In the 1660s, one out of every 100 Parisians was confined to an asylum. The leadership of Paris, according to Foucault, had “acquired an ethical power of segregation, which permitted it to eject, as into another world, all forms of social uselessness.” Today in the United States, as incarceration rates also rapidly approach the one percent mark, we might be inclined to look for parallels.
America’s dominant culture of unmitigated economic rapaciousness has always been accompanied by oppositional cultures, one of which we might call the leisure counterculture. This counterculture calls the dominant commerce-centered outlook into question, and is therefore a menace to economic productivity. The question is, how to get rid of it? Rulers have often encountered difficulty when they arbitrarily incarcerate citizens based on their ideology. But this turns out not to be so great an obstacle as it might seem. The solution is to criminalize the rituals of leisure, thereby making a large proportion of the leisure counterculture into criminals.
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