[FRA:] wrong life can't be lived rightly... so then what are you going to do?

[Jason Gallagher]

Hello

I respond to the posting about "wrong life cant be lived rightly".  If wrong life can't be lived rightly, does this mean that there is no point in trying to live rightly at all?  You see, I hear people who study Adorno go on and on about the culture industry and about self-help industry;  but I think a lot of this is just intellectual snobery.  If all is industry and Adorno's books are marketed too, and so we have Frankfurt School industry, what difference in principle is there between Adorno's "self-help" books and others.  I struggle with this one, because perhaps there are some, beleive it or not, pretty alright self-help books out there, that actually do what they say on the tin... i.e. they help.  They might no change the world, but they can open eyes and provoke thought.  Adorno helped me understand a lot; so did Aristotle, and Marx, and even Nietzsche.  All these guys can help to a certain degree.  Some self-help stuff is pretty bad. 
 But not all.  Some of it is written by people who have had long personal journeys and profound transformative intellectual and "spiritual" experiences... and perhaps have even read Adorno too.  To me, one has to be discriminating in whatever it is one reads.  Novels are a kind of self-help, as is philosophy to a certain extent, if we understand self-help in the broader sense.   I don't see why one cannot read Adorno AND selective self-help if one can take something from it.  In this elitist attitude towards anything that does not meet the standards of high intellectual rigor set by certain people, you take legitimacy away from something that can actually make a difference to someone.  Who are we to say that that is not appropriate for someone?  I often sense a cynical and self-loathing attitude to anything that might inspire hope or joy in some Adorno commentators.  Not all though.

On Obama, yes, he is not the Messiah, but if he is inspiring people in some positive direction what is the problem?  He will not bring all the changes that you would like to see, and no doubt if he did you would still find something to be unhappy about.  But if he wants to close Guantanamo, I'm happy and praise him for that.  If he wants to change CIA practices away from torture, I'm happy about that.  If he wants to bring more effort to bear on dealing with Middle Eastern issues then that's good too.  Why all the constant negativism?  Is life really so depressing and absent of hope or joy?  If it is, why reproduce it with constant negativism.  Try a little self-help, you never know you might actually find something interesting.  

It may be that life cannot be lived rightly.  OK, I get that,... but we all still need to live in any case, so do we constantly have to be depressed and so god darn pessimistic all the time?