Extra
Loyalty is rare. If you find it, keep it.
The strength of Woke ideology is its lack of scripture. Much like during the French Revolution, orthodoxy is in flux, tending toward increasing radicalization. There is a constant tension where the adherents know their membership is purely contingent on the mob's consensus.
I'd rather be rude than a fucking liar.
The eighteenth-century polymath Thomas Young was the last person to have read all the books published in his lifetime. That means that he would've read all the Shakespeare and all the Greek and Roman classics and all the theology and all the philosophy and all the science. But the same man today, a man who had read all the books published today, would've had to've read all Dan Brown's novels, two volumes of Chris Moyles' autobiography, The World According to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson, The World according to Clarkson II by Jeremy Clarkson, The World according to Clarkson III by Jeremy Clarkson... his mind would be awash with bad metaphors and unsustainable, reactionary opinion; one long anecdote about the time that Comedy Dave put a pound coin in the urinal. In short, the man who had read everything published today would be more stupid than a man who had read nothing. That's not a good state of affairs.
The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one."The Human Condition"
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.
Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance."Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution"
Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power."Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution"
Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it."On Violence"
Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power.
Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
Like all highs, freedom highs can be abused, can even become addictive, but these autonomous zones, however temporary, can have extraordinarily joyful power. They say 'No!' but they also say a great 'Yes!' to life lived intensely and meaningfully.
If our conversation is to have meaning, it must be to make that 'No!' louder, to magnify the pain and the fury and the dignity. There is always a danger that by placing an object in a museum, you silence it, you [..] dumb it down.
The absolute best selfcare you can invest in is learning how to suffer.
If you love, you will suffer. If you live with courage, you will suffer. If you see beauty, you will suffer. If you explore the world, you will suffer.
We cannot avoid hard things without avoiding life.
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things – For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.
Remember the dignity of your womanhood. Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us, fight with us.
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.
To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
Laughter helps one to find a place in the world, but ironically, which is to say, without selling one’s soul to it.
The ruling ideology sees to it that subversive discoveries are trivialized and sterilized, after which they can be safely spectacularized.
In seeking my own restoration and that of those I had wounded, it became clear I wanted restoration for those who hurt me as well. I wanted their humanity recognized and whatever twisted them acknowledged. I wanted healing and restoration for generations.
There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in.
This is where we are at right now, as a whole. No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.
Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honor and money are not to be found in the same purse—honora y provecho no caben en un saco.
In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you. When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe."The Quiet World"
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’m a Christian. I was christened as a Christian. I used to go to Sunday school. I never took much interest in it because … I didn’t. My idea of heaven is feeling good. A place where people are alright to each other. This world scares the shit out of me. We’re all living on the tinderbox. It’s like there’s 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. It’s always the negative things they find first. Since I’ve had kids I’ve thought, ‘What are we leaving these people? Nothing.’ What a future we’ve got for mankind.
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.
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.
Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.
What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play."The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"
The most profound legacy of the dominance of bureaucratic forms of organization over the last two hundred years is that it has made this intuitive division between rational, technical means and the ultimately irrational ends to which they are put seem like common sense."The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"
Freedom has to be in tension with something, or it’s just randomness."The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"
There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all."The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"
Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence."The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"
the hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is—it exists because we all collectively produce it."The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"
the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently."The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"
The whole world is shit, everything is shit, people are shit. Choosing to be positive and present is a coping strategy. It's definitely against my nature.
Compliments and other acts of kindness help. Just a little. Worth it.
The type of 'individualism' that neoliberal ghouls and those Randian dipshits propagate is ironically the very opposite of human nature, despite the 'muh human nature' shite they constantly propagate to defend their perverse ideological inclinations.
It's an individualism that can never truly bring about any actual individuality. One where your entire life is dictated by the exploitation of labour. One where you can never truly realise who you are. Life itself almost becomes soulless. Just centred on the 9-5 corporate grinder and an increasingly insular gated suburbia. An asphalt covered hellscape detached from nature or any true sense of community. Underpinned by an increasingly bureaucratic corporatocracy that does away with what individuality we do have.
FROMM: Like for instance, that we are confronted with the possibility of a war of such destruction that the whole existence of our nation and of the whole world is at stake. And yet, people know it - people read it in the newspapers, people read that at the first attack, a hundred million Americans might be killed.And yet, they talk about it as if they were talking about something being wrong with the carburetor of their car, perhaps.
FROMM: Actually, they have paid more attention to the danger of a flu epidemic than to the danger of the atomic bomb, because...
WALLACE: Don't you think that's a little overstatement, Dr. Fromm?
FROMM: Well, I wish it were, because what I see is relatively few people who experience, who feel, the danger, which we are threatened with, and who feel the responsibility of doing something about it.
WALLACE: Or maybe, when you talk about the responsibility of doing something, maybe it simply is this: that we find it very difficult to make ourselves felt in this amorphous society in which we live. Each individual would want to do something but would find it difficult to make himself felt.
FROMM: Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act -but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid."The Mike Wallace Interview", 25th of May 1958
FROMM: Like for instance, that we are confronted with the possibility of a war of such destruction that the whole existence of our nation and of the whole world is at stake. And yet, people know it - people read it in the newspapers, people read that at the first attack, a hundred million Americans might be killed.And yet, they talk about it as if they were talking about something being wrong with the carburetor of their car, perhaps.
FROMM: Actually, they have paid more attention to the danger of a flu epidemic than to the danger of the atomic bomb, because...
WALLACE: Don't you think that's a little overstatement, Dr. Fromm?
FROMM: Well, I wish it were, because what I see is relatively few people who experience, who feel, the danger, which we are threatened with, and who feel the responsibility of doing something about it.
WALLACE: Or maybe, when you talk about the responsibility of doing something, maybe it simply is this: that we find it very difficult to make ourselves felt in this amorphous society in which we live. Each individual would want to do something but would find it difficult to make himself felt.
FROMM: Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act -but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid."The Mike Wallace Interview", 25th of May 1958
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.
In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves."On Bullshit"
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
If the world sees you are determined to make something of yourself it will help you.
I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 A. M. until 8 P. M. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.
Accept praise for its worth — politeness. Be brutally frank with yourself. It's safer.
It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world.