Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean philosopher and writer who has gained great notoriety in the contemporary world, his reflections have been oriented towards different themes, but especially towards the technology and culture that are his product, he has also dedicated many of his lines to the way people work and produce today.
So far, Byung-Chul Han has published 16 books. In them, he developed two concepts in particular, one is that of the society of tiredness and the other of the ‘society of transparency’. In his work, he presents very critical approaches to today’s world. She points out that today people exploit themselves and are terrified of what is different. That’s when he talks about “hell of the same thing. “
- ?« Violence.
- Inherent in the neoliberal system.
- No longer destroys the individual himself from the outside.
- Does it destroy you inside and cause you depression or cancer?-Byung-Chul Han-.
Many argue that Byung-Chul Han’s work is an indispensable reading to understand today’s world, its objective is original and profound, but above all very current, it is one of the few thinkers that has created very profound theories about phenomena such as social ones. networks, privacy and the society of mental dysfunction.
During a visit that the author made to Spain, he gave several interviews that had a great impact, in which he summarized some of the concepts that support his work, these are, in general, the thoughts he shared.
For Byung-Chul Han, we are at a time when freedom is only a great illusion, according to this philosopher, what prevails today is consensual slavery, for example, the apparent freedom of expression that exists on social media has become a practice that allows the power to exercise its vigilance over us.
Byung-Chul Han points out that people have an almost pornographic desire to show their intimacy, expose their thoughts, their private moments, their feelings and everything they are, or claim to be, through social media. Everyone does it “voluntarily. ” Power no longer needs to interfere or infiltrate anyone’s secrets, because these people offer all this spontaneously.
Similarly, people have enrolled in a mode of production where self-realization is at the center of everything. Byung-Chul Han says this self-realization is nothing more than self-exploration. The product is the angry body and mind worker. , very tired or sick.
Some of Byung-Chul Han’s reflections revolve around the same thing and the different, exalting the fact that people live individuality as one more fiction, they all want to be different, precisely because we are all equal, this desire is precisely proof of the homogeneity of people. Thinking.
The result is radical conformism. People humbly agree to “live like everyone else. “That is, over-producing, being useless, spinning all the time around the ideals of success that have been imposed. On the other side of this reality, there are different forms of depression and anxiety. Human beings mysteriously sick for reasons they can’t explain. For Byung-Chul Han, this system is very stable and fundamentally unbreakable. He calls it “neoliberalism. “
For this South Korean philosopher based in Germany, there must be a revolution in the use of time. Without hypocrisy, he says that “time worked is wasted time, it’s not time for us. “What we need is free time, during which we stopped producing and it had the festive character. It’s not a break or a break to keep producing later. What you are talking about is a personal time, which vindicates the desire to do nothing considered “productive” for neoliberalism.
The thinking of this philosopher is current and provocative, his criticism is acidic and direct, but above all very informed and sustained, many of his books have already been translated into other languages and some of them are even free online. recommended reading for those who are not comfortable with the current situation.