This chapter will dig into the association between the impulsivity of mass consumption, a prime source of the ecological crisis, and the ascetic sensibility of the obsessive neoliberal subject. While ecological awareness is growing, critical thought demands that we uncover the reasons why a decisive, widespread change in human sensibility may not be on the immediate horizon, but that human sensibility remains distorted and profoundly unsettled. The ground of human liberation must be sought in individuals in themselves, in their proclivities and sensibilities. Because the destruction of nature is rooted in human instincts, long forged under manipulative forms of life, it is not enough to look only at the structural relations of society. There is a psychological destructiveness that lies at the core of our destructive relation to nature. Industrial society embeds itself so profoundly into human beings that it manipulates our deepest instinctual needs. In his final talk, “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society,” Herbert Marcuse argued that confronting the ecological crisis required grasping the dialectic between social relations and human instincts.
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