Inversion of Realms: Critical Considerations of Cultural Conundrums in the Work of Sheldon S. Wolin, Hannah Arendt and Ray Bradbury
Mark J. R. Wakefield
*
CETAPS-FLUP/University of Aveiro, Portugal.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
This texts seeks to uncover the intellectual meanderings the broader thread that explores and links the concepts of totalitarianism, its inversion and the power of critical thinking in popular culture. Drawing on the writings of Sir Francis Bacon and Hannah Arendt read through the prism of one Ray Bradbury’s short stories, this text seeks to uncover some of the cognitive features of public perception as stimulated through fiction. The exposition the systems of consumption-encouraging technologies and the logic behind them is also explored in a manner which is complimented by the theorists mentioned above. It ends with an appeal to motivated citizens to exercise their mental faculties to make it possible to deploy critical thinking strategies as means to counteract hegemonic tendencies in the private sector which seek to fatally undermine the safeguards of democratic systems. Deeper reflection is encouraged on the basis of the Habermas’s suggestion of interrogating ‘specific public opinions’ within the ‘lifeworld’ with a view of mapping the cultural terrain of human popular consciousness.
Keywords: Totalitarianism, consumer society, critical thinking, English literature, fiction, philosophy of literature