Episode 100 Selfish wishes for social change

Structured Visions

Photo by Saad Chaudhry

What are your top three wishes? Are they selfish?

As it happens, your wishes may be worse than selfish—they may be toxically self-effacing. If you participate, on whatever level, in a society in which people are continually and oppressively bullied into thinking they need to be someone other than who they are, then you may be wishing for things that obliterate your own unique selfhood.

In this episode we explore the linguistics of wishing—with a close look at realis and irrealis expressions—and discover what grammatical structures can reveal about a desire for a transformative society. We explore the possibility of a social structure in which individual selfhood is protected and sustained by a mutually supporting community.

The book I refer to in this episode is Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds, and you can learn more about the analysis I did there in Episode 58, ‘Communities of Sara Mills’.

The stories I read in this episode are ‘Beyond desire’ and ‘Ala’s lamp.’

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