People find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, because the existing economic system has come to seem like the only possible one.
Fisher named it in Capitalist Realism (2009), building on a line Jameson had attributed to someone else in 2003 and which is often credited to Žižek: that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Fisher argued that after 1989 the sense that there was no alternative spread from politics into culture, education and mental health.
In practice
- A policy debate on climate change weighs carbon markets and geoengineering and never considers a change of economic system.
- A disaster film imagines the collapse of civilisation in detail and keeps every brand name on the billboards.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is familiarity: an order that has lasted a lifetime feels natural. Another is the collapse of the Soviet alternative, which removed the visible counterexample. A third is institutional, since education, media and careers are organised around the existing system.
- In its favour
- Names a widely felt limit on political imagination and has been influential in cultural criticism.
- Against it
- Critics note that alternatives are imagined and debated constantly, and that the persistence of market economies may reflect how they perform rather than a failure of imagination. The claim is interpretive rather than measured.
- Standing
- Compare the Overton window and cultural hegemony.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change