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If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.
The march away from language continues. Facial expressions may be a rich form of communication but the kinds of ideas you can communicate with them are severely restricted. Literacy was hard won and now it seems like we're letting it go.
A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm's reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm's reach. So that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
[George Orwell] hardly writes anything about fascism, at all. He hardly writes a single essay saying why you should be against it. He takes it for granted, that when you look down the gun barrel of Hitler and Mussolini and Franco and fascism and nazism, that you don't need to be told what's wrong with it. Here is everything you hate. Here is ever bullying father, every crushed, repressed mother, every sadistic prison warder, every exploiting capitalist, every racist and Jew-baiter, every thug and bully and sadist and exploiter that has ever been all rolled into one, and then refined and double-distilled and then re-done again so you've got the absolutely pure of everything that's hateful. We tend to sneer, or I've heard people sneer, at the use of the word "evil" by politicians. By politicians one should usually suspect the use of this word. But it's not possible, if you want to write morally, or you want to write critically, or you want to write historically, it's not possible to do without this word.
Mainstream media sources about most topics are propaganda, plain and simple. You can call it marketing, you can call it public relations, or you can call it propaganda. Same god damn'd thing. The news is simply a good way to know what the opinion leaders want us to think about various things.
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, itâs just not that good. Itâs trying to be good, it has potential, but itâs not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesnât have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone Iâve ever met. Itâs gonna take awhile. Itâs normal to take awhile. Youâve just gotta fight your way through.
Software will absorb new humans as just another object, and map them into some form of homelessness, because that's the most efficient use of us.
Personally I'd feel happier if I grew up on a community surrounded by people that I knew and cared for, instead of being routed around like a tinder hookup, endlessly bidding for cheaper container storage.
I think that's something worth sacrificing a little bit of algorithmic efficiency for.
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
Meaningful writing has a purpose beyond that of simple entertainment or of generating conversation. Its purpose is to improve society, to improve our life, by teaching us certain truths that the author has learned. John Ruskin puts it well in his essay on books, Of Kings' Treasuries, by saying that good books give us sight. By teaching us what to look for, and the value of those things, we learn to tell apart the good from the bad, to pass better judgements using our sharpened vision. We grow and become wiser. And that is the only sort of writing that ever improves us as people because all the rest, information and entertainment, it just passes by and leaves us in the same state that we are when we first come into contact with it.
Hi, future generations!
Political prisoners are being raped with food intubators to prevent themselves from committing suicide in America's secret torture prison, with the express consent and approval of President Obama, the American Congress, and the numerical majority of the American people.
Love, 2013
Sure, the elimination of sexually transmitted diseases would be a great thing, but to herald it primarily for the potential of the self-centered orgy it might bring is downright depressing and reeks of a man who has never had meaningful sex.
There's a pattern on the internet where as soon as someone's name is mentioned, people trot out the #1 worst meme about them and act like it ends the discussion. It's as if there's a big hash table in the sky that maps public figures' names to most-rage-inducing detail, and when a name in the hash table shows up, someone invariably rushes in with the value. That is a Pavolvian reflex, not thoughtful discussion.
True words aren't charming, Charming words aren't true. People who know aren't learned, Learned people don't know.
If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
"And in her ears the little Seashells, the timble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming on on the shore of her unsleeping mind."
So, even as she rests, Mildred is surrounded by noise, by constant entertainment, just like she is during the day with her t.v. walls. Montag's society uses these seashells for two purposes. The first is to control information, and hence, thought and potential rebellion. If they are the ones controlling what information you get, they can tell you whatever they want, giving only one perspective, and painting a rosy picture so that people are never discontented. They also use the shells to relay important information. For example, when Montag escapes at the end, they send a message through all of the seashells for everyone to look out for him, and to turn him in if they see him. They automatically have a huge civilian army at hand, through the use of the seashells. Secondly, if people are constantly "plugged in," they don't have any spare time for their minds to be on their own. If people never have silence, they never think, and so never have the kind of discontented thought that come from meditation.
Mildred stays "tuned in" so much that she really has no mind of her own. In this sense, she is a perfect citizen of her society. I hope that these thoughts helped; good luck!
Iâve yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it the right way didnât become still more complicated."Call Me Joe"
A man's work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.
They kill and die, for this "precious land", right? And they both litter, whole place is filled with, like, Cheeto bags..
[..]
If they're forced to work together on something that helps everybody.. they might just find out they're not so different after all.
[..]
Let's say solar power, Israel's all sun... so, you're welcome.
Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
You can do anything you want with an idea. It can be as big as you want. It doesnât have to solve a minor problem that nobody ever really realized was a problem. It doesnât have to fit into something the size of a button crammed into a âfolderâ the size of a button on a screen the size of a playing card. But everywhere I look, I see tiny little ideas, ideas that are almost petty in their inconsequentiality. And I come back to those cliches, and I think the real problem is in how little thought goes into the language these people use. When the language you employ to communicate your ideas is small and boring, your ideas are going to be small and boring. And when all your ideas are small and boring, your future gets dimmer and dimmer and more claustrophobic until itâs finally just a pinpoint of light on a dark screen, in danger of going out at any time.
The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice â that it must be seen to be done. The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.
When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct.
They were crazy, and they loved God â and I thought about the unimpeachable dignity of that love, which I never was capable of. Because knowing it isn't true doesn't mean you would be strong enough to believe if it were.
Marry, and you will regret it; donât marry, you will also regret it; marry or donât marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the worldâs foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the worldâs foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it⌠Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or donât hang yourself, youâll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.
Be one with the dust of the way, Then you can't be controlled by love or by rejection. You can't be controlled by profit or by loss. You can't be controlled by praise or by humiliation.
The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
I'm tired of gurus and I'm tired of cults. Either we take advantage of the opportunity and try to reach people, or just forget it.
We could live on a paradise planet together, with complete freedom, using high tech inventions to live anywhere with power and water.
But instead we are building a prison planet.
We did not allow them to make an example of us.
We should be building eternal, public archives of all the cultural and scientific knowledge of humankind. Instead we're building vast secret archives of everyone's tweets, lunch appointments and credit card transactions.
An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not.
To build a bridge, you donât need millions of people. You need enough people to build a bridge so that a million others can cross over it.
There's a time and a place to dig in your heels and say NO to something. It usually comes when someone else has been reckless. If you do it for everything, then either you're the problem, or you're surrounded by recklessness. I think you can figure out what to do then.
All truly wise thoughts have been thoughts already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.
Your neighbors may shit in their pool. They may not even be aware that theyâre doing it. They might think shit is just a natural consequence of having a pool. They may hop the fence at night and shit in your pool, oblivious as they are to the difference between shit and not-shit. That doesnât mean you give up and start shitting in your pool, too. You clean it up (even though itâs not your mess) and you go back to enjoying swimming in a nice sanitary place where poops donât hit you in the face when you come up from underwater. You invite your friends over, because swimming in a nice clean pool is more fun for everyone, and itâs more fun for you if youâre not swimming alone. As a result, if your friends decide to dig pools in their backyards, they know shit and pools are not irrevocably linked and they work to keep theirs clean. Slowly, you all hope, everyone will see how much nicer that makes swimming.
You must get your living by loving.
Iâm a Christian. I was christened as a Christian. I used to go to Sunday school. I never took much interest in it because ⌠I didnât. My idea of heaven is feeling good. A place where people are alright to each other. This world scares the shit out of me. Weâre all living on the tinderbox. Itâs like thereâs some maniac somewhere trying to devise a new means of destruction. It always amazes me that mankind always goes to find the biggest, powerfullest means of destruction before they find anything good. Itâs always the negative things they find first. Since Iâve had kids Iâve thought, âWhat are we leaving these people? Nothing.â What a future weâve got for mankind.
No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
[..] The horseman serves the horse, The neatherd serves the neat, The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat; 'T is the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind. There are two laws discrete, Not reconciled,-- Law for man, and law for thing; The last builds town and fleet, But it runs wild, And doth the man unking. 'T is fit the forest fall, The steep be graded, The mountain tunnelled, The sand shaded, The orchard planted, The glebe tilled, The prairie granted, The steamer built. Let man serve law for man; Live for friendship, live for love, For truth's and harmony's behoof; The state may follow how it can, As Olympus follows Jove. [..]"Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing"
Much scarier than the idea that the education is failing, is the idea that it's succeeding, but succeeding at the meager role that our society has assigned it.
It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not. One would think, from looking at literature, that this question had never disturbed a solitary individual's musings. Is it that men are too much disgusted with their experience to speak of it?
Virtuous intelligent people, the wise, are habituated and developed in the direction of truth and away from lies, deceit and bullshit. They have a sensitivity to the truth and the value of truth. Bullshitting requires and in turn reinforces a kind of mental dullness and blindness. It leads to a kind of degeneration of the mental faculties. If you don't care about the truthâonly the parochial effects of your petty machinationsâthen you are frustrating the intellect and its grasp of reality. You are reinforcing vices while weakening the capacity for discernment and the strengths and virtues needed for proper intellectual function and receptivity.
It's a bit like what happens when an intelligent coward is met with contrary evidence. He will turn away from the truth and go to great lengths to rationalize it away, and in doing so, he will blind himself to the truth. Making that a habit through repetition only deepens the vice and unravels the mind, making it increasingly difficult to dig yourself out.
There will always be idiots, there will always be people who missed something, and there will always be people who refuse to try and figure anything out themselves. But, if we keep designing for these people then everyone else has to suffer because of it.
I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population had the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would be utterly appalled.
Weâre all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesnât. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a shirking of the real business of life, - chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better. The rush to California, for instance, and the attitude, not merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. That so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contributing any value to society! And that is called enterprise! I know of no more startling development of the immorality of trade, and all the common modes of getting a living. The philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puffball. The hog that gets his living by rooting, stirring up the soil so, would be ashamed of such company. If I could command the wealth of all the worlds by lifting my finger, I would not pay such a price for it
Few are guilty, but all are responsible.
I should like to preface my remarks on the New Objectivity with the proposition that to supply a production apparatus without trying, within the limits of the possible, to change it, is a highly disputable activity even when the material supplied appears to be of a revolutionary nature. For we are confronted with the fact - of which there has been no shortage of proof in Germany over the last decade - that the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication is capable of assimiliating, indeed of propagating, an astonishing amount of revolutionary themes without ever seriously putting into question its own continued existence or of that of the class which owns it. In any case this remains true so long as it is supplied by hacks, albeit revolutionary hacks. And I define a hack as a man who refuses as a matter of principle to improve the production apparatus and so prise it away from the ruling class for the benefit of Socialism. I further maintain that an appreciable part of so-called left-wing literature had no other social function than that of continually extracting new effects or sensations from this situation for the public's entertainment. Which brings me to the New Objectivity. It launched the fashion for reportage. Let us ask ourselves whose interests were advanced by this technique.
For greater clarity let me concentrate on photographic reportage. Whatever applies to it is transferable to the literary form. Both owe their extraordinary development to publication techniques - radio and the illustrated press. Let us think back to Dadaism. The revolutionary strength of Dadaism lay in testing art for its authenticity. You made still-lifes out of tickets, spools of cotton, cigarette stubs, and mixed them with pictorial elements. You put a frame around the whole thing. And in this way you said to the public: look, your picture frame destroys time; the smallest authentic fragment of everyday life says more than painting. Just as a murderer's bloody fingerprint on a page says more than the words printed on it. Much of this revolutionary attitude passed into photomontage. You need only think of the works of John Heartfield, whose technique made the book jacket into a political instrument. But now let us follow the subsequent development of photography. What do we see? It has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, 'How beautiful.' The World is Beautiful - that is the title of the well-known picture book by Renger-Patzsch in which we see New Objectivity photography at its peak. It has succeeded in turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment. For it is an economic function of photography to supply the masses, by modish processing, with matter which previously eluded mass consumption.lecture at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris, 27th April 1934