all we see and do. The dominance of forms of spectacular life that were accelerated under neoliberalism and global consumer capital has obliterated things such as Habermas’s rational critical debate and Althusser’s notion of ideology, replacing them with a mode of existence that depends entirely on having over being. Even homo economicus has been replaced by homo consumptor.