The Perpetual Treadmill

The Perpetual Treadmill is a care pathway devised to ensnare the poor within a never ending treatment system for their own good, after they have been labelled with their designated malaise. Once caught within it, similar to Kafkas Trial and Castle, they are wedged within its corridors where they are forever signposted between services. This book draws on the analogies of knights and knaves by building on Bath of Steel to focus on how this system has been constructed and then maintained. To depict its shortcomings, it has been ranged against a psychologically informed perspective (PSIP) to show how those entrapped can eventually exit the perpetual treadmill. But there are numerous vested interests which militate against those clients, duly labelled from ever emotionally recovering. The interplay between politicians, bureaucrats, academics, practitioners and clients is explored to detail how the poor have become a raw material which feeds this machine. This book is relevant to psychotherapists, addiction specialists, psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, social policy experts and nurses.

If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to an assigning of some levelling plexuity, and that, the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system; we can legibly assume that the cosmos, as a legitimate point of singularity, as an undivided totality in the contributions for making of its whole. In that, for evincing to the progressive principal order of complementarity, as placed within the intertwining relations within its given parts. Minded that this collective and undivided whole exists in some sense within all contributions of its parts, then one can declare positively or firmly maintain that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the evidence for all emergent plexuities. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain is equivalently matched to all physical phenomena, as this can be viewed as an emergent property in the possessive nature of totality, such that it can be found within the whole for existing by its reason of certainty. As, can be feasible as plausibly concluded, that locality presupposes the consciousness of the universe, as we are conscious to its existing conventions within this prevalent response to approaching the expeditions into which of the past-present-future dimensions, allow to some marginal glimpse into the unthinkable.

The House of Value Creation (HVC) methodology, developed by the authors in the course and as a result of their consulting engagements, summarizes and systematizes corporate strategies, which lead to significant and sustainable shareholder value creation. The book offers a practical how-to-guide for focusing management ambitions on increasing capital market value. The examples of the Electronics & High-Tech industries illustrate that some best-in-class companies manage to detach themselves from overall market developments and continuously surpass their peers through superior strategies and business architectures.

Experiencing Mahler surveys the symphonies and major song sets of Gustav Mahler, presenting them not just as artworks but as vivid and deeply felt journeys. Mahler took the symphony, perhaps the most tradition-bound genre in Western music, and opened it to the widest span of human experience. He introduced themes of love, nature, the chasmic depth of midnight, making peace with death, facing rebirth, seeking one’s creator, and being at one with God. Arved Ashby offers the non-specialist a general introduction into Mahler’s seemingly unbounded energy to investigate the elements that make each work an experiential adventure—one that has redefined the symphonic genre in new ways. In addition to the standard nine symphonies, Ashby discusses Das Lied von der Erde, the three most commonly heard song sets (the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Kindertotenlieder, and Rückert-Lieder), and the unfinished Tenth Symphony (in Cooke’s edition). Experiencing Mahler is a far-reaching and often provocative search for meaning in the music of one of the most beloved composers of all time.

Is Capitalism doomed; how long is its shelf-life? Can its promise of prosperity and the ‘good life’ be sustained? Have stories of its impending demise been exaggerated? If some soothsayers are to be believed it has been on a downward slippery slope at least since the financial crash over a decade ago, so that its days may well be numbered. This work analyses the place of the free market economy in modern society, distinguishes between neo-liberalism and traditional capitalism, and comes to quite different conclusions – as much for reasons of perception as for socio-economic realpolitik. But in the process some important conceptual myths need to be demolished: about the misunderstood role of the individual in modern society, about the absurdity of focusing on economic growth, about the unsustainability of current social inequalities and how they can be overcome, about the mirage of social mobility and the future of work. These issues can only be appreciated in their historical context – currently a yawning gap in any discussion of our current predicament. Suggestions are put forward as to how a reformed, ‘social’ capitalism would better serve the interests of the economy, the community and the individual – in a world where we must learn to consume less, travel less, and yes, work less – with the ultimate goal of greater dignity and justice for all.

Surrealism has been covered over by the sanitised hand-towel of bourgeois decorum and then relegated to the art gallery as yet another happy-clappy social distraction. Subsequently a journey into revolutionising minds has been reduced to gazing and consuming objects; fit for advertising dross. What has occurred is consumption without reflection. Only by returning back to Breton, Vaches and the original surrealistic impulse can the wider culture be reaffirmed; this philosophy of art calls for an alchemisation of the self: to think higher and thereby emit elevated social values. Eventually this will shift individual as well as collective minds into the Stratos. Thinking higher - means moving firstly entering into nihilism and destroying all current values, before rediscovering the Albedo life stream to then move into the masculine realm of Citrinitas: before dissolving within the Rubedo flow of pure collective consciousness. The book plots a journey within a stream of thinking to dissolve from engaging in robotic herd-speak; to finally entering an elite ambit of reflective consciousness.

This book asks what, if any, public role drama might play under Project Austerity – an intensification phase of contemporary liberal political economy. It investigates the erosion of public life in liberal democracies, and critiques the attention economy of deficit culture, by which austerity erodes life-in-common in favour of narcissistic performances of life-in-public. It argues for a social order committed to human flourishing and deliberative democracy, as a counterweight to the political economy of austerity. It demonstrates, using examples from England, Ireland, Italy, and the USA, that drama and the academy pursue shared humane concerns; the one, a critical art form, the other, a social enabler of critical thought and progressive ideas. A need for dialogue with emergent forms of collective consciousness, new democratic practices and institutions, shapes a manifesto for critical performance, which invites universities and cultural workers to join other social actors in imagining and enabling ethical lives-in-common.

Neoliberal rationality — ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture — remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In vivid detail, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice cede to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either. In an original and compelling theoretical argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that, far from being the lodestar of the twenty-first century, a future for democracy depends upon it becoming an object of struggle and rethinking.