Double Life
Critical reading: Here’s a link to the transcript of a special address by Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, delivered during the 2026 World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. Excerpts:
“So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination. …
“Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability. We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but. A partner that builds and values relationships for the long term.
“And we have something else. We have a recognition of what’s happening and a determination to act accordingly. We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is. We are taking the sign out of the window. …
“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. … This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation. The powerful have their power. But we have something too – the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.”
The references to the sign in the window are from Václav Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless, where Havel writes:
“The essential aims of life are present naturally in every person. In everyone there is some longing for humanity’s rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence. Yet, at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie. Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialization of his inherent humanity, and to utilitarianism. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudolife. This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself.”
Milan Kundera, writing in The Art of the Novel, illuminates the connection between the self and the real world of life:
“The crisis Husserl spoke of seemed to him so profound that he wondered whether Europe was still able to survive it. The roots of the crisis lay for him at the beginning of the Modern Era, in Galileo and Descartes, in the one-sided nature of the European sciences, which reduced the world to a mere object of technical and mechanical investigation and put the concrete world of life, die Lebenswelt as he called it, beyond their horizon.
The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of the specialized disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl’s pupil Heidegger called, in a beautiful and almost magical phrase, “the forgetting of being.”
Once elevated by Descartes to “master and proprietor of nature,” man has now become a mere thing to the forces (of technology, of politics, of history) that bypass him, surpass him, possess him. To those forces, man’s concrete being, his “world of life” (die Lebenswelt), has neither value nor interest: it is eclipsed, forgotten from the start.”
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, published in 1947, connect this split with enlightment and technology:
“Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge. … The”happy match” between human understanding and the nature of things that [Francis Bacon] envisaged is a patriarchal one: the mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over disenchanted nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters. Just as it serves all the purposes of the bourgeois economy both in factories and on the battlefield, it is at the disposal of entrepreneurs regardless of their origins. Kings control technology no more directly than do merchants: it is as democratic as the economic system with which it evolved. Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital. … On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.”
And then, critically, Horkheimer and Adorno connect reason and technology with media, with machine, with manipulation:
“Propaganda directed at changing the world—what an absurdity! Propaganda turns language into an instrument, a lever, a machine. … All people know in their innermost awareness that through this medium they are turned into media, as in a factory. The rage they feel in following it is the old rage against the yoke, reinforced by the dim knowledge that the way out pointed by propaganda is the wrong one. Propaganda manipulates human beings; when it screams freedom it contradicts itself. Mendacity is inseparable from it. It is the community of lies in which the leader and the led come together … In it even truth becomes a mere means, to the end of gaining adherents; it falsifies truth simply by taking it into its mouth. That is why true resistance is without propaganda. Propaganda is antihuman.”
And then, in 1963, comes The Port Huron Statement, written by Tom Hayden for the Students for a Democratic Society and referenced in the 1988 cult classic film The Big Lebowski, written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, that whacky stoner comedy in which The Dude says to Maude, “I was, uh, one of the authors of the Port Huron Statement.—The original Port Huron Statement.”
Why is the Port Huron Statement referenced in the film, why is it in this piece on Double Life, why is it relevant now, in 2026? Because both the reference in the movie and the text in the Port Huron Statement itself exposes how empiricism, that brain child of the Enlightment, slams shut the door of the just reproach of those seeking to live a concrete life, a real life, in the world they inhabit. Instead, that scientific empiricism, in Kundera’s words, “reduced the world to a mere object of technical and mechanical investigation.” Here’s a critical excerpt from the Port Huron Statement, with a nod to Robert Reich’s article on Substack titled The Old Left, the New Left, and the Left Behind that reminded me of it:
Making values explicit—an initial task in establishing alternatives—is an activity that has been devalued and corrupted. The conventional moral terms of the age, the politician moralities—“free world”, “people’s democracies”—reflect realities poorly, if at all, and seem to function more as ruling myths than as descriptive principles. But neither has our experience in the universities brought as moral enlightenment. Our professors and administrators sacrifice controversy to public relations; their curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world; their skills and silence are purchased by investors in the arms race; passion is called un-scholastic. The questions we might want raised—what is really important? can we live in a different and better way? if we wanted to change society, how would we do it?—are not thought to be questions of a “fruitful, empirical nature”, and thus are brushed aside.
So: How do we maintain our connection to the real world of life, to our humanity, sanity, empathy, privacy, and security in the face of corruption, corrosion, and coercion?
Re-evaluate ideas that are uncritically adopted from the system in which we are embedded. Develop a critical awareness of the bureaucratic rationalization of everyday life, dispense with its abstractions, and resist its colonization of being in the world.
Or, to make it simplier still, at least for myself: Breathe. Meditate. Practice mindfulness and resistance. Move. Go outside. Travel. Read literature. Play.
In her essay “The Dream of the Raised Arm” in Dead and Alive, Zadie Smith supplies one possible answer, and you can do it right now. She writes:
“I began as follows: in a hyper-capitalist economy – one that has found a way to monetize human attention itself — we are the product. Well, sure, everybody knows that by now, even the fourteen-year-olds. But within this fact does there not lurk the not-so-hidden possibility of a radical and thrillingly simple act of resistance? … to seriously damage the billionaire empires that have been built on your attention and are now manipulating your democracies? To achieve that right now? All you guys would need to do is look away.”
I’ll leave it to you to figure out how that simple act of resistance is closely related to my point about playing. So why not stop reading here, now — stop using the Internet — and go outside and play. Or at least walk over to a bookstore, a real, live bookstore, and pick yourself up a copy of Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith. And then go play.
Between the City and the Mountain: Burnaby, Brentwood, and All. December 2025. Photograph by Steve Hoenisch.
Book Review of Read All About It: The Corporate Takeover of America’s Newspapers: Read All About It: The Corporate Takeover of America’s Newspapers is an institutional acknowledgement of what many wary readers have known for years: Corporate control is ruining our daily newspapers.
Max Weber’s View of Objectivity in Social Science.
Max Weber’s Interest in Studying Capitalism
Indoctrination and Resistance in Psychoanalytic Dialogue
Reading Books as an Act of Critical Resistance.
About the Author Page for Steve Hoenisch on Amazon.Com