Peter1c

The rulers wanted to fool people, since they saw that people have a kinship with what is truly good. They took the names of the good and assigned them to what is not good, to fool people with names and link the names to what is not good. So, as if they were doing people a favor, they took names from what is not good and transferred them to the good, in their own way of thinking. For they wished to take free people and enslave them forever. ~ The Gospel of Philip

I, who have the strength and awareness to be my own motive force, will not be the little cog that is overwhelmed, annihilated by the heavy social gears. ~ Bruno Filippi

The gods of all pagan faiths have been allied with the rich rulers. The priests of most religions are the employees of the landowners. But the God of Israel has always claimed to be with the poor—whether in the legislation of Deuteronomy, the words of the prophets, or the experiences of the New Testament. Our God is on the side of the poor. ~ John Howard Yoder

I did not come to execute upon the guilty the sentence of condemnation they deserve, but to show them with compassion how they can avoid it. ~ Guigo I

Oppressed and oppressors cannot possibly mean the same thing when they speak of God. The God of the oppressed is a God of revolution who breaks the chains of slavery. The oppressors' God is a God of slavery and must be destroyed along with the oppressors. ~ James Cone

In vain do they think themselves innocent who appropriate to their own use alone those goods which God gave in common; by not giving to others that which they themselves receive, they become homicides and murderers, inasmuch as in keeping for themselves those things which would alleviate the sufferings of the poor, we may say that every day they cause the death of as many persons as they might have fed and did not. When, therefore, we offer the means of living to the indigent, we do not give them anything of ours, but that which of right belongs to them. ~ Gregory the Great

Neighbor love has nothing to do with the kind of love that depends on the recognition of a valuable quality in its object. Neighbor love does not recognize value, but creates it. The neighbor loves, and imparts value by loving. ... Neighbor love is a value-creating principle. ~ Anders Nygren

There are clear and predictable consequences for the world if human beings continue to rape the earth and plunder its resources; to exploit, oppress, and dominate the weak and the poor for the sake of greed and the hunger for power; to depend on ever-rising levels of violence and ever more lethal instruments of death and destruction in order to secure positions of power and privilege. ~ Allan Boesak

Only the idea of God gives me the confidence that morality will become reality on earth. And because I cannot live without this confidence, I cannot live without God. ~ Hermann Cohen

When the Prophet saw injustice, either on the part of men or on the part of Providence, he did not ... bend the knee to necessity, and judge the evil-doers leniently; nor again did he give himself up to despair, or doubt the strength of Righteousness, or the possibility of its victory. He simply complained, pouring out his soul in words of fire; then went his way again, fighting for his ideal, and full of hope that in time—perhaps even "at the end of time"—Righteousness would be lord over all the earth. ~ Ahad Ha'am

The sublime title "Christ" is an adjective which only receives its specific value from the specificity of the noun, Jesus of Nazareth. If Jesus is forgotten, then it becomes possible to fill the adjective with whatever suits at the time, without checking whether Jesus was like that or not, or whether this means leaving the world sunk in its wretchedness or not; or worse still, without asking if this image legitimates the tragedy of the world or brings liberation from it. ~ Jon Sobrino

You, the common man, must become learned yourself, so that you will be misled no longer. ~ Thomas Müntzer

There was a time when people of the rich nations of the world regarded poverty as a "natural condition" for those living in the poor nations of the world. ... Today we have largely been stripped of this pseudo-innocence. We know that the poor are so poor because the rich are so rich, that the causes of poverty can be traced to deliberate decisions and deliberate economic and political policies designed to benefit the rich and powerful. We know that poverty and unemployment are not just accidents of history but deliberate, even indispensable, components of capitalism as an economic system. ~ Allan Boesak

Wherever rights are denied the poor, the prophetic anger is turned not merely against the incumbent rulers but equally against the means society employs to gloss over its own mendacity. And foremost among these means is art. Catering to luxury and emphasizing only the beautiful, art denies the fact that wretchedness and destitution have a tight grip on the poor. This is the reason why the prophetic zeal turned against art, and not merely against the luxury of women and the pretentiousness of the rich. ~ Hermann Cohen

Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins remain addicted to such unedifying conversation as about kings, robbers, ministers, armies, dangers, wars, food, drink, clothes, beds, garlands, perfumes, relatives, carriages, villages, towns and cities, countries, women, heroes, street- and well-gossip, talk of the departed, desultory chat, speculations about land and sea, talk about being and non-being, the ascetic Gotama refrains from such conversation. ~ Gautama Buddha

The Prophet ... remains always a man apart, a narrow-minded extremist, zealous for his own ideal, and intolerant of every other. And since he cannot have all that he would, he is in a perpetual state of anger and grief; he remains all his life "a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth." [Jeremiah 15:10] Not only this: the other members of society, those many-sided dwarfs, creatures of the general harmony, cry out after him, "The Prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad" [Hosea 9:7]; and they look with lofty contempt on his narrowness and extremeness. ~ Ahad Ha'am

The fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity. It has programmed into its very nature a massive, complex and automatic defense mechanism for all our old methods for raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class of people. The essence of a U.S.A. totalitarian socio-political capitalism is concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away its mask. ~ George Jackson

All possessions are by nature unrighteous when a man possess them for personal advantage as being entirely his own, and does not bring them into the common stock for those in need. ~ Clement of Alexandria

The right of individual possession is that the individual is in a way a steward of his property on behalf of society; his tenure of property is more of a duty than an actual right of possession. ... The condition on which this right must stand is that of wisdom in the disposal; if the disposal of property is foolish, then the ruler or society may withdraw this right of disposal. ... The right of disposal depends on being mature and being able to fulfill one's duties; when the possessor does not meet these requirements, then the natural fruits of ownership come to an end. ~ Sayyid Qutb

Prestige stands between the masses and a revolt against their class enemy. The aura of magic, glamour, luster and splendid permanence covers the fascists like a protective layer of fat. The slimy scales of majesty shield and conceal the dilapidation of the old bourgeois reign of terror. ~ George Jackson

It is monstrous for one to live in luxury while many are in want. ~ Clement of Alexandria

Can humans exist without some people ruling and others being ruled? The founders of political science did not think so. "I put for a general inclination of mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death," declared Thomas Hobbes. Because of this innate lust for power, Hobbes thought that life before (or after) the state was a "war of every man against every man"—"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Was Hobbes right? Do humans have an unquenchable desire for power that, in the absence of a strong ruler, inevitably leads to a war of all against all? To judge from surviving examples of bands and villages, for the greater part of prehistory our kind got along quite well without so much as a paramount chief, let alone the all-powerful English leviathan King and Mortal God, whom Hobbes believed was needed for maintaining law and order among his fractious countrymen. ~ Anthropologist Marvin Harris

When the Lord's Prayer is prayed with insight it becomes a petition for the abolition of capitalism and the supplanting of the existing economic order with a society which is consistent with the religion of Jesus. ~ Kirby Page

If I take the wages of everyone here, individually it means nothing, but collectively all of the earning power or wages that you earned in one week would make me wealthy. And if I could collect it for a year, I'd be rich beyond dreams. Now, when you see this, and then you stop and consider the wages that were kept back from millions of Black people, not for one year but for 310 years, you'll see how this country got so rich so fast. And what made the economy as strong as it is today. And all that slave labor that was amassed in unpaid wages, is due someone today. And you're not giving us anything when we say that it's time to collect. ~ Malcolm X

At its beginnings there was very powerful meditation on the presence of Christ in the oppressed Indians, which objectively pointed toward a christology of the "body of Christ." Guamán Poma, for example, said, "By faith we know clearly that where there is a poor person there is Jesus Christ himself," and Bartolomé de las Casas declared, "In the Indies I leave Jesus Christ, our God, being whipped and afflicted, and buffeted and crucified, not once but thousands of times, as often as the Spaniards assault and destroy those people." But this original christological insight did not thrive, and what became the tradition was a christology based on the dogmatic formulas, in which—however well they were known and understood—what was stressed was the divinity of Christ rather than his real and lived humanity. ~ Jon Sobrino

Abandoning false speech, the ascetic Gotama dwells refraining from false speech, a truth-speaker, one to be relied on, trustworthy, dependable, not a deceiver of the world. Abandoning malicious speech, he does not repeat there what he has heard here to the detriment of these, or repeat here what he has heard there to the detriment of those. Thus he is a reconciler of those at variance and an encourager of those at one, rejoicing in peace, loving it, delighting in it, one who speaks up for peace. Abandoning harsh speech, he refrains from it. He speaks whatever is blameless, pleasing to the ear, agreeable, reaching the heart, urbane, pleasing and attractive to the multitude. Abandoning idle chatter, he speaks at the right time, what is correct and to the point, of Dhamma and discipline. He is a speaker whose words are to be treasured, seasonable, reasoned, well-defined and connected with the goal. ~ Digha Nikaya

Those who love their neighbor as themselves possess nothing more than their neighbor. ~ Basil of Caesarea

The stinking puddle from which usury, thievery and robbery arises is our lords and princes. They make all creatures their property—the fish in the water, the bird in the air, the plant in the earth must all be theirs. Then they proclaim God's commandments among the poor and say, "You shall not steal." They oppress everyone, the poor peasant, the craftsman are skinned and scraped. ~ Thomas Müntzer

In Islam, there is no priesthood, and no intermediary between the creature and The Creator; but every Muslim from the ends of earth or in the paths of the sea has the ability of himself to approach his Lord without priest or minister. Nor again can the Muslim administrator derive his authority from any papacy, or from Heaven; but he derives it solely from the Muslim community. Similarly, he derives his principles of administration from the religious law, which is universal in its understanding and application and before which all men come everywhere as equals. ~ Sayyid Qutb

A long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society. ~ Lucy Parsons

We cannot change the world by a new plan, project, or idea. We cannot even change other people by our convictions, stories, advice and proposals, but we can offer a space where people are encouraged to disarm themselves, lay aside their occupations and pre-occupations and listen with attention and care to the voices speaking in their center. ~ Henri Nouwen

The economic system denies the right of the sincerest and most sympathetic to keep their hands out of the blood of their brothers. We may not go to our rest at night, or waken to our work in the morning, without bearing the burden of the communal guilt; without being ourselves creators and causes of the wrongs we seek to bear away. At every step, when we would do good, evil is present with us, and exacts its tribute from the very citadel of the soul. ~ George D. Herron

If we stay at our posts, in order that we may change the system, we are on the backs of our brothers; if we desert our posts, in order that we may get off our brothers' backs, we take bread from their mouths, from the mouths of their children, and add to the army of the workless and hopeless. ~ George D. Herron

The love of gain, which is a large, incalculably large, element in every soul, when once applied to the desire for God, will bless the one who has it. ~ Gregory of Nyssa

Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

It is the expensiveness of our pleasures that makes the world poor and keeps us poor in ourselves. If we could but learn to find enjoyment in the things of the mind, the economic problems would solve themselves, ~ John Lancaster Spalding

Live with your century; but do not be its creature. Work for your contemporaries; but create what they need, not what they praise. ~ Friedrich Schiller

It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance. ~ Søren Kierkegaard

If, while hurrying ostensibly to the temple of truth, we hand the reins over to our personal interests which look aside at very different guiding stars, for instance at the tastes and foibles of our contemporaries, at the established religion, but in particular at the hints and suggestions of those at the head of affairs, then how shall we ever reach the high, precipitous, bare rock whereon stands the temple of truth? ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

When I speak of the purpose of self-culture, I mean that it should be sincere. In other words, we must make self-culture really and truly our end, or choose it for its own sake, and not merely as a means or instrument of something else. And here I touch a common and very pernicious error. Not a few persons desire to improve themselves only to get property and to rise in the world; but such do not properly choose improvement, but something outward and foreign to themselves; and so low an impulse can produce only a stinted, partial, uncertain growth. A man, as I have said, is to cultivate himself because he is a man. He is to start with the conviction that there is something greater within him than in the whole material creation, than in all the worlds which press on the eye and ear; and that inward improvements have a worth and dignity in themselves quite distinct from the power they give over outward things. ~ William Ellery Channing

Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair,—the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish,—to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself,—an hypæthral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity in this respect. Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very bar-room of the mind’s inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us,—the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts’ shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide? ~ Henry David Thoreau

The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed suddenly into magnificent sense. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I worship freedom; I abhor restraint, trouble, dependence. As long as the money in my purse lasts, it assures my independence; it relieves me of the trouble of finding expedients to replenish it, a necessity which has always inspired me with dread; but the fear of seeing it exhausted makes me hoard it carefully. The money which a man possesses is the instrument of freedom; that which we eagerly pursue is the instrument of slavery. Therefore I hold fast to that which I have, and desire nothing. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists then in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor to think well; this is the principle of morality. ~ Blaise Pascal

As the saints and prophets were often forced to practise long vigils and fastings and prayers before their ecstasies would fall upon them and their visions would appear, so Virtue in its purest and most exalted form can only be acquired by means of severe and long continued culture of the mind. Persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience; but the conscience itself will be defective. ... To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall. ~ William Winwood Reade

School children and students who love God should never say: “For my part I like mathematics”; “I like French”; “I like Greek.” They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer. ~ Simone Weil

"Will to truth" does not mean "I do not want to let myself be deceived" but—there is no alternative—"I will not deceive, not even myself"; and with that we stand on moral ground. ... You will have gathered what I'm getting at, namely, that it's still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The science, which teaches arts and handicrafts is merely science for the gaining of a living; But the science which teaches deliverance from worldly existence, is not that the true science? ~ Nagarjuna

This oppressor, this machine that has gone mad and run amok, it is beserk. They keep telling us, "progress.” They keep telling us “face reality.” Well, let’s deal with reality. Reality is the Earth can no longer take this attack. We can no longer allow this Thing to continue when it’s polluting the air, it’s polluting the water, polluting our food. ... The earth gives us life, not the multi-national corporate government. The Earth gives us life. We need to have the Earth. We must have it, otherwise our life will be no more. So we must resist what they do. ~ John Trudell

My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart you will not despise. ~ Psalm 51:17

You must speak my words to them, whether they listen or fail to listen. ~ Ezekiel 2:7

The Age of Empty Freedom does not know that man must first through labour, industry, and art, learn how to know; but it has a certain fixed standard for all conceptions, and an established Common Sense of Mankind always ready and at hand, innate within itself and there present without trouble on its part;—and those conceptions and this Common Sense are to it the measure of the efficient and the real. It has this great advantage over the Age of Science, that it knows all things without having learned anything; and can pass judgment upon whatever comes before it at once and without hesitation,—without needing any preliminary evidence:—'That which I do not immediately comprehend by the conceptions which dwell within me, is nothing,'—says Empty Freedom. ~ Johann Gottlieb Fichte

I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you. ~ Gloria Anzaldúa

If a person's actions are not good, it does not matter how the person looks physically. Doing good is equivalent to being beautiful. ~ Molefi Kete Asante

Peter Capofreddi studies Lifelong Learning and Adult Education at Pennsylvania State University.

A commonplace book

• Just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. ... The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”
  • Steven Berlin Johnson, "The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book," Hearst New Media lecture, April 22, 2010

• Wikiquote, as I see it, is a communal commonplace book that allows us to record inspirational passages we find in a lifetime of reading, to share them with friends, and to enjoy them in the company of online neighbors destined to become friends.
  • User peter1c, 2017

Theognis (6th century BC)

• We struggle onward, ignorant and blind,
  For a result unknown and undesign’d;
  Avoiding seeming ills, misunderstood,
  Embracing evil as a seeming good.
  • Theognis, Elegies, 58, D. Wender, trans.

• Ploutos, no wonder mortals worship you:
  You are so tolerant of their sins!
  • Theognis, Elegies, D. Wender, trans., 523

Gautama Buddha (c. 563 – 483 BC)

• Abandoning false speech, the ascetic Gotama dwells refraining from false speech, a truth-speaker, one to be relied on, trustworthy, dependable, not a deceiver of the world. Abandoning malicious speech, he does not repeat there what he has heard here to the detriment of these, or repeat here what he has heard there to the detriment of those. Thus he is a reconciler of those at variance and an encourager of those at one, rejoicing in peace, loving it, delighting in it, one who speaks up for peace. Abandoning harsh speech, he refrains from it. He speaks whatever is blameless, pleasing to the ear, agreeable, reaching the heart, urbane, pleasing and attractive to the multitude. Abandoning idle chatter, he speaks at the right time, what is correct and to the point, of Dhamma and discipline. He is a speaker whose words are to be treasured, seasonable, reasoned, well-defined and connected with the goal.
  • Gautama Buddha, Digha Nikaya, M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 1 (Brahmajala Sutta), verse 1.9, pp. 68-69

• Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins remain addicted to attending such shows as dancing, singing, music, displays, recitations, hand-music, cymbals and drums, fairy-shows, acrobatic and conjuring tricks, combats of elephants, buffaloes, bulls, goats, rams, cocks and quail, fighting with staves, boxing, wrestling, sham-fights, parades, manoeuvres and military reviews, the ascetic Gotama refrains from attending such displays.
  • Gautama Buddha, Digha Nikaya, M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 1 (Brahmajala Sutta), verse 1.13

• Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins remain addicted to such unedifying conversation as about kings, robbers, ministers, armies, dangers, wars, food, drink, clothes, beds, garlands, perfumes, relatives, carriages, villages, towns and cities, countries, women, heroes, street- and well-gossip, talk of the departed, desultory chat, speculations about land and sea, talk about being and non-being, the ascetic Gotama refrains from such conversation.
  • Gautama Buddha, Digha Nikaya, M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 1 (Brahmajala Sutta), verse 1.17, p. 70

• As long, Sire, as a monk does not perceive the disappearance of the five hindrances in himself, he feels as if in debt, in sickness, in bonds, in slavery, on a desert journey. But when he perceives the disappearance of the five hindrances in himself, it is as if he were freed from debt, from sickness, from bonds, from slavery, from the perils of the desert.
  • Gautama Buddha, Digha Nikaya, M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 2 (Samaññaphala Sutta), verse 74, p. 102

• It is just as if a man were to draw out a reed from its sheath. He might think: “This is the reed, this is the sheath, reed and sheath are different. Now the reed has been pulled from the sheath.” … In the same way a monk with mind concentrated directs his mind to the production of a mind-made body. He draws that body out of this body.
  • Gautama Buddha, Digha Nikaya, M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 2 (Samaññaphala Sutta), verse 86, p. 104

• If he goes forth from the household life into homelessness, then he will become an Arahant, a fully-enlightened Buddha, one who draws back the veil from the world.
  • Gautama Buddha, Digha Nikaya, M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 3 (Ambattha Sutta), verse 1.5, p. 112

• Wisdom is purified by morality, and morality is purified by wisdom: where one is, the other is, the moral man has wisdom and the wise man has morality, and the combination of morality and wisdom is called the highest thing in the world.
  • Gautama Buddha, Digha Nikaya, M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 4 (Sonadanda Sutta), verse 22, p. 131

• “Well, Lord, is the soul the same as the body, is the soul one thing and the body another?”

“I have not declared that the soul is one thing and the body another.”

“Well, Lord, does the Tathagata exist after death?” …

“I have not declared that the Tathagata exists after death.” …

“But, Lord, why has the Lord not declared these things?”

“Potthapada, that is not conducive to the purpose, not conducive to Dhamma, not the way to embark on the holy life; it does not lead to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to calm, to higher knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nibbana. That is why I have not declared it.”

• Gautama Buddha, Digha Nikaya, M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 9 (Potthapada Sutta), verse 28, p. 164

• Pleasant feeling is impermanent, conditioned, dependently-arisen, bound to decay, to vanish, to fade away, to cease—and so too are painful feeling and neutral feeling. So anyone who, on experiencing a pleasant feeling, thinks: "This is my self", must, at the cessation of that pleasant feeling, think: "My self has gone!"
  • Gautama Buddha, Digha Nikaya, M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 15 (Mahanidana Sutta), verse 29, p. 227

• Any kind of material form whatever, whether past, future, or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far or near, all material form should be seen as it actually is with proper wisdom thus: “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.”
  • Gautama Buddha, Majjhima Nikaya, B. Nanamoli and B. Bodhi, trans. (1995), Sutta 62, verse 3, p. 527

• Rahula, whatever internally, belonging to oneself, is solid, solidified, and clung-to, that is, head-hairs, body-hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, bone-marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, diaphragm, spleen, lungs, large intestines, small intestines, contents of the stomach, feces, or whatever else internally, belonging to oneself, is solid, solidified, and clung-to: this is called the internal earth element. Now both the internal earth element and the external earth element are simply earth element. And that should be seen as it actually is with proper wisdom thus: “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.” When one sees it thus as it actually is with proper wisdom, one becomes disenchanted with the earth element and makes the mind dispassionate towards the earth element.
  • Gautama Buddha, Majjhima Nikaya, B. Nanamoli and B. Bodhi, trans. (1995), Sutta 62, verse 8, p. 528

• Rahula, develop meditation that is like water. ... Just as people wash clean things and dirty things, excrement, urine, spittle, pus, and blood in water, and the water is not horrified, humiliated, and disgusted because of that, so too, Rahula, develop meditation that is like water.
  • Gautama Buddha, Majjhima Nikaya, B. Nanamoli and B. Bodhi, trans. (1995), Sutta 62, verse 14, p. 530

• The seers of old had fully restrained selves, and were austere. Having abandoned the five strands of sensual pleasures, they practiced their own welfare. The brahmans had no cattle, no gold, no wealth. They had study as their wealth and grain. They guarded the holy life as their treasure.
  • Gautama Buddha, Sutta Nipata, pp. 284-285

Confucius (551-479 BC)

To rank the effort above the prize may be called love. ~ Confucius

• A scholar who loves comfort is not worthy of the name.
  • Confucius, Analects, 14.3

• The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration.
  • Confucius, Analects

• They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.
  • Confucius, Analects

• Guide the people by law, subdue them by punishment; they may shun crime, but will be void of shame. Guide them by example, subdue them by courtesy; they will learn shame, and come to be good.
  • Confucius, Analects 2.3

• To rank the effort above the prize may be called love.
  • Confucius, Analects 6.20

Sophocles (496-406 BC)

• Whoever has a keen eye for profits is blind in relation to his craft.
  • Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, l:388

Tanakh (c. 450BC-200BC)

They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat. ~ Isaiah

• Be ye holy as I am holy.
  • Leviticus 19:2

• For behold short years pass away, and I am walking in a path by which I shall not return.
  • Job 16:23

• Be not wise in thine own eyes.
  • Proverbs 3:7

• Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding. For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold. She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her.
  • Proverbs 3:13-15

• Envy thou not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways.
  • Proverbs 3:31

• Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge.
  • Proverbs 12:1

• Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope for a fool than for him.
  • Proverbs 26:12

• You who know nothing of how the soul marries the body, you therefore know nothing of God’s works.
  • Ecclesiastes 11:5

• Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity.
  • Ecclesiastes 2:15

• They shall build houses and inhabit them;

they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.

They shall not build and another inhabit;

they shall not plant and another eat.

• Isaiah 65:21-22 NRSV

• He defended the cause of the poor and needy,

and so all went well.

Is that not what it means to know me?

• Jeremiah 22:15-17 NRSV

Xenophon (430-354 BC)

• As athletes who gain an easy victory in the games are apt to neglect their training, so the honour in which he was held, the cheap triumph he won with the people, led him to neglect himself.
  • Xenophon, describing Alcibiades, Memorabilia, 1.2.25

Plato (428-348 BC)

The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are. ~ Plato

• The greatest penalty of evildoing—namely, to grow into the likeness of bad men.
  • Plato, Theatetus

• I set to do you—each one of you, individually and in private—what I hold to be the greatest possible service. I tried to persuade each one of you to concern himself less with what he has than with what he is, so as to render himself as excellent and rational as possible.
  • Plato, Apology, 36c6

• I would be better for me … that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.
  • Plato, Socrates in Gorgias, 482c

• Each of these private teachers who work for pay, whom the politicians call sophists and regard as their rivals, inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom. It is as if a man were acquiring the knowledge of the humors and desires of a great strong beast which he had in his keeping, how it is to be approached and touched, and when and by what things it is made most savage or gentle, yes, and the several sounds it is wont to utter on the occasion of each, and again what sounds uttered by another make it tame or fierce, and after mastering this knowledge by living with the creature and by lapse of time should call it wisdom, and should construct thereof a system and art and turn to the teaching of it, knowing nothing in reality about which of these opinions and desires is honorable or base, good or evil, just or unjust, but should apply all these terms to the judgments of the great beast, calling the things that pleased it good, and the things that vexed it bad, having no other account to render of them, but should call what is necessary just and honorable, never having observed how great is the real difference between the necessary and the good, and being incapable of explaining it to another.
  • Plato, Republic, 493a

• Anyone who holds a true opinion without understanding is like a blind man on the right road.
  • Plato, Republic, 506c

• The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are.
  • Plato, Republic, 586a-b

Aristotle (384-322 BC)

• Practical life is not necessarily directed toward other people, as some think; and it is not the case that practical thoughts are only those which result from action for the sake of what ensues. On the contrary, much more practical are those mental activities and reflections which have their goal in themselves and take place for their own sake.
  • Aristotle, Politics, VII, 3, 8, 1325b16-20

• It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
  • Aristotle

• Virtue is displayed … in performing noble acts rather than in avoiding base ones.
  • Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IV, 1, 7

Epicurus (341-270 BC)

• Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.
  • Epicurus, cited in A Little Book of Aphorisms (New York: 1947), p. 207

• He who understands the limits of life knows how easy it is to procure enough to remove the pain of want and make the whole life complete and perfect. Hence he has no longer any need of things which are not to be won save by labor and conflict.
  • Epicurus, “Principal Doctrines,” 21

• If you wish to make Pythocles rich, do not give him more money, but diminish his desire.
  • Epicurus, Fragment 28

• The man who follows nature and not vain opinions is independent in all things. For in reference to what is enough for nature every possession is riches, but in reference to unlimited desires even the greatest wealth is not riches but poverty.
  • Epicurus, Fragment 45

• I have never wished to please the crowd: for what I know, they do not approve; what they approve, I do not know.
  • Epicurus, in Seneca, Letters, 29.10

Xun Zi (c.312 BC - 230 BC)

• If human nature is evil, then where do ritual and rightness come from? I reply: ritual and rightness are always created by the conscious activity of the sages.
  • Xun Zi, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 180

• Learning proceeds until death and only then does it stop. ... Its purpose cannot be given up for even a moment. To pursue it is to be human, to give it up to be a beast.
  • Xun Zi, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 258

• The learning of the gentleman enters through his ears, fastens to his heart, spreads through his four limbs, and manifests itself in his actions. ... The learning of the petty person enters through his ears and passes out his mouth. From mouth to ears is only four inches—how could it be enough to improve a whole body much larger than that?
  • Xun Zi, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 259

• One whose intentions and thoughts are cultivated will disregard wealth and nobility. One whose greatest concern is for the Way and righteousness will take lightly kings and dukes. It is simply that when one examines oneself on the inside, external goods carry little weight. A saying goes, "The gentleman makes things his servants. The petty man is servant to things."
  • Xun Zi, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 263

Publius Syrus (1st century BC)

• Tension weakens the bow; the want of it, the mind.
  • Publius Syrus, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus (1856), # 59

Virgil (70-19 BC)

• Liberty, which, though late, yet cast an eye upon me in my inactive time of life, after my beard began to fall off with a greyish hue when I shaved: yet on me she cast her eye, and after a long period of slavery came at last.
  • Virgil, Bucolica

Horace (65 BC - 8 BC)

• Why do you hasten to remove things that hurt your eyes, but if any thing gnaws your mind, defer the time of curing it from year to year?
  • Horace, Epistle II

• He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.
  • Horace

Apollonius of Tyana (15 AD - 100 AD)

Make yourself known as a philosopher, that is a free man. ~ Apollonius of Tyana

• Plato said that virtue has no master [Republic 617e]. If a person does not honor this principle and rejoice in it, but is purchasable for money, he creates many masters for himself.
  • to Euphrates, Epp. Apoll. 15

• The natural philosopher Heraclitus said that man is naturally irrational. If this is true, as it is true, then everyone who enjoys futile glory should hide his face.
  • to Euphrates, Epp. Apoll. 18

• You must shun barbarians and not govern them since, barbarians as they are, it is not right that they should receive a benefit.
  • to Domitian, Epp. Apoll. 21

• Pythagoras said that medicine is the most godlike of arts. But if the most godlike, it should tend to the soul as well as the body, or else a living thing must be unhealthy, being diseased in its higher part.
  • to Crito, Epp. Apoll. 23

• You request my presence at the Olympic Games, and for that reason you have sent envoys. For myself, I would come for the spectacle of physical struggle, except that I would be abandoning the greater struggle for virtue.
  • Epp. Apoll. 24

• Make yourself known as a philosopher, that is a free man.
  • Epp. Apoll. 28

• In my judgment excellence and wealth are direct opposites.
  • Epp. Apoll. 35

• If someone gives money to Apollonius, and the giver is someone considered respectable, he will take the money if he needs it. But he will not accept a fee for philosophy even if he does need it.
  • Epp. Apoll. 42

• Greet your son Aristocleides from me. I pray he may not turn out like you, since you, too, were once an irreproachable young man.
  • to Gordias, Epp. Apoll. 46

• The soul that does not consider the question of the body’s self-sufficiency cannot make itself self-sufficient.
  • to Euphrates, Epp. Apoll. 82

• To speak falsely is the mark of a slave, but the truth is noble.
  • to Euphrates, Epp. Apoll. 83

Seneca (54 BC-39 AD)

• The shortest way to wealth lies in the contempt of wealth.
  • Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius); Letter XLII

• He who has injured thee was either stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare thyself.
  • De Ira (On Anger); Book III, Chapter V

Plutarch (46 AD–120 AD)

• Why do we assert that virtue is unteachable, and thus make it non-existent?
  • Plutarch, “Can virtue be taught?” Moralia, W. Helmbold, trans. (1939), vol. 6, pp. 5-7

Epictetus (55-135 AD)

• Unless you perfectly understand the principle from which anyone acts, how should you know if he acts ill?
  • Epictetus, Enchiridion, 45

Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD)

• It is not death that a man should fear, but never beginning to live.
  • Marcus Aurelius

• How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
  • Marcus Aurelius

• Every man values himself more than all the rest of men, but he always values others’ opinions of himself more than his own.
  • Marcus Aurelius

• Those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy.
  • Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.8

New Testament (c. 50-150 AD)

If you would be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me. ~ Matthew

• Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt. ... For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
  • Matthew 6:19-21

• Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.
  • Matthew 11:25

• If you would be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.
  • Matthew 19:21

• Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
  • Paul's letter to the Romans 13:8

• I died to the law so that I might live for God.
  • Paul's letter to the Galatians 2:19

Basil of Caesarea (329-379 AD)

Just as the eye which constantly shifts its gaze, now turning to the right or to the left, now incessantly peering up and down, cannot see distinctly what lies before it, ... so too man's mind when distracted by his countless worldly cares cannot focus itself distinctly on the truth. ~ Basil of Caesarea

• We must try to keep the mind in tranquility. For just as the eye which constantly shifts its gaze, now turning to the right or to the left, now incessantly peering up and down, cannot see distinctly what lies before it, ... so too man's mind when distracted by his countless worldly cares cannot focus itself distinctly on the truth.
  • Basil of Caesarea, Letter to Gregory, Saint Basil: The Letters, R. Deferrari, trans. (1926), vol. 1, p. 9

• It is no more possible to write in wax without first smoothing away the letters previously written thereon, than it is to supply the soul with divine teachings without first removing its preconceptions derived from habit.
  • Basil of Caesarea, Letter to Gregory, Saint Basil: The Letters, R. Deferrari, trans. (1926), vol. 1, p. 11

• Solitude … calms our passions, and gives reason leisure to sever them completely from the soul. For just as animals are easily subdued by caresses; so desire, anger, fear and grief, the venomous evils which beset the soul, if they are lulled to sleep by solitude and are not exasperated by constant irritations, are more easily subdued by the influence of reason. Therefore let the place of retirement be such as ours, so separated from the intercourse of men that the continuity of our religious discipline may not be interrupted by any external distraction.
  • Basil of Caesarea, Letter to Gregory, Saint Basil: The Letters, R. Deferrari, trans. (1926), vol. 1, pp. 12-13

• The discipline of piety nourishes the soul with divine thoughts.
  • Basil of Caesarea, Letter to Gregory, Saint Basil: The Letters, R. Deferrari, trans. (1926), vol. 1, p. 13

• The very beginning of the soul’s purgation is tranquility, in which the tongue is not given to discussing the affairs of men, nor the eyes to contemplating rosy cheeks or comely bodies, nor the ears to lowering the tone of the soul by listening to songs whose sole object is to amuse, or to words spoken by wits and buffoons—a practice which above all things tends to relax the tone of the soul.
  • Basil of Caesarea, Letter to Gregory, Saint Basil: The Letters, R. Deferrari, trans. (1926), vol. 1, p. 13

• When the mind is not dissipated upon extraneous things, nor diffused over the world about us through the senses, it withdraws within itself, and of its own accord ascends to the contemplation of God.
  • Basil of Caesarea, Letter to Gregory, Saint Basil: The Letters, R. Deferrari, trans. (1926), vol. 1, p. 15

• In general, just as painters in working from models constantly gaze at their exemplar and thus strive to transfer the expression of the original to their own artistry, so too he who is anxious to make himself perfect in all the kinds of virtue must gaze upon the lives of the saints as upon statues, so to speak, that move and act, and must make their excellence his own by imitation.
  • Basil of Caesarea, Letter to Gregory, Saint Basil: The Letters, R. Deferrari, trans. (1926), vol. 1, p. 17

• Prayer is to be commended, for it engenders in the soul a distinct conception of God.
  • Basil of Caesarea, Letter to Gregory, Saint Basil: The Letters, R. Deferrari, trans. (1926), vol. 1, p. 17

• We thus become temples of God whenever earthly cares cease to interrupt the continuity of our memory of Him.
  • Basil of Caesarea, Letter to Gregory, Saint Basil: The Letters, R. Deferrari, trans. (1926), vol. 1, p. 19

• Let one hour, the same regularly each day, be set aside for food, so that out of the twenty-four hours of day and night, barely shall this one be expended on the body, the ascetic devoting the remainder to the activities of the mind.
  • Basil of Caesarea, Letter to Gregory, Saint Basil: The Letters, R. Deferrari, trans. (1926), vol. 1, p. 23

• “The kingdom of of heaven is within you.” And concerning the inner man, it consists of nothing but contemplation. Therefore the kingdom of heaven must be contemplation.
  • Basil of Caesarea, Letter 8, Saint Basil: The Letters, R. Deferrari, trans. (1926), vol. 1, p. 89

• I consider it absurd that we should permit our senses to sate themselves without hindrance with their own material food, but that we should exclude the mind alone from its own particular activity.
  • Basil of Caesarea, Letter 8, Saint Basil: The Letters, R. Deferrari, trans. (1926), vol. 1, p. 91

To the Rich (c. 368)

Saint Basil on Social Justice, edited and translated by C. P. Schroeder (2009)

Greek title: Ὁμιλία πρὸς τοὺς πλουτούντας

• Ὥστε ὁ ἀγαπῶν τὸν πλησίον ὡς ἑαυτὸν οὐδὲν περισσότερον κέκτηται τοῦ πλησίον·
  • Those who love their neighbor as themselves possess nothing more than their neighbor.
    • p. 43

• ἀλλὰ μὴν φαίνῃ ἔχων κτήματα πολλά. Πόθεν ταῦτα; ἢ δῆλον ὅτι τὴν οἰκείαν ἀπόλαυσιν προτι μοτέραν τῆς τῶν πολλῶν παραμυθίας ποιούμενος. Ὅσον οὖν πλεονάζεις τῷ πλούτῳ, τοσοῦτον ἐλλείπεις τῇ ἀγάπῃ.
  • You seem to have great possessions! How else can this be, but that you have preferred your own enjoyment to the consolation of the many? For the more you abound in wealth, the more you lack in love.
    • p. 43

• Ἀλλ' οὐ γὰρ ἱματίων ἕνεκεν οὐδὲ τροφῶν ὁ πλοῦτός ἐστι τοῖς πολλοῖς περισπούδαστος, ἀλλά τις ἐπινενόηται μεθοδεία τῷ διαβόλῳ, μυρίας τοῖς πλουσίοις δαπάνης ἀφορμὰς ὑποβάλλουσα, ὥστε τὰ περιττὰ καὶ ἄχρηστα ὡς ἀναγκαῖα σπου δάζεσθαι, μηδὲν δὲ αὐτοῖς ἐξαρκεῖν πρὸς τὴν τῶν ἀναλωμάτων ἐπίνοιαν.
  • Some device has been concocted by the devil, suggesting innumerable spending opportunities to the wealthy, so that they pursue unnecessary and worthless things as if they were indispensable, and no amount is sufficient for the expenditures they contrive.
    • p. 44

• Οὐδὲν ὑφίσταται τὴν βίαν τοῦ πλούτου· Πάντα ὑποκύπτει τῇ τυραννίδι, πάντα ὑποπτήσσει τὴν δυναστείαν.
  • Nothing withstands the influence of wealth. Everything submits to its tyranny, everything cowers at its dominion.
    • p. 51

I Will Tear Down My Barns

Greek title: καθελῶ μου τὰς ἀποθήκας

Saint Basil on Social Justice, edited and translated by C. P. Schroeder (2009)

• Φθονεῖς μάλιστα τοὺς ἀνθρώπους γιὰ τὴν ἀπόλαυση τῶν ἀγαθῶν, καὶ δημιουργεῖς μέσα στὴν ψυχή σου πονηροὺς συλλογισμούς, φροντίζοντας ὄχι πῶς νὰ χορηγήσεις στὸν καθένα ὅ, τι τοῦ χρειάζεται, ἀλλὰ πῶς θὰ τὰ ἀποθηκεύσεις ὅλα, καὶ ἔτσι θὰ ἀποστερήσεις ὅλους ἀπὸ τὴν ὠφέλεια ποὺ θὰ εἶχαν ἀπὸ αὐτά.
  • You begrudge your fellow human beings what you yourself enjoy; taking wicked counsel in your soul, you consider not how you might distribute to others according to their needs, but rather how, after having received so many good things, you might rob others.
    • p. 62

• Καὶ ποῖον, λέγει, ἀδικῶ, μὲ τὸ νὰ κρατῶ γιὰ τoν ἐαυτόν μου αὐτὰ ποῦ μου ἀνήκουν; Ποία, εἰπέ μου, εἶναι αὐτὰ ποῦ σου ἀνήκουν; Ἀπὸ ποῦ τὰ ἔλαβες, καὶ τὰ ἔφερες στὴν ζωὴν αὐτήν; Ὅπως ἀκριβῶς κάποιος ποὺ εὑρίσκει στὸ θέατρο θέση μὲ καλὴν θέαν, ἐμποδίζει ἔπειτα τοὺς εἰσερχομένους, θεωρώντας ὡς ἰδικὸ τοῦ αὐτὸ ποὺ προορίζεται γιὰ χρῆσιν κοινήν, ἔτσι εἶναι καὶ οἱ πλούσιοι. Ἀφοῦ ἐκυρίευσαν ἐκ τῶν προτέρων τα κοινὰ ἀγαθά, τὰ ἰδιοποιοῦνται ἁπλῶς ἐπειδὴ τὰ ἐπρόλαβαν. Ἐὰν ὁ καθένας ἐκρατοῦσε ἐκεῖνο ποὺ ἀρκεῖ γιὰ τὴν ἱκανοποίηση τῶν ἀναγκῶν του, καὶ ἄφηνε τὸ περίσσευμα σ’ αὐτὸν ποὺ τὸ χρειάζεται, κανεὶς δὲν θὰ ἦταν πλούσιος, ἀλλὰ καὶ κανεὶς πτωχός.
  • 'But whom do I treat unjustly,' you say, 'by keeping what is my own?' Tell me, what is your own? What did you bring into this life? From where did you receive it? It is as if someone were to take the first seat in the theater, then bar everyone else from attending, so that one person alone enjoys what is offered for the benefit of all in common — this is what the rich do. They seize common goods before others have the opportunity, then claim them as their own by right of preemption. For if we all took only what was necessary to satisfy our own needs, giving the rest to those who lack, no one would be rich, no one would be poor, and no one would be in need.
    • p. 69

• Who are the greedy? Those who are not satisfied with what suffices for their own needs. Who are the robbers? Those who take for themselves what rightfully belongs to everyone. And you, are you not greedy? Are you not a robber? The things you received in trust as a stewardship, have you not appropriated them for yourself? Is not the person who strips another of clothing called a thief? And those who do not clothe the naked when they have the power to do so, should they not be called the same? The bread you are holding back is for the hungry, the clothes you keep put away are for the naked, the shoes that are rotting away with disuse are for those who have none, the silver you keep buried in the earth is for the needy. You are thus guilty of injustice toward as many as you might have aided, and did not.
  • p. 70

Jerome (347-420)

Every rich man is unjust or the heir of an unjust one. ~ Jerome

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor. ~ Jerome

• Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.
  • Jerome, in The Cry for Justice (1915), p. 397

• They fill their houses through the plunder and losses of others, so that the saying of the philosophers may be fulfilled, 'Every rich man is unjust or the heir of an unjust one.' (Omnis dives aut iniquis aut iniqui haeres.)
  • Jerome, Commentary on Jeremiah

• Negotiatorem clericum, et ex inope divitem, ex ignobili gloriosum quasi quandam pestem fuge.
  • A clergyman who engages in business, and who rises from poverty to wealth, and from obscurity to a high position, avoid as you would the plague.
  • Jerome, Letter 52

Pelagius (390-418)

• He is a Christian ...

who is seen to have no feigning or pretense in his heart,

whose soul is open and unspotted,

whose conscience is faithful and pure,

whose whole mind is on God,

whose whole hope is in Christ,

who desires heavenly things rather than earthly.

• Pelagius, On the Christian Life, as translated by B. R. Rees in Pelagius: Life and Letters (Boydell Press: 2004)

Apophthegmata Patrum (5th century AD)

• Just as fish die if they stay too long out of water, so the monks who loiter outside their cells or pass their time with men of the world lose the intensity of inner peace. So like a fish going towards the sea, we must hurry to reach our cell, for fear that if we delay outside, we will lose our interior watchfulness.
  • Abba Anthony, Saying 10, Page 3

• Μισήσατε τὸν κόσμον καὶ πάντα τὰ ἐν αὐτῷ. Μισήσατε πᾶσαν σαρκικὴν ἀνάπαυσιν. Ἀποτάξασθε τῇ ζωῇ ταύτῃ, ἵνα ζήσητε τῷ Θεῷ.
  • Hate the world and all that is in it. Hate all peace that comes from the flesh. Renounce this life, so that you may be alive to God.
    • Abba Anthony, Saying 33, Page 8

• Ὁ τύπτων τὸ μαζὶν τοῦ σιδήρου, πρῶτον σκοπεῖ τὸν λογισμὸν τί μέλλει ποιεῖν, δρέπανον, μάχαιραν, πέλυκα. Οὕτως καὶ ἡμεῖς ὀφείλομεν λογίζεσθαι ποίαν ἀρετὴν μετερχόμεθα, ἵνα μὴ εἰς κενὸν κοπιάσωμεν.
  • Whoever hammers a lump of iron, first decides what he is going to make of it, a scythe, a sword, or an axe. Even so we ought to make up our minds what kind of virtue we want to forge or we labor in vain.
    • Abba Anthony, Saying 35, Page 8

• Ὁ ἀββᾶς Ἀρσένιος, ἔτι ὢν ἐν τῷ παλατίῳ, εὔξατο τῷ Θεῷ λέγων· Κύριε, ὁδήγησόν με πῶς σωθῶ. Καὶ ἦλθεν αὐτῷ φωνὴ λέγουσα· Ἀρσένιε, φεῦγε τοὺς ἀνθρώπους, καὶ σώζῃ.
  • While still living in the palace, Abba Arsenius prayed to God in these words, "Lord, lead me in the way of salvation." And a voice came saying to him, "Arsenius, flee from men and you will be saved."
    • Abba Arsenius, Saying 1, Page 9

• I cannot live with God and with men. The thousands and ten thousands of the heavenly hosts have but one will, while men have many. So I cannot leave God to be with men.
  • Abba Arsenius, Saying 13, Page 11

• Ὅση δύναμίς σοί ἐστιν, ἀγώνισαι, ἵνα ἡ ἔνδον σου ἐργασία κατὰ Θεὸν ᾗ, καὶ νικήσῃ τὰ ἔξω πάθη.
  • Strive with all your might to bring your interior activity into accord with God, and you will overcome exterior passions.
    • Abba Arsenius, Saying 9, Page 10

• Someone asked Abba Agathon, "Which is better, bodily asceticism or interior vigilance?" The old man replied, "Man is like a tree, bodily asceticism is the foliage, interior vigilance the fruit. According to that which is written, 'Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit shall be cut down and cast into the fire' (Matt 3:10) it is clear that all our care should be directed towards the fruit, that is to say, guarding of the spirit; but it needs the protection and the embellishment of the foliage, which is bodily asceticism.
  • Abba Agathon, Saying 8, Page 21

• Ἐὰν μὴ εἴπῃ ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ αὐτοῦ ἄνθρωπος, ὅτι Ἐγὼ μόνος καὶ ὁ Θεὸς ἐσμὲν ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ, οὐχ ἕξει ἀνάπαυσιν.
  • If a man does not say in his heart, in the world there is only myself and God, he will not gain peace.
    • Abba Alonius, Saying 1, page 35

• Εἰ μὴ τὸ ὅλον κατέστρεψα, οὐκ ἂν ἠδυνήθην ἐμαυτὸν οἰκοδομῆσαι.
  • If I had not destroyed myself completely, I should not have been able to rebuild and shape myself again.
    • Abba Alonius, Saying 2, page 35

• Πρέπει τῷ μοναχῷ τὰ τρία ταῦτα· ἡ ξενιτεία, ἡ πτωχεία, καὶ ἡ σιωπὴ ἐν ὑπομονῇ.
  • These three things are appropriate for a monk: exile, poverty, and endurance in silence.
    • Abba Andrew, Saying 1, Page 37

• Στέφανός ἐστι μοναχοῦ ἡ ταπεινοφροσύνη.
  • The crown of the monk is humility.
    • Abba Or, Saying 9, Page 247

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

When what is ordered by an authority is opposed to the object for which that authority was constituted, ... not only is there no obligation to obey the authority, but one is obliged to disobey it, as did the holy martyrs who suffered death rather than obey the impious commands of tyrants. ~ Thomas Aquinas

The order of authority derives from God, as the Apostle says [in Romans 13:1-7]. For this reason, the duty of obedience is, for the Christian, a consequence of this derivation of authority from God, and ceases when that ceases. But, as we have already said, authority may fail to derive from God for two reasons: either because of the way in which authority has been obtained, or in consequence of the use which is made of it. ~ Thomas Aquinas

• The order of authority derives from God, as the Apostle says [in Romans 13:1-7]. For this reason, the duty of obedience is, for the Christian, a consequence of this derivation of authority from God, and ceases when that ceases. But, as we have already said, authority may fail to derive from God for two reasons: either because of the way in which authority has been obtained, or in consequence of the use which is made of it. There are two ways in which the first may occur. Either because of a defect in the person, if he is unworthy; or because of some defect in the way itself by which power was acquired, if, for example, through violence, or simony or some other illegal method.
  • Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, in Aquinas: Selected Political Writings (Basil Blackwell: 1974), p. 183

• With regard to the abuse of authority, this also may come about in two ways. First, when what is ordered by an authority is opposed to the object for which that authority was constituted (if, for example, some sinful action is commanded or one which is contrary to virtue, when it is precisely for the protection and fostering of virtue that authority is instituted). In such a case, not only is there no obligation to obey the authority, but one is obliged to disobey it, as did the holy martyrs who suffered death rather than obey the impious commands of tyrants. Secondly, when those who bear such authority command things which exceed the competence of such authority; as, for example, when a master demands payment from a servant which the latter is not bound to make, and other similar cases. In this instance the subject is free to obey or disobey.
  • Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, in Aquinas: Selected Political Writings (Basil Blackwell: 1974), p. 183

• Virtue’s true reward is happiness itself, for which the virtuous work, whereas if they worked for honor, it would no longer be virtue, but ambition.
  • Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

Petrarch (1304-1374)

A meaningless master’s degree has kept many from becoming true masters. Believing others rather than themselves, and believing to be what they were cried up to be but really were not, they never became what they could have become. ~ Petrarch

• We look about us for what is to be found only within.
  • Petrarch

• A meaningless master’s degree has kept many from becoming true masters. Believing others rather than themselves, and believing to be what they were cried up to be but really were not, they never became what they could have become.
  • Petrarch, “On the Master’s Degree,” De remediis utriusque fortune, C. Rawski, trans. (1967), p. 59

• Philosophy offers not wisdom but the love of wisdom.
  • Petrarch, “On the Various Academic Titles,” De remediis utriusque fortune, C. Rawski, trans. (1967), p. 65

John Calvin (1509–1564)

Human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error. ~ John Calvin

Our feeling of ignorance, vanity, want, weakness, in short, depravity and corruption, reminds us ... that in the Lord, and none but He, dwell the true light of wisdom, solid virtue, exuberant goodness. We are accordingly urged by our own evil things to consider the good things of God; and, indeed, we cannot aspire to Him in earnest until we have begun to be displeased with ourselves. ~ John Calvin

• To make everything yield to custom would be to do the greatest injustice. Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error.
  • John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Prefatory Address, p. 23

• We must not only resist, but boldly attack prevailing evils.
  • John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Prefatory Address, p. 23

• Be it so that public error must have a place in human society, still, in the kingdom of God, we must look and listen only to his eternal truth, against which no series of years, no custom, no conspiracy, can plead prescription. Thus Isaiah formerly taught the people of God, “Say ye not, A confederacy, to all to whom this people shall say, A confederacy;” i.e. do not unite with the people in an impious consent.
  • John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Prefatory Address, p. 23

• Depraved custom is just a kind of general pestilence in which men perish not the less that they fall in a crowd.
  • John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Prefatory Address, p. 23

• Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God.
  Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.
  • John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 1 Chapter 1, p. 44

• Our feeling of ignorance, vanity, want, weakness, in short, depravity and corruption, reminds us ... that in the Lord, and none but He, dwell the true light of wisdom, solid virtue, exuberant goodness. We are accordingly urged by our own evil things to consider the good things of God; and, indeed, we cannot aspire to Him in earnest until we have begun to be displeased with ourselves. For what man is not disposed to rest in himself? Who, in fact, does not thus rest, so long as he is unknown to himself; that is, so long as he is contented with his own endowments, and unconscious or unmindful of his misery? Every person, therefore, on coming to the knowledge of himself, is not only urged to seek God, but is also led as by the hand to find him.
  • John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 1, Chapter 1, p. 44

• Since we are all naturally prone to hypocrisy, any empty semblance of righteousness is quite enough to satisfy us instead of righteousness itself.
  • John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 1, Chapter 1, p. 45

Étienne de La Boétie (1530-1563)

• Freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve.
  • Étienne de La Boétie

• Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.
  • Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, Part 3

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

• The most profound joy has more of gravity than of gaiety in it.
  • Michel de Montaigne

• Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
  • Michel de Montaigne

• There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.
  • Michel de Montaigne

• “Knowing” no more consists in what we once knew than in what we shall know in the future.
  • Michel de Montaigne, Essays, M. Screech, trans. (1991), Book I, ch. 25, “On Schoolmasters’ Learning,” p. 154

• Whenever I ask a certain acquaintance of mine to tell me what he knows about anything, he wants to show me a book.
  • Michel de Montaigne, Essays, M. Screech, trans. (1991), Book I, ch. 25, “On Schoolmasters’ Learning,” p. 155

• Learned we may be with another man’s learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.
  • Michel de Montaigne, Essays, M. Screech, trans. (1991), Book I, ch. 25, “On Schoolmasters’ Learning,” p. 155

• We must not attach knowledge to the mind, we have to incorporate it there.
  • Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book I, ch. 25, “On Pedantry”

• My trade and my art is living.
  • Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book II, ch. 6, “On practice”

• If I study, it is for no other science than that which treats of the knowledge of myself, and instructs me how to die well and how to live well.
  • Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book II, ch. 10, “Of books”

• [The teaching of the Pyrrhonists] is a pure, complete and very perfect postponement and suspension of judgment. They use their reason to inquire and debate, but not to conclude and choose.
  • Michel de Montaigne, Essays, F374, V505B, in Ian Maclean, “Montaigne and the truth of the schools,” The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne, pp. 155-156

• My behaviour is natural: I have not called in the help of any teaching to build it. But feeble as it is, when the desire to tell it seized me, and then, to make it appear in public a little more decently, I set myself to support it with reasons and examples, it was a marvel to myself to find it, simply by chance, in conformity with so many philosophical examples and reasons. What rule my life belonged to, I did not learn until after it was completed and spent. A new figure: an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher!
  • Michel de Montaigne, Essays, F409, V546C

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

I cannot be called on to abide by the sentence of a tribunal which is itself on its trial. ~ Francis Bacon

• Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.
  • Francis Bacon

• Riches are the baggage of virtue; they cannot be spared nor left behind, but they hinder the march.
  • Francis Bacon, Ornamenta Rationalia

• While a man maketh his train longer, he maketh his wings shorter.
  • Francis Bacon, Ornamenta Rationalia

• Time, like a river, bears down to us that which is light and inflated, and sinks that which is heavy and solid.
  • Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, preface

• Whatever the mind seizes and dwells upon with peculiar satisfaction is to be held in suspicion.
  • Francis Bacon, Novum Organum

• I cannot be called on to abide by the sentence of a tribunal which is itself on its trial.
  • Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, § 33

• The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.
  • Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, § 45

Shakespeare (1564-1616)

• Be great in act, as you have been in thought.
  • Shakespeare, King John, Act 5, Scene 2

• And thus I clothe my naked villainy
  With old odd ends, stol’n forth of holy writ;
  And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.
  • Shakespeare, Gloster, Richard III, Act 1, Scene 3

• Action is eloquence.
  • Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Act III, Scene ii

• My library was dukedom large enough.
  • Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1 scene 2

• Our doubts are traitors,
  And make us lose the good we oft might win
  By fearing to attempt.
  • Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act 1 scene 4

• And since you know you cannot see yourself,
  so well as by reflection, I, your glass,
  will modestly discover to yourself,
  that of yourself which you yet know not of.
  • Shakespeare, Cassius in Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene i

• ‘T is better to be lowly born,
  And range with humble livers in content,
  Than to be perked up in a glistering grief,
  And wear a golden sorrow.
  • Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, Act 2 scene 3

• To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
  To the last syllable of recorded time,
  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
  The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
  Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
  And then is heard no more: it is a tale
  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
  Signifying nothing.
  • Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5 scene 5

• I understand a fury in your words,
  But not the words.
  • Shakespeare, Othello, Act 4 scene 2

• Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.
  • Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1

• Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
  • Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4

Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658)

Parcel out your life wisely, not confusedly in the rush of events, but with foresight and judgment. ~ Baltasar Gracián

• It is worse to busy yourself with the trivial than to do nothing.
  • Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia, § 33 (C. Maurer trans.)

• Don’t talk about yourself. You must either praise yourself, which is vanity, or criticize yourself, which is meekness.
  • Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia, § 117 (C. Maurer trans.)

• Complaints … encourage those who hear our complaints to behave like those we complain about. Once divulged, the offenses done to us seem to make others pardonable. … It is better to praise the favors others have done for you, so as to win still more of them. When you tell how those absent have favored you, you are asking those present to do the same.
  • Baltasar Gracián, "Never complain," Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia, § 129 (C. Maurer trans.)

• Truth is always late, last to arrive, limping along with time.
  • Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia, § 146 (C. Maurer trans.)

• Lying is ordinary; let belief be extraordinary.
  • Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia, § 154 (C. Maurer trans.)

• The example of people in high places is so persuasive that it makes people imitate even their ugliness.
  • Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia, § 186 (C. Maurer trans.)

• Parcel out your life wisely, not confusedly in the rush of events, but with foresight and judgment.
  • Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia, § 229 (C. Maurer trans.)

• Some people belong entirely to others … They have not a day, not an hour to call their own, so completely do they give themselves to others. This is true even in matters of understanding. Some people know everything for others and nothing for themselves.
  • Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia, § 252 (C. Maurer, trans.)

John Milton (1608-1674)

• The mind is its own place, and in itself
  Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 254-255

• Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, line 263

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

• Philosophers condemn wealth only because of the bad use it has been put to, and it is up to us to acquire and use it blamelessly, Then, instead of letting it feed and encourage crimes as wood keeps fire burning, we can dedicate it to all the virtues and thereby make them more beautiful and striking.
  • François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, L. Tancock trans., Posthumous, p. 106

Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)

• To virgin minds, which yet their native whiteness hold,
  Not yet discoloured with the love of gold
  (That jaundice of the soul,
  Which makes it look so gilded and so foul)
  • Abraham Cowley, “Of Greatness”

Molière (1622-1673)

• To esteem everything is to esteem nothing.
  • Molière, Le Misanthrope, Act. 1 Sc. 1

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

All our dignity consists then in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor to think well; this is the principle of morality. ~ Blaise Pascal

• To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
  • Blaise Pascal, Pensées, #4, W. F. Trotter, trans. (New York: 1958)

• Spirit and sentiment are formed by conversation. Spirit and sentiment are ruined by conversation. … It is, then, all-important to know how to choose our society in order to form rather than ruin them; and one cannot make this choice unless one has already formed them and not ruined them. Thus a circle is formed, and those are fortunate who escape it.
  • Blaise Pascal, Pensées, #6, my translation

• It is a deplorable thing to see all men deliberating on means alone, and not on the end.
  • Blaise Pascal, Pensées, #98, W. F. Trotter, trans. (New York: 1958)

• Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

All our dignity consists then in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor to think well; this is the principle of morality.

• Blaise Pascal, Pensées, #347, W. F. Trotter, trans. (New York: 1958)

Spinoza (1632-1677)

• Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.
  • Spinoza, Ethics, Part 3, Prop. 2, Note (Dover 1955 p. 134)

George Savile, Marquess of Halifax (1633-1695)

When by habit a man cometh to have a bargaining soul, its wings are cut, so that it can never soar. It bindeth reason an apprentice to gain, and instead of a director, maketh it a drudge. ~ George Savile, Marquess of Halifax

• The condition of mankind is to be weary of what we do know, and afraid of what we do not.
  • George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, “Moral Thoughts and Reflections,” Complete Works (Oxford:1912), p. 230

• Men make it such a point of honour to be fit for business that they forget to examine whether business is fit for a man.
  • George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, “Moral Thoughts and Reflections,” Complete Works (Oxford:1912), p. 231

• It is not a reproach but a compliment to learning, to say, that great scholars are less fit for business; since the truth is, business is so much a lower thing than learning, that a man used to the last cannot easily bring his stomach down to the first.
  • George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, “Moral Thoughts and Reflections,” Complete Works (Oxford:1912), p. 231

• When by habit a man cometh to have a bargaining soul, its wings are cut, so that it can never soar. It bindeth reason an apprentice to gain, and instead of a director, maketh it a drudge.
  • George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, “Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections,” Complete Works (Oxford:1912), p. 253

• Misspending time is a kind of self-homicide.
  • George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, “Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections,” Complete Works (Oxford:1912), p. 255

Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696)

A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune, and favor cannot satisfy him. ~ Jean de La Bruyère

• He who only writes to suit the taste of the age, considers himself more than his writings. We should always aim at perfection, and then posterity will do us that justice which sometimes our contemporaries refuse.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, Characters, H. Van Laun, trans. (London: 1885) “Of Works of the Mind,” #67

• A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune, and favor cannot satisfy him.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, Characters, H. Van Laun, trans. (London: 1885) “Of Personal Merit,” #43

• The true spirit of conversation consists more in bringing out the cleverness of others than in showing a great deal of it yourself.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, Characters, H. Van Laun, trans. (London: 1885) “Of Society and Conversation,” #16

• Wise men sometimes avoid the world, that they may not be surfeited with it.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, Characters, H. Van Laun, trans. (London: 1885) “Of Society and Conversation,” #83

• Let us not envy a certain class of men for their enormous riches; they have paid such an equivalent for them that it would not suit us; they have given for them their peace of mind, their health, their honour, and their conscience; this is rather too dear, and there is nothing to be made out of such a bargain.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, Characters, H. Van Laun, trans. (London: 1885) “Of The Gifts of Fortune,” #13

• We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, Characters, H. Van Laun, trans. (London: 1885) “Of the Heart,” #63

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

• Whoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both; whereas common speakers have only one set of ideas, and one set of words to clothe them in, and these are always ready at the mouth.
  • Jonathan Swift, “Thoughts on Various Subjects”

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance. ~ Alexander Pope

• ‘Tis the first virtue, vices to abhor;
  And the first wisdom, to be fool no more.
  • Alexander Pope, “Imitations of Horace”

• Pride, where Wit fails, steps in to our defence,
  And fills up all the mighty void of sense.
  • Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” 203-214

• A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
  Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
  There, shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
  And drinking largely sobers us again.
  • Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism," 215-223

• True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d;
  What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d;
  Something, whose truth convinc’d at sight we find,
  That gives us back the image of our mind.
  • Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism," 297-300

• Some foreign writers, some our own despise;
  The Ancients only, or the Moderns prize.
  Thus Wit, like Faith, by each man is apply’d
  To one small sect, and all are damn’d beside.
  Meanly they seek the blessing to confine,
  And force that sun but on a part to shine.
  • Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” 394-399

• Men must be taught as if you taught them not
  And things unknown proposed as things forgot.
  • Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism”

• True ease in writing comes from art, not chance. As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
  • Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism," Part II, line 162 (1711)

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

• If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle.
  • Samuel Johnson

• A man should cultivate his mind so as to have that confidence and readiness without wine which wine gives.
  • Samuel Johnson, in Dr. Johnson’s Table Talk (London: 1807), p. 37

• A desire for knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind; and every human being, whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to give all he has to get knowledge.
  • Samuel Johnson, in Dr. Johnson’s Table Talk (London: 1807), p. 64

• It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.
  • Samuel Johnson, in Dr. Johnson’s Table Talk (London: 1807), p. 67

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

• Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, M. Cranston, trans., p. 49

• I worship freedom; I abhor restraint, trouble, dependence. As long as the money in my purse lasts, it assures my independence; it relieves me of the trouble of finding expedients to replenish it, a necessity which has always inspired me with dread; but the fear of seeing it exhausted makes me hoard it carefully. The money which a man possesses is the instrument of freedom; that which we eagerly pursue is the instrument of slavery. Therefore I hold fast to that which I have, and desire nothing.
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (Wordsworth: 1996), p. 35

Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715-1747)

• Magnanimity owes no account to prudence of its motives.
  • Marquis de Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims, E. Lee, trans. (1903), p. 171

• The generality of men are so bound within the sphere of their circumstances that they have not even the courage to get out of them through their ideas, and if we see a few whom, in a way, speculation over great things makes incapable of mean ones, we find still more with whom the practice of small things takes away the feeling for great ones.
  • Marquis de Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims, E. Lee, trans. (1903), pp. 180-181

• Men are not to be judged by what they do not know, but by what they know, and by the manner in which they know it.
  • Marquis de Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims, E. Lee, trans. (1903), p. 182

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult. Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the go-cart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts. ~ Immanuel Kant

• It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult. Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the go-cart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts.
  • Immanuel Kant, "What is Enlightenment?" L. Beck, trans.

• [Jesus] claims that not the observance of outer civil or statutory churchly duties but the pure moral disposition of the heart alone can make man well-pleasing to God (Matthew V, 20-48); … that injury done one’s neighbor can be repaired only through satisfaction rendered to the neighbor himself, not through acts of divine worship (V, 24). Thus, he says, does he intend to do full justice to the Jewish law (V, 17); whence it is obvious that not scriptural scholarship but the pure religion of reason must be the law’s interpreter, for taken according to the letter, it allowed the very opposite of all this. Furthermore, he does not leave unnoticed, in his designations of the strait gate and the narrow way, the misconstruction of the law which men allow themselves in order to evade their true moral duty, holding themselves immune through having fulfilled their churchly duty (VII, 13). He further requires of these pure dispositions that they manifest themselves also in works (VII, 16) and, on the other hand, denies the insidious hope of those who imagine that, through invocation and praise of the Supreme Lawgiver in the person of His envoy, they will make up for their lack of good works and ingratiate themselves into favor (VII, 21). Regarding these works he declares that they ought to be performed publicly, as an example for imitation (V, 16), and in a cheerful mood, not as actions extorted from slaves (VI, 16); and that thus, from a small beginning in the sharing and spreading of such dispositions, religion, like a grain of seed in good soil, or a ferment of goodness, would gradually, through its inner power, grow into a kingdom of God (XIII, 31-33).
  • Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, “The Christian religion as a natural religion,” as translated by Theodore M. Greene

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781)

• For all but one in thousands the goal of their thinking is the point at which they have become tired of thinking.
  • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, letter to Moses Mendelssohn, January 9, 1771

Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788)

A thirsty ambition for truth and virtue, and a frenzy to conquer all lies and vices which are not recognized as such nor desire to be; herein consists the heroic spirit of the philosopher. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

• A thirsty ambition for truth and virtue, and a frenzy to conquer all lies and vices which are not recognized as such nor desire to be; herein consists the heroic spirit of the philosopher.
  • Johann Georg Hamann, Socratic Memorabilia, J. Flaherty, trans. (Baltimore: 1967), p. 147

Nicolas Chamfort (1741-1794)

Anyone whose needs are small seems threatening to the rich, because he’s always ready to escape their control. ~ Nicolas Chamfort

• To help a man suffering from dropsy, it’s far better to cure his thirst than to offer him a barrel of wine. Apply this principle to the wealthy.
  • Nicolas Chamfort, Reflections, D. Parmée, trans. (London: 2003) #107

• Despising money is like toppling a king off his throne.
  • Nicolas Chamfort, Reflections, D. Parmée, trans. (London: 2003) #113

• There are more fools than wise men, and even in a wise man there is more folly than wisdom.
  • Nicolas Chamfort, Maxims and Considerations, E. P. Mathers, trans. (1926), #149

• L’intérêt d’argent est la grande épreuve des petits caractères, mais ce n’est encore que la plus petite pour les caractères distingués.
  • Nicolas Chamfort, Maximes et Pensées (Van Bever, Paris: 1923), #164

• Both the court and the general public give a conventional value to men and things, and then are surprised to find themselves deceived by it. This is as if arithmeticians should give a variable an arbitrary value to the figures in a sum, and then, after restoring their true and regular value in the addition, be astonished at the incorrectness of their answer.
  • Nicolas Chamfort, Maxims and Considerations, E. P. Mathers, trans. (1926), #199

• Anyone whose needs are small seems threatening to the rich, because he’s always ready to escape their control.
  • Nicolas Chamfort, Reflections, D. Parmée, trans. (London: 2003) #169

• Unfortunately for mankind—and perhaps fortunately for tyrants—the poor and downtrodden lack the instinct or pride of the elephant, who refuses to breed in captivity.
  • Nicolas Chamfort, Reflections, D. Parmée, trans., modified (London: 2003) #266

• There is a kind of harmful modesty which … sometimes affects men of superior character to their detriment by keeping them in a state of mediocrity. I am reminded of the remark that a certain gentleman of acknowledged eminence once made at luncheon to some persons of the Court, “How bitterly I regret the time I wasted merely to learn how superior I am to all of you!”
  • Nicolas Chamfort, Maxims and Considerations, my translation, #556

Georg Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of. ~ Georg Lichtenberg

It is certainly better not to have studied a subject at all than to have studied it superficially. For when the unaided healthy common sense seeks to form an opinion of something it does not go so far wrong as semi-erudition does. ~ Georg Lichtenberg

• We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.
  • Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, R. J. Hollingdale trans. (2000), B49

• Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.
  • Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, R. J. Hollingdale trans. (2000), C16

• Just as a good writer does not depart from the common usage of words, so a good citizen must not straightaway depart from normal usage in the realm of actions, even though he may have much to object to.
  • Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, R. J. Hollingdale trans. (2000), D55

• Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.
  • Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, R. J. Hollingdale trans. (2000), D89

• A on his lips, not-A in his heart.
  • Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, R. J. Hollingdale trans. (2000), E95

• It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.
  • Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, R. J. Hollingdale trans. (2000), F154

• You believe that I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.
  • Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, R. J. Hollingdale trans. (2000), F160

• We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.
  • Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, R. J. Hollingdale trans. (2000), H4

• It is … strange … to say “The soul … is in the body,” … for we do not say “the roundness is in the sphere.”
  • Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, R. J. Hollingdale trans. (2000), J69

• It is a question of whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when he hits the chair he has bumped into.
  • Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, R. J. Hollingdale trans. (2000), J146

• To doubt things that are now believed without any further investigation whatever: that is everywhere the main thing.
  • Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, R. J. Hollingdale trans. (2000), J242

• Nothing is more inimical to the progress of science than the belief that we know what we do not yet know.
  • Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, R. J. Hollingdale trans. (2000), J248

• Even if my philosophy does not extend to discovering anything new, it does nevertheless possess the courage to regard as questionable what has long been thought true.
  • Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, R. J. Hollingdale trans. (2000), K12

• It is certainly better not to have studied a subject at all than to have studied it superficially. For when the unaided healthy common sense seeks to form an opinion of something it does not go so far wrong as semi-erudition does.
  • Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, R. J. Hollingdale trans. (2000), K33

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

He who deems it important to keep aloof from the so-called rabble ... is as much to blame as a coward who hides himself from his enemy because he fears defeat. ~ Goethe

One often says to oneself … that one ought to avoid having too many different businesses, to avoid becoming a jack-of-all-trades, and that the older one gets, the more one ought to avoid entering into new business. But … the very fact of growing older means taking up a new business; all our circumstances change, and we must either stop doing anything at all or else willing and consciously take on the new role we have to play on life’s stage. ~ Goethe

• Not to keep from error, is the duty of the educator of men, but to guide the erring one, even to let him swill his error out of full cups—that is the wisdom of teachers. Whoever merely tastes of his error, will keep house with it for a long time, … but whoever drains it completely will have to get to know it.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation (1966), p. 156

• I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letter to Schiller, 18 December 1798, in Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 59

• Art is in itself noble; that is why the artist has no fear of what is common. This, indeed, is already ennobled when he takes it up.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, Elisabeth Stopp, trans. (Penguin: 1998) #61

• The man of action is always unprincipled; none but the contemplative has a conscience.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, Elisabeth Stopp, trans. (Penguin: 1998) #241

• One often says to oneself … that one ought to avoid having too many different businesses, to avoid becoming a jack-of-all-trades, and that the older one gets, the more one ought to avoid entering into new business. But … the very fact of growing older means taking up a new business; all our circumstances change, and we must either stop doing anything at all or else willing and consciously take on the new role we have to play on life’s stage.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, Elisabeth Stopp, trans., modified (Penguin: 1998) #259

• Books, we find, are like new acquaintances. To begin with, we are highly delighted if we find an area of general agreement … It is only on closer acquaintance that differences begin to emerge, at which point the great thing is not immediately to recoil, as may happen at a more youthful age, but to cling very firmly to the areas of agreement and fully clarify our differences
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, Elisabeth Stopp, trans. (Penguin: 1998) #272

• Scientific knowledge helps us mainly because it makes the wonder to which we are called by nature rather more intelligible.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, Elisabeth Stopp, trans. (Penguin: 1998) #417

• A mathematician is only perfect insofar as he is a perfect man, sensitive to the beauty of truth.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, Elisabeth Stopp, trans. (Penguin: 1998) #609

• He who deems it important to keep aloof from the so-called rabble ... is as much to blame as a coward who hides himself from his enemy because he fears defeat.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (Boston: 1884), modified translation, “May 15”

Joseph Joubert (1754-1824)

• There is in the soul a taste for the good, just as there is in the body a taste for enjoyment.
  • Joseph Joubert, cited in A Little Book of Aphorisms (New York: 1947), p. 141

William Blake (1757-1827)

If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise. ~ William Blake

• I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s.
  • William Blake, “Creation”

• He who binds to himself a joy, does the winged life destroy.
  • William Blake

• When I tell any truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who do.
  • William Blake, Public address, Blake’s Notebook c. 1810

• The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
  • William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

• If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.
  • William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell,” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, line 18

Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error. Satisfied if they themselves can escape from the hard labour of thought, they willingly abandon to others the guardianship of their thoughts. ~ Friedrich Schiller

• Wouldst thou other men know, look thou within thine own heart.
  • Friedrich Schiller, Tabulae Votivae (Votive Tablets) (1796), "The Key"; tr. Edgar Alfred Bowring, The Poems of Schiller, Complete (1851)

• Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error, and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of tranquil wisdom.
  • Friedrich Schiller, Philosophical Letters, Preface

• The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error. Satisfied if they themselves can escape from the hard labour of thought, they willingly abandon to others the guardianship of their thoughts.
  • Friedrich Schiller, The Aesthetic Education of Man, Eighth Letter

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814)

• The "I" who speaks in this book is by no means the author. Rather, the author wishes that the reader may come to see himself in this "I": that the reader may not simply relate to what is said here as he would to history, but rather that while reading he will actually converse with himself, deliberate back and forth, deduce conclusions, make decisions like his representative in the book, and through his own work and reflection, purely out of his own resources, develop and build within himself the philosophical disposition that is presented to him in this book merely as a picture.
  • Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man (1800), P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 2

• If I only know what I am convinced of and have found out myself, if I really only know what I have experienced myself, then indeed I cannot say that I have the least knowledge about my vocation; I only know what others claim to know about it.
  • Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man (1800), P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 4

• With the same assurance with which I count on the floor to support me when I step on it, and on the fire to burn me were I to approach it, I want to be able to count on what I myself am and what I will be.
  • Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man (1800), P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 4

Jean Paul (1763-1825)

• Never write on a subject without first having read yourself full on it; and never read on a subject till you have thought yourself hungry on it.
  • Jean Paul

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)

• Pitiful, to be sure, is what the pragmatic philosophy of the French and English is. ... They are considered to be so well versed in the knowledge of what man is, despite their failure to speculate on what he should be.
  • Friedrich Schleiermacher, in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), “Athenaeum Fragments,” § 355

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

The objects of philosophy, it is true, are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

• Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Difference of the Fichtean and Schellingean System of Philosophy, in W. Kaufmann, Hegel (1966), p. 49

• The objects of philosophy, it is true, are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth.
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Logic, Chapter 1

Novalis (1772-1801)

• Every stage of education begins with childhood. That is why the most educated person on earth so much resembles a child.
  • Novalis, “Miscellaneous Observations,” Philosophical Writings, M. Stolijar, trans. (Albany: 1997) #48

Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829)

People who are eccentric enough to be quite seriously virtuous understand each other everywhere, discover each other easily, and form a silent opposition to the ruling immorality that happens to pass for morality. ~ Friedrich Schlegel

• In the same way as philosophy loses sight of its true object and appropriate matter, when either it passes into and merges in theology, or meddles with external politics, so also does it mar its proper form when it attempts to mimic the rigorous method of mathematics.
  • Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophy of Life, Lecture 1

• Novels are the Socratic dialogs of our time. This free form has become the refuge of common sense in its flight from pedantry.
  • Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), “Critical Fragments,” § 26

• One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.
  • Friedrich Schlegel, “Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, E. Behler and R. Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #54

• Philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem.
  • Friedrich Schlegel, “Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, E. Behler and R. Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #84

• People who are eccentric enough to be quite seriously virtuous understand each other everywhere, discover each other easily, and form a silent opposition to the ruling immorality that happens to pass for morality.
  • Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991) § 414

Charles Lamb (1775-1834)

• I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people’s time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me three-fold. My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding thirty.
  • Charles Lamb, “The superannuated man,” Last Essays of Elia

Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832)

• We are more apt to catch the vices of others rather than their virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.
  • Charles Caleb Colton

William Ellery Channing (1780-1842)

I call that mind free, which masters the senses, which protects itself against animal appetites, which contemns pleasure and pain in comparison to its own energy, which penetrates beneath the body and recognises its own reality and greatness, which passes life, not in asking what it shall eat or drink, but in hungering, thirsting, and seeking after righteousness.

I call that mind free, which escapes the bondage of matter, which, instead of stopping at the material universe and making it a prison wall, passes beyond it to its Author, and finds in the radiant signatures which everywhere bears of the Infinite Spirit, helps to its own spiritual enlightenment.

I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven.

I call that mind free, which sets no bounds to its love, which is not imprisoned in itself or in a sect, which recognises in all human beings the image of God and the rights of his children, which delights in virtue and sympathizes with suffering wherever they are seen, which conquers pride, anger, and sloth, and offers itself up a willing victim to the cause of mankind. ~ William Ellery Channing

• Undoubtedly some men are more gifted than others, and are marked out for more studious lives. But the work of such men is not to do others’ thinking for them, but to help them to think more vigorously and effectually. Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves.
  • William Ellery Channing, Lectures On The Elevation Of The Labouring Portion Of The Community

• I call that mind free, which masters the senses, which protects itself against animal appetites, which contemns pleasure and pain in comparison to its own energy, which penetrates beneath the body and recognises its own reality and greatness, which passes life, not in asking what it shall eat or drink, but in hungering, thirsting, and seeking after righteousness.
  I call that mind free, which escapes the bondage of matter, which, instead of stopping at the material universe and making it a prison wall, passes beyond it to its Author, and finds in the radiant signatures which everywhere bears of the Infinite Spirit, helps to its own spiritual enlightenment.
  I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven.
  I call that mind free, which sets no bounds to its love, which is not imprisoned in itself or in a sect, which recognises in all human beings the image of God and the rights of his children, which delights in virtue and sympathizes with suffering wherever they are seen, which conquers pride, anger, and sloth, and offers itself up a willing victim to the cause of mankind.
  • William Ellery Channing, Spiritual Freedom (1830)

• A clear thought, a pure affection, a resolute act of a virtuous will, have a dignity of quite another kind, and far higher than accumulations of brick and granite and plaster and stucco, however cunningly put together.
  • William Ellery Channing, “Self-Culture”

• A man has within him capacities of growth which deserve and will reward intense, unrelaxing toil. I do not look on a human being as a machine, made to be kept in action by a foreign force, to accomplish an unvarying succession of motions, to do a fixed amount of work, and then to fall to pieces at death, but as a being of free spiritual powers; and I place little value on any culture but that which aims to bring out these, and to give them perpetual impulse and expansion. I am aware that this view is far from being universal. The common notion has been, that the mass of the people need no other culture than is necessary to fit them for their various trades; and, though this error is passing away, it is far from being exploded. But the ground of a man’s culture lies in his nature, not in his calling. His powers are to be unfolded on account of their inherent dignity, not their outward direction. He is to be educated, because he is a man, not because he is to make shoes, nails, or pins. A trade is plainly not the great end of his being, for his mind cannot be shut up in it; his force of thought cannot be exhausted on it. He has faculties to which it gives no action, and deep wants it cannot answer. Poems, and systems of theology and philosophy, which have made some noise in the world, have been wrought at the work-bench and amidst the toils of the field. How often, when the arms are mechanically plying a trade, does the mind, lost in reverie or day-dreams, escape to the ends of the earth! How often does the pious heart of woman mingle the greatest of all thoughts, that of God, with household drudgery! Undoubtedly a man is to perfect himself in his trade, for by it he is to earn his bread and to serve the community. But bread or subsistence is not his highest good; for, if it were, his lot would be harder than that of the inferior animals, for whom nature spreads a table and weaves a wardrobe, without a care of their own. Nor was he made chiefly to minister to the wants of the community. A rational, moral being cannot, without infinite wrong, be converted into a mere instrument of others’ gratification. He is necessarily an end, not a means. A mind, in which are sown the seeds of wisdom, disinterestedness, firmness of purpose, and piety, is worth more than all the outward material interests of a world. It exists for itself, for its own perfection, and must not be enslaved to its own or others’ animal wants.
  • William Ellery Channing, “Self-Culture”

• When I speak of the purpose of self-culture, I mean that it should be sincere. In other words, we must make self-culture really and truly our end, or choose it for its own sake, and not merely as a means or instrument of something else. And here I touch a common and very pernicious error. Not a few persons desire to improve themselves only to get property and to rise in the world; but such do not properly choose improvement, but something outward and foreign to themselves; and so low an impulse can produce only a stinted, partial, uncertain growth. A man, as I have said, is to cultivate himself because he is a man. He is to start with the conviction that there is something greater within him than in the whole material creation, than in all the worlds which press on the eye and ear; and that inward improvements have a worth and dignity in themselves quite distinct from the power they give over outward things. Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself. If he knows no higher use of his mind than to invent and drudge for his body, his case is desperate as far as culture is concerned.
  • William Ellery Channing, “Self-Culture”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Truth that has been merely learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; at best, like a nose made out of another’s flesh; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thinking of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us. This is the fundamental difference between the thinker and the mere man of learning. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

• It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles’ Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God’s sake, not to inquire further.
  • Schopenhauer, Letter to Goethe (November 1819)

• If, while hurrying ostensibly to the temple of truth, we hand the reins over to our personal interests which look aside at very different guiding stars, for instance at the tastes and foibles of our contemporaries, at the established religion, but in particular at the hints and suggestions of those at the head of affairs, then how shall we ever reach the high, precipitous, bare rock whereon stands the temple of truth?
  • Schopenhauer, “Sketch for a history of the doctrine of the ideal and the real,” Parerga and Paralipomena, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 22-23

• What a man is by himself, what accompanies him into solitude, and what no one can give to him or take from him is obviously more essential to him than everything he possesses, or even what he may be in the eyes of others. A man of intellect, when entirely alone, has excellent entertainment in his own thoughts and fancies, whereas the continuous diversity of parties, plays, excursions, and amusements cannot ward off from the dullard the tortures of boredom.
  • Schopenhauer, "Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life," Parerga und Paralipomena, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 318-319

• The result of this mental dullness is that inner vacuity and emptiness that is stamped on innumerable faces and also betrays itself in a constant and lively attention to all events in the external world, even the most trivial. This vacuity is the real source of boredom and always craves for external excitement in order to set the mind and spirits in motion through something. Therefore in the choice thereof it is not fastidious, as is testified by the miserable and wretched pastimes to which people have recourse. ... The principal result of this inner vacuity is the craze for society, diversion, amusement, and luxury of every kind which lead many to extravagance and so to misery. Nothing protects us so surely from this wrong turning as inner wealth, the wealth of the mind, for the more eminent it becomes, the less room does it leave for boredom. The inexhaustible activity of ideas, their constantly renewed play with the manifold phenomena of the inner and outer worlds, the power and urge always to make different combinations of them, all these put the eminent mind, apart from moments of relaxation, quite beyond the reach of boredom.
  • Schopenhauer, “Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life,” Parerga und Paralipomena, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 329-330

• It is natural for great minds—the true teachers of humanity—to care little about the constant company of others; just as little as the schoolmaster cares for joining in the gambols of the noisy crowd of boys which surround him. The mission of these great minds is to guide mankind over the sea of error to the haven of truth—to draw it forth from the dark abysses of a barbarous vulgarity up into the light of culture and refinement.
  • Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims, T. Saunders, trans., § 9

• A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free. Constraint is always present in society, like a companion of whom there is no riddance; and in proportion to the greatness of a man’s individuality, it will be hard for him to bear the sacrifices which all intercourse with others demands.
  • Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims, T. B. Saunders, trans., § 9

• Truth that has been merely learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; at best, like a nose made out of another’s flesh; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thinking of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us. This is the fundamental difference between the thinker and the mere man of learning.
  • Schopenhauer, “On Thinking for Oneself,” Parerga und Paralipomena, Vol. 2, § 260

• The characteristic sign of a mind of the highest standard is the directness of its judgment. Everything it utters is the result of thinking for itself; this is shown everywhere in the way it gives expression to its thoughts. Therefore it is, like a prince, an imperial director in the realm of intellect. All other minds are mere delegates, as may be seen by their style, which has no stamp of its own. Hence every true thinker for himself is so far like a monarch; he is absolute, and recognises nobody above him. His judgments, like the decrees of a monarch, spring from his own sovereign power and proceed directly from himself. He takes as little notice of authority as a monarch does of a command; nothing is valid unless he has himself authorised it. On the other hand, those of vulgar minds, who are swayed by all kinds of current opinions, authorities, and prejudices, are like the people which in silence obey the law and commands.
  • Schopenhauer, “Thinking for Oneself,” H. Dirks, trans.

• In a field of ripening corn I came to a place which had been trampled down by some ruthless foot; and as I glanced amongst the countless stalks, every one of them alike, standing there so erect and bearing the full weight of the ear, I saw a multitude of different flowers, red and blue and violet. How pretty they looked as they grew there so naturally with their little foliage! But, thought I, they are quite useless; they bear no fruit; they are mere weeds, suffered to remain only because there is no getting rid of them. And yet, but for these flowers, there would be nothing to charm the eye in that wilderness of stalks. They are emblematic of poetry and art, which, in civic life—so severe, but still useful and not without its fruit—play the same part as flowers in the corn.
  • Schopenhauer, “Similes, Parables and Fables,” Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, § 380A

Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872)

• Genius resembles a bell; in order to ring it must be suspended into pure air, and when a foreign body touches it, its joyful tone is silenced.
  • Franz Grillparzer, Notebooks and Diaries (1809)

• Why do I love the ancients so much? Aside from everything else, when I read them, the entire past between them and me unfolds at the same time.
  • Franz Grillparzer, Notebooks and Diaries (1820)

• I am considered a misanthropist now and then, because I do not socialize with many people. But it’s only my mind that avoids you, my heart is still with you, and seeks the distance so that it can keep on loving you.
  • Franz Grillparzer

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

• Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley

• From the fitness of the Universe to its end you infer the necessity of an intelligent Creator. But if the fitness of the Universe, to produce certain effects, be thus conspicuous and evident, how much more exquisite fitness to his end must exist in the Author of this Universe? If we find great difficulty from its admirable arrangement in conceiving that the Universe has existed from all eternity, and to resolve this difficulty suppose a Creator, how much more clearly must we perceive the necessity of this very Creator’s creation whose perfections comprehend an arrangement far more accurate and just. The belief of an infinity of creative and created Gods, each more eminently requiring an intelligent author of his being than the foregoing, is a direct consequence of the premises which you have stated. The assumption that the Universe is a design, leads to a conclusion that there are [an] infinity of creative and created Gods, which is absurd.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, Eusebes and Theosophus

Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875)

When the claims of God are revealed to the mind, it must necessarily yield to them, or strengthen itself in sin. It must, as it were, gird itself up, and struggle to resist the claims of duty. This strengthening self in sin under light is the particular form of sin which we call impenitence. ~ Charles Grandison Finney

• Repentance ... implies a conviction, that God is wholly right, and the sinner wholly wrong, and a thorough and hearty abandonment of all excuses and apologies for sin. It implies an entire and universal acquittal of God from every shade and degree of blame, a thorough taking of the entire blame of sin to self. It implies a deep and thorough abasement of self in the dust, a crying out of soul against self, and a most sincere and universal, intellectual, and hearty exaltation of God.
  • Lectures on Systematic Theology (1878), p. 365

• Self-loathing is a natural and a necessary consequence of those intellectual views of self that are implied in repentance.
  • Lectures on Systematic Theology (1878), p. 366

• Impenitence is a phenomenon of the will, and consists in the will's cleaving to self-indulgence under light. It consists in the will's pertinacious adherence to the gratification of self, in despite of all the light with which the sinner is surrounded. It is not, as has been said, a passive state nor a mere negation, nor the love of sin for its own sake; but it is an active and obstinate state of the will, a determined holding on to that course of self-seeking which constitutes sin, not from a love to sin, but for the sake of the gratification.
  • Lectures on Systematic Theology (1878), p. 368

• When the claims of God are revealed to the mind, it must necessarily yield to them, or strengthen itself in sin. It must, as it were, gird itself up, and struggle to resist the claims of duty. This strengthening self in sin under light is the particular form of sin which we call impenitence.
  • Lectures on Systematic Theology (1878), p. 369

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

• The Philosopher of this age is not a Socrates, a Plato, a Hooker, or Taylor, who inculcates on men the necessity and infinite worth of moral goodness, the great truth that our happiness depends on the mind which is within us, and not on the circumstances which are without us; but a Smith, a De Lolme, a Bentham, who chiefly inculcates the reverse of this,—that our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times (1829)

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)

• Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance.
  • Heinrich Heine, History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, Vol. III (1834)

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)

• To understand Dante is to be as great as he.
  • Honoré de Balzac

• Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser’s gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyments have been intellectual joys.
  • Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion. It is easy in solitude to live after our own. But the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Literary Ethics”

• Yield not one inch to all the forces which conspire to make you an echo. That is the sin of dogmatism and creeds. Avoid them; they build a fence about the intellect .
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson in conversation, as reported by Charles J. Woodbury, Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson (1890), p. 30

• He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal entry December 26, 1839, Journals (1911), Volume 5, p. 361

• If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as “spiritual life,” “God,” “soul,” “cross,” etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal entry June 15, 1844, Journals (1911), Volume 6, p. 526

• Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance, from Essays: First Series (1841)

• It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion. It is easy in solitude to live after our own. But the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series (1883), p. 55

• Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series (1883), pp. 55-56

• The lesson of life is ... to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, 4, “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” Representative Men (1892)

• How can he [today’s writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Goethe; or, the Writer,” Representative Men (1892), p. 274

• 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.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Ode,” Complete Works (1883), vol. 9, p. 73

• A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Natural History of Intellect, Complete Works (1883), vol. 12, pp. 32-33

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)

• Every presentation of philosophy, whether oral or written, is to be taken and can only be taken in the sense of a means. Every system is only an expression or image of reason, and hence only an object of reason, an object which reason—a living power that procreates itself in new thinking beings—distinguishes from itself and posits as an object of criticism. Every system that is not recognized and appropriated as just a means, limits and warps the mind for it sets up the indirect and formal thought in the place of the direct, original and material thought.
  • Ludwig Feuerbach, “Towards a critique of Hegel’s philosophy” (1839), Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 67

• The first philosophers were astronomers. The heavens remind man ... that he is destined not merely to act, but also to contemplate.
  • Ludwig Feuerbach, Introduction to The Essence of Christianity (1843), Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), pp. 101-102

• To be sure, the human individual can, even must, feel and know himself to be limited—and this is what distinguishes him from the animal—but he can become conscious of his limits, his finite-ness, only because he can make the perfection and infinity of his species the object either of his feeling, conscience, or thought. But if his limitations appear to him as emanating from the species, this can only be due to his delusion that he is identical with the species, a delusion intimately linked with the individual’s love of ease, lethargy, vanity, and selfishness; for a limit which I know to be mine alone, humiliates, shames, and disquiets me. Hence, in order to free myself of this feeling of shame, this uneasiness, I make the limits of my individuality the limits of man’s being itself. What is incomprehensible to me is incomprehensible to others; why should this worry me at all? It is not due to any fault of mine or of my understanding: the cause lies in the understanding of the species itself. But it is a folly, a ludicrous and frivolous folly to designate that which constitutes the nature of man and the absolute nature of the individual, the essence of the species, as finite and limited.
  • Ludwig Feuerbach, Introduction to The Essence of Christianity (1843), Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), pp. 103-104

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence. In the United States the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. Everybody there adopts great numbers of theories, on philosophy, morals, and politics, without inquiry, upon public trust; and if we examine it very closely, it will be perceived that religion itself holds sway there much less as a doctrine of revelation than as a commonly received opinion. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

• In democratic societies, the sensuality of the public has taken a certain moderate and tranquil style, to which all souls are held to conform. It is as difficult to escape the common rule by one’s vices as by one’s virtues.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, H. Mansfield, trans. (Chicago: 2000), p. 509

• One must distinguish well arbitrariness from tyranny. Tyranny can be exercised by means of law itself, and then is not arbitrariness; arbitrariness can be exercised in the interest of the governed, and then it is not tyrannical.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, H. Mansfield, trans. (Chicago: 2000), p. 242

• In America the majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Inside those limits, the writer is free; but unhappiness awaits him if he dares to leave them.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, H. Mansfield, trans. (Chicago: 2000), p. 244

• What chiefly diverts the men of democracies from lofty ambition is not the scantiness of their fortunes, but the vehemence of the exertions they daily make to improve them.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book 2, Chapter 19, “Why so many ambitions men and so little lofty ambition are to be found in the United States”

• The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence. In the United States the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. Everybody there adopts great numbers of theories, on philosophy, morals, and politics, without inquiry, upon public trust; and if we examine it very closely, it will be perceived that religion itself holds sway there much less as a doctrine of revelation than as a commonly received opinion.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 2, Book 1, Chapter 2, J. Spencer, trans.

• The fact that the political laws of the Americans are such that the majority rules the community with sovereign sway materially increases the power which that majority naturally exercises over the mind. For nothing is more customary in man than to recognize superior wisdom in the person of his oppressor. This political omnipotence of the majority in the United States doubtless augments the influence that public opinion would obtain without it over the minds of each member of the community; but the foundations of that influence do not rest upon it. They must be sought for in the principle of equality itself.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 2, Book 1, Chapter 2, J. Spencer, trans.

Max Stirner (1806-1856)

• Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hopes on “institutions.”
  • Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, S. Byington, trans. (1913), p. 421

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

• How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?
  • John Stuart Mill, in James Huneker, Egoists: A Book of Supermen (New York: 1909), p. 367

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

• It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843), S. Walsh, trans. (2006), p. 28

• None has more contempt for what it is to be a man than they who make it their profession to lead the crowd.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, p. 96

• It will be easy for us once we receive the ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) and then go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many are there who plunge into life (the labyrinth) without taking that precaution?
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Journal entry, August 1, 1835

• To work for a living certainly cannot be the meaning of life, since it is indeed a contradiction that the continual production of the conditions is supposed to be the answer to the question of the meaning of that which is conditional upon their production.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Either-Or, H. Hong, trans. (1987), part 1 (I 15), p. 31

Arthur Helps (1813-1875)

• The unfortunate Ladurlad did not desire the sleep that for ever fled his weary eyelids with more earnestness than most people seek the deep slumber of a decided opinion.
  • Arthur Helps, Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd (1835)

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

• Where is this division of labor to end? And what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
  • Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), “Economy”

• Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that.
  • Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), “Economy” ¶ A6

• There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men.
  • Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), “Economy” ¶ A19

• Men have become the tools of their tools.
  • Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), Chapter 1, “Economy”

• A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
  • Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), Chapter 2, “Where I lived, and what I lived for”

• The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.
  • Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), Chapter 3, “Reading”

• The life that I aspire to live
  No man proposeth me—
  No trade upon the street
  Wears its emblazonry.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Independence”

• I hearing get, who had but ears,
  And sight, who had but eyes before,
  I moments live, who lived but years,
  And truth discern, who knew but learning’s lore.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Inspiration”

• I do not need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle,” 1.5

• Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. I feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle,” 1.12

• If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle,” 1.12

• A man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle,” 1.12

• There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle,” 1.12

• 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.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle,” 1.15

• Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle,” 1.15

• I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock,—that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things. They will continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow skylight, between you and the sky, when it is the unobstructed heavens you would view.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle,” 2.4

• I did not know why my news should be so trivial,—considering what one’s dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry. The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle,” 2.9

• If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire,—thinner than the paper on which it is printed,—then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle”

• Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair,—the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish,—to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself,—an hypæthral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity in this respect. Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very bar-room of the mind’s inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us,—the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts’ shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle”

• I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle”

• Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle”

• We are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle”

• What is called politics is something so superficial and inhuman that, practically, I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle”

• Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. They are infra-human, a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called.
  • Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle”

• The rich man... is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.
  • Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 2.10

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

• When we have weighed everything, and when our relations in life permit us to choose any given position, we may take that one which guarantees us the greatest dignity, which is based on ideas of whose truth we are completely convinced, which offers the largest field to work for mankind and approach the universal goal for which every position is only a means: perfection.
  • Karl Marx, “Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation” (1835), Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 38

• It is commonly held that the historical school is a reaction against the frivolous spirit of the eighteenth century. The currency of this view is in inverse ratio to its truth. In fact, the eighteenth century had only one product, the essential character of which is frivolity, and this sole frivolous product is the historical school.
  • Karl Marx, “The philosophical manifesto of the historical school of law” (1842), Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works (1975), vol. 16, p. 203

• Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital … Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by … the sense of having.
  • Karl Marx, Early Writings, (trans. T. B. Bottomore), London: Watts, p. 159

• The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it.
  • Karl Marx

• The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
  • Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, I

George Eliot (1819-1880)

• Hardly anything could have happened to me which I could regard as a greater blessing than this growth of my spiritual existence when my bodily existence is decaying.
  • George Eliot, Journal Entry, Jan 1, 1873

• The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
  • George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical

• Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name. ... Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.
  • George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Part 1

• Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
  • George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Part 4

John Ruskin (1819-1900)

• I receive many letters from parents respecting the education of their children. In the mass of these letters I am always struck by the precedence which the idea of a “position in life” takes above all other thoughts in the parents’—more especially in the mothers’—minds. “The education befitting such and such a station in life”—this is the phrase, this the object, always. They never seek, as far as I can make out, an education good in itself, … but, an education … “which shall lead to advancement in life;—this we pray for on bent knees—and this is all we pray for.” It never seems to occur to the parents that there may be an education which, in itself, is advancement in life.
  • John Ruskin, “Sesame and Lilies” (1865)

• I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusion of the science [of economics] if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons.
  • John Ruskin, Unto This Last (1860)

• Labour without joy is base.
  • John Ruskin, Time and Time (1867), Letter 5

• A well-educated gentleman may not know many languages,—may not be able to speak any but his own,—may have read very few books. But whatever language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned in the peerage of words; knows the words of true descent and ancient blood, at a glance, from words of modern canaille; remembers all their ancestry, their intermarriages, distant relationships, and the extent to which they were admitted, and offices they held, among the national noblesse of words at any time, and in any country.
  • John Ruskin, “Sesame and Lilies” (1865)

• You will not be able, I tell you again, for many and many a day, to come at the real purposes and teaching of these great men; but a very little honest study of them will enable you to perceive that what you took for your own “judgment” was mere chance prejudice, and drifted, helpless, entangled weed of castaway thought; nay, you will see that most men’s minds are indeed little better than rough heath wilderness, neglected and stubborn, partly barren, partly overgrown with pestilent brakes, and venomous, wind-sown herbage of evil surmise; that the first thing you have to do for them, and yourself, is eagerly and scornfully to set fire to this; burn all the jungle into wholesome ash-heaps, and then plough and sow.
  • John Ruskin, “Sesame and Lilies” (1865)

• When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work, as the colour-petals out of a fruitful flower;—when they are faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body. But now, having no true business, we pour our whole masculine energy into the false business of money-making; and having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up for us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, but guiltily and darkly.
  • John Ruskin, “Sesame and Lilies” (1865)

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)

The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class. ~ Friedrich Engels

• I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle-classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men; I am both glad and proud of having done so. Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life—many an hour, which else would have been wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette; proud, because thus I got an opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men who with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, yet command the respect of every one but an English money-monger.
  • Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)

• I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie; and I mean by this, especially the bourgeoisie proper, particularly the Liberal, Corn Law repealing bourgeoisie. For it nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold. In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted.
  • Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)

• The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class.
  • Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

• Genius is youth recaptured.
  • Charles Baudelaire, Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863), III: “L’artiste, homme du monde, homme des foules et enfant”

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

• The use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so. If it were not for this purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines. The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call the Philistines. Culture says: “Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?”
  • Matthew Arnold, “Sweetness and Light,” Culture and Anarchy (1869), p. 16

• If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.
  • Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States (1888), p. 177, in ** Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 28

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

• Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know. Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well. ... At present, people study useless sciences, but forget to study this, the most important knowledge.
  • Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom, P. Sekirin, trans. (1997), March 16

• Wise consumption is much more complicated than wise production.
  • Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom, P. Sekirin, trans. (1997), July 13

• The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic: “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius—man in the abstract—was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.
  • Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, ch. 6

• It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending.
  • Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, ch.11

• He lay on his back and began to pass his life in review in quite a new way. In the morning when he saw first his footman, then his wife, then his daughter, and then the doctor, their every word and movement confirmed to him the awful truth that had been revealed to him during the night. In them he saw himself—all that for which he had lived—and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a terrible and huge deception which had hidden both life and death.
  • Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, ch.11

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916)

• Virtue is also an art, and its adherents can also be divided into the practicing artists and the mere fans.
  • Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

• Whoever prefers the material comforts of life over intellectual wealth is like the owner of a palace who moves into the servants’ quarters and leaves the sumptuous rooms empty.
  • Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aphorisms, D. Scrase and W. Mieder, trans. (Riverside, California: 1994), p. 53

Walter Pater (1839-1894)

• Art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
  • Walter Pater, The Renaissance, Conclusion

John Lancaster Spalding (1840-1916)

A taste for the best books, as a taste for whatever is best, is acquired; and it can be acquired only by long study and practice. It is a result of free and disinterested self-activity, of efforts to attain what rarely brings other reward than the consciousness of having loved and striven for the best. ~ John Lancaster Spalding

• We have lost the old love of work, of work which kept itself company, which was fair weather and music in the heart, which found its reward in the doing, craving neither the flattery of vulgar eyes nor the gold of vulgar men.
  • John Lancaster Spalding, Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 21

• No sooner does a divine gift reveal itself in youth or maid than its market value becomes the decisive consideration, and the poor young creatures are offered for sale, as we might sell angels who had strayed among us.
  • John Lancaster Spalding, Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 21

• If a state should pass laws forbidding its citizens to become wise and holy, it would be made a byword for all time. But this, in effect, is what our commercial, social, and political systems do. They compel the sacrifice of mental and moral power to money and dissipation.
  • John Lancaster Spalding, Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 62

• Liberty is more precious than money or office; and we should be vigilant lest we purchase wealth or place at the price of inner freedom.
  • John Lancaster Spalding, Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 77

• A liberal education is that which aims to develop faculty without ulterior views of profession or other means of gaining a livelihood. It considers man an end in himself and not an instrument whereby something is to be wrought. Its ideal is human perfection.
  • John Lancaster Spalding, Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 234

William H. Crogman (1841-1931)

The development of an individual will invariably be in the direction of his ideal, and will partake largely of the nature and character of that ideal. ... Is the object of his thought lofty in its character, so is he. Is it low, so is he. We rise or fall, we ascend or descend, according to our ideals. ~ William H. Crogman

He, therefore, who fixes a limit of any kind to his intellectual attainments dwarfs himself, and cramps the growth of that mind given to us by the Creator, and capable of indefinite expansion. ~ William H. Crogman

• Young men, don't be in a hurry to distiuguish yourselves. Don't feel when you go into a strange community, that it is necessary to inform the people how wise you are, and what vast stores of learning you possess. Too many are doing that now, wasting precious time and life. Life was not made for that. Life hath a deeper meaning. If you know anything, if you are of any value to the community, the people will discover it in time, and give you credit for it; and if they do not, you can better afford to go without such recognition than not to have merited it.
  • William H. Crogman, Talks for the Times (1896), p. 42

• Whatever you are in the future, young ladies and gentlemen, will depend largely upon your conceptions of life, its duties, its responsibilities, its end. For this reason I have proposed to myself to speak to you in a practical manner on the importance of correct ideals.
  • William H. Crogman, Talks for the Times (1896), p. 272

• The development of an individual will invariably be in the direction of his ideal, and will partake largely of the nature and character of that ideal.
  • William H. Crogman, Talks for the Times (1896), p. 272

• Is the object of his thought lofty in its character, so is he. Is it low, so is he. We rise or fall, we ascend or descend, according to our ideals.
  • William H. Crogman, Talks for the Times (1896), p. 273

• The pugilist, whose highest ambition is to pound and bruise human flesh, and bear off from the prize-ring the victory and money staked thereon, subjects himself to the severest physical training in order to secure those ends, and naturally enough he always develops into a powerful animal, but an animal of less value than the horse or mule, whose powers of body contribute so much to human comfort.

  There have been pugilists on a more gigantic scale, with larger arenas for their operations, men like Julius Caesar, who conceived a passion for sovereign power.

• William H. Crogman, Talks for the Times (1896), p. 273

• Let us not, however, deceive ourselves with the thought that vaulting ambition, that lust for power and place is a disease peculiar to great minds, for nothing is more commonly found among ordinary men in the humbler walks of life. We need not travel very far in any direction to find a little Caesar or a little Napoleon.
  • William H. Crogman, Talks for the Times (1896), p. 276

• In these days of ours there is an almost irresistible impulse towards wealth, an indescribable passion to grasp and concentrate material forces. "By thy words," saith Scripture, "thou shalt be judged, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." The recent editions of our English dictionaries furnish us a number of new words, and words used in a new sense, which are irrefragable evidence of the existing spirit of greed, the passion to grasp and centralize wealth, such words as "pool" and "pooling," "combines," "trusts," "deals," and many more.
  • William H. Crogman, Talks for the Times (1896), p. 278

• Neither the black boy nor the white will ever be educated in the best and broadest sense of the term who seeks an education merely to reach an office, for, as in nature a stream never rises higher than its source, so in life men never rise higher than their ideals. The education that merely seeks an office must of necessity be limited to the dimensions of that office.
  • William H. Crogman, Talks for the Times (1896), p. 281

• A large proportion of the offices in this vast country is not held by the best, most learned and most cultivated men, but by men of mediocre attainments, whose hearts and whose eyes have been fixed on those places, and who, to obtain them, have used every means, honorable and dishonorable.
  • William H. Crogman, Talks for the Times (1896), p. 281

• The place-seeker will resort to methods from which self-respecting men would shrink with as much aversion as the ancient Jew shrank from contact with the leper. The true purpose of education is not office. "The true purpose of education," says one, "is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us; to develop to their fullest extent the capacities of every kind with which the God who made us has endowed us." He, therefore, who fixes a limit of any kind to his intellectual attainments dwarfs himself, and cramps the growth of that mind given to us by the Creator, and capable of indefinite expansion.
  • William H. Crogman, Talks for the Times (1896), p. 282

• Character is eternal; all other things are transient and fleeting. No ideal, perishable in itself, is worth striving for by an immortal soul.
  • William H. Crogman, Talks for the Times (1896), p. 287

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

• O proud philanthropist, your hope is vain To get by giving what you lost by gain.
  • Ambrose Bierce, Epigrams, The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (1911), Volume 8, p. 349

• Mammon, n.: The god of the world's leading religion.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Hermann Cohen (1842-1918)

The God who appears to me is the comforter of the poor and their avenger in world history. This avenger of the poor is the God I love. ~ Hermann Cohen

• Only the idea of God gives me the confidence that morality will become reality on earth. And because I cannot live without this confidence, I cannot live without God.
  • Hermann Cohen, Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen (1971), p. 5

• The God who appears to me is the comforter of the poor and their avenger in world history. This avenger of the poor is the God I love.
  • Hermann Cohen, The Concept of Religion in the System of Philosophy (1915), p. 81

• In the poor man I see humanity. I can't think of humanity without feeling sympathy for him, without feeling love for him. It is not the physical universe, but rather the moral universe, the social existence of mankind, that I must think and love, if my thought of God is to be called love.
  • Hermann Cohen, The Concept of Religion in the System of Philosophy (1915), p. 81

Georg Brandes (1842-1927)

He who feels that in his inmost being he cannot be compared with others, will be his own lawgiver. ~ Georg Brandes

• What is public opinion? It is private indolence.
  • Georg Brandes, “An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism,” Friedrich Nietzsche (1914), p. 9

• The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period.
  • Georg Brandes, “An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism,” Friedrich Nietzsche (1914), pp. 18-19

• Greatness has nothing to do with results or with success.
  • Georg Brandes, “An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism,” Friedrich Nietzsche (1914), p. 19

• Why you exist, says Nietzsche with Søren Kierkegaard, nobody in the world can tell you in advance; but since you do exist, try to give your existence a meaning by setting up for yourself as lofty and noble a goal as you can.
  • Georg Brandes, “An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism,” Friedrich Nietzsche (1914), p. 19

• The noblest and highest does not affect the masses at all, either at the moment or later. Therefore the historical success of a religion, its toughness and persistence, witness against its founder’s greatness rather than for it.
  • Georg Brandes, “An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism,” Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 20

• Instead of trying to educate the human race, they should imitate the pedagogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who concentrated their efforts on the education of a single person.
  • Georg Brandes, “An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism,” Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 26

• He who feels that in his inmost being he cannot be compared with others, will be his own lawgiver. For one thing is needful: to give style to one’s character. This art is practised by him who, with an eye for the strong and weak sides of his nature, removes from it one quality and another, and then by daily practice and acquired habit replaces them by others which become second nature to him; in other words, he puts himself under restraint in order by degrees to bend his nature entirely to his own law.
  • Georg Brandes, “An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism,” Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 26

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. ... He is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia. ... Men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them. Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

• By resolutely overthrowing, as soon as possible, the entire past of the world, we should at once join the ranks of independent gods. … World history would then be nothing for us but a dreamlike trance; the curtain falls, and man once more finds himself, … like a child waking up in the glow of the morning and laughingly wiping the frightful dream from his forehead.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, in Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche (Baltimore: 1997), pp. 56-57

• The modern scientific counterpart to belief in God is the belief in the universe as an organism: this disgusts me. This is to make what is quite rare and extremely derivative, the organic, which we perceive only on the surface of the earth, into something essential, universal, and eternal! This is still an anthropomorphizing of nature!
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe 9,11 [201]

• A very popular error: having the courage of one’s convictions; rather, it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions!!!
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe 13.344

• I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter to Mathilde Mayer, July 16, 1878, in Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche (Baltimore: 1997), p. 46

• In order to be able thus to misjudge, and thus to grant left-handed veneration to our classics, people must have ceased to know them. This, generally speaking, is precisely what has happened. For, otherwise, one ought to know that there is only one way of honoring them, and that is to continue seeking with the same spirit and with the same courage, and not to weary of the search.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (A. Ludovici trans.), § 1.2

• [Philistines] only devised the notion of an epigone-age in order to secure peace for themselves, and to be able to reject all the efforts of disturbing innovators summarily as the work of epigones. With the view of ensuring their own tranquility, these smug ones even appropriated history, and sought to transform all sciences that threatened to disturb their wretched ease into branches of history. ... No, in their desire to acquire an historical grasp of everything, stultification became the sole aim of these philosophical admirers of “nil admirari.” While professing to hate every form of fanaticism and intolerance, what they really hated, at bottom, was the dominating genius and the tyranny of the real claims of culture.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (A. Ludovici trans.), “David Strauss,” § 1.2

• In this way, a philosophy which veiled the Philistine confessions of its founder beneath neat twists and flourishes of language proceeded further to discover a formula for the canonization of the commonplace. It expatiated upon the rationalism of all reality, and thus ingratiated itself with the Culture-Philistine, who also loves neat twists and flourishes, and who, above all, considers himself real, and regards his reality as the standard of reason for the world. From this time forward he began to allow every one, and even himself, to reflect, to investigate, to aestheticise, and, more particularly, to make poetry, music, and even pictures—not to mention systems of philosophy; provided, of course, that ... no assault were made upon the “reasonable” and the “real”—that is to say, upon the Philistine.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (A. Ludovici trans.), “David Strauss, § 1.2, p. 17

• I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely—that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, “On the uses and disadvantages of history for life,” Preface, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), § 2.0, p. 60

• Perhaps no philosopher is more correct than the cynic. The happiness of the animal, that thorough cynic, is the living proof of cynicism.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, § 2.1, cited in Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (1987), p. ix

• In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia. ... Men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them. Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 127

• The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: “Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.”
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 127

• There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. ... He is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 128

• If it is true to say of the lazy that they kill time, then it is greatly to be feared that an era which sees its salvation in public opinion, this is to say private laziness, is a time that really will be killed: I mean that it will be struck out of the history of the true liberation of life. How reluctant later generations will be to have anything to do with the relics of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men dominated by public opinion.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 128

• We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 128

• I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught which did not yet exist a couple of thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself. No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), pp. 128-129

• How can a man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: “this is really you, this is no longer outer shell.”
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 129

• That is the secret of all culture: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles—that which can provide these things is, rather, only sham education. Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack the tender buds of the plant.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 130

• I always believed that at some time fate would take from me the terrible effort and duty of educating myself. I believed that, when the time came, I would discover a philosopher to educate me, a true philosopher whom one could follow without any misgiving because one would have more faith in him than one had in oneself. Then I asked myself: what would be the principles by which he would educate you?—and I reflected on what he might say about the two educational maxims which are being hatched in our time. One of them demands that the educator should quickly recognize the real strength of his pupil and then direct all his efforts and energy and heat at them so as to help that one virtue to attain true maturity and fruitfulness. The other maxim, on the contrary, requires that the educator should draw forth and nourish all the forces which exist in his pupil and bring them to a harmonious relationship with one another. ... But where do we discover a harmonious whole at all, a simultaneous sounding of many voice in one nature, if not in such men as Cellini, men in whom everything, knowledge, desire, love, hate, strives towards a central point, a root force, and where a harmonious system is constructed through the compelling domination of this living centre? And so perhaps these two maxims are not opposites at all? Perhaps the one simply says that man should have a center and the other than he should also have a periphery? That educating philosopher of whom I dreamed would, I came to think, not only discover the central force, he would also know how to prevent its acting destructively on the other forces: his educational task would, it seemed to me, be to mould the whole man into a living solar and planetary system and to understand its higher laws of motion.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.2, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), pp. 130-131

• When virtue has slept, she will get up more refreshed.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too Human, § 83

• The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too Human, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (1996), § 137

• The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too Human, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1986), § 181

• In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain. Either you will get up higher today, or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too Human, § 358

• Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too Human, § 483

• The free human being is immoral because in all things he is determined to depend upon himself and not upon a tradition.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (1997) § 9

• If an action is performed not because tradition commands it but for other motives ... even indeed for precisely the motives which once founded the tradition, it is called immoral.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (1997) § 9

• Who is the most moral man? First, he who obeys the law most frequently, who ... is continually inventive in creating opportunities for obeying the law. Then, he who obeys it even in the most difficult cases. The most moral man is he who sacrifices the most to custom.... Self-overcoming is demanded, not on account of any useful consequences it may have for the individual, but so that hegemony of custom and tradition shall be made evident.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (1997) § 9

• Every individual action, every individual mode of thought arouses dread; it is impossible to compute what precisely the rarer, choicer, more original spirits in the whole course of history have had to suffer through being felt as evil and dangerous, indeed through feeling themselves to be so. Under the dominion of the morality of custom, originality of every kind has acquired a bad conscience.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (1997) § 9

• ‘Trust your feelings!’—But feelings are nothing final or original; behind the feelings there stand judgments and evaluations... The inspiration born of feeling is the grandchild of a judgment—and often a false judgment! And in any event not a child of your own! To trust one’s feelings means to give more obedience to one’s grandfather and grandmother and their grandparents than to the gods which are in us: our reason and our experience.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, § 35

• Must everything that one has to combat, that one has to keep within bounds or on occasion banish totally from one’s mind, always have to be called evil! Is it not the way of common souls always to think an enemy must be evil!
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, § 76

• Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, § 382

• The popular medical formulation of morality that goes back to Ariston of Chios, "virtue is the health of the soul," would have to be changed to become useful, at least to read: "your virtue is the health of your soul." For there is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failures. Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more we allow the unique and incomparable to raise its head again, and the more we abjure the dogma of the "equality of men," the more must the concept of a normal health, along with a normal diet and the normal course of an illness, be abandoned by medical men. Only then would the time have come to reflect on the health and illness of the soul, and to find the peculiar virtue of each man in the health of his soul.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), “Health of the Soul,” W. Kauffman, trans. (1974), § 120

• Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can really dispense with illness—even for the sake of our virtue—and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge in particular does not require the sick soul as much as the healthy, and whether, in brief, the will to health alone, is not a prejudice, cowardice, and perhaps a bit of very subtle barbarism and backwardness.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), “Health of the Soul,” W. Kauffman, trans. (1974), § 120

• If sociability and the arts still offer any delight, it is the kind of delight that slaves, weary of their work, devise for themselves. How frugal our educated—and uneducated—people have become regarding ‘joy’! How they are becoming increasingly suspicious of all joy! More and more, work enlists all good conscience on its side; the desire for joy already calls itself a ‘need to recuperate’ and is beginning to be ashamed of itself.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), W. Kaufmann, trans, § 329

• Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilized countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only it pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not to be the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare breed, but so do even those men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery only if it is associated with pleasure, and the hardest, most difficult work if necessary. Otherwise their idleness is resolute, even if it spells impoverishment, dishonor, and danger to life and limb. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), W. Kaufmann, trans, § 42

• How can we make things beautiful, attractive and desirable for us when they are not? And I rather think that in themselves they never are. Here we could learn something … from artists who are really continually trying to bring off such inventions and feats. Moving away from things until there is a good deal that one no longer sees and there is much that our eye has to add if we are still to see them at all; or seeing things around a corner and as cut out and framed; or to place them so that they partially conceal each other and grant us only glimpses and architectural perspectives; or looking at them through tinted glass or in the light of the sunset; or giving them a surface and skin that is not fully transparent—all this we should learn from artists while being wiser than they are in other matters. For with them this subtle power usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but we want to be poets of our life—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), W. Kaufmann, trans, § 299

• [Many historians of morality,] Mostly Englishmen, … affirm some consensus of the nations, at least of the tame nations, concerning certain principles of morals, and then they infer from this that these principles must be unconditionally binding also for you and me; or, conversely, they see the truth that among different nations moral valuations are necessarily different and then infer from this that no morality is at all binding. Both procedures are equally childish.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882) § 345, in Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche, p. 36

• How easily these men of knowledge are satisfied! … When they find something in things…quite familiar to us, such as … our willing and desiring—how happy they are right away! For “what is familiar is known”: on this they are agreed. Even the most cautious among them suppose that what is familiar is at least more easily knowable than what is strange, and that, for example, sound method demands that we start from the “inner world,” from the “facts of consciousness”: because this world is more familiar to us. Error of errors! What is familiar is what we are used to, and what we are used to is most difficult to “know”—that is, to see as a problem.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), W. Kaufmann, trans, § 355

• You see what it was that really triumphed over the Christian God: Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness that was understood more rigorously, the father confessor’s refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), W. Kaufmann, trans, § 357

• what we call consciousness constitutes only one state of our spiritual and psychic world (perhaps a pathological state) and not by any means the whole of it.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), § 357, describing “Leibniz’s incomparable insight”

• You have served the people and the superstition of the people, all you famous wise men—and not the truth. And that is precisely why you were accorded respect.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, W. Kaufmann, trans., p. 214, “On the Famous Wise Men”

• You tell me, my friends, that there is no disputing of taste? But all of life is a dispute over taste. Taste is at the same time weight and scales and weigher. Woe unto a life that would live without disputes over weight and scales and weighers!
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, W. Kaufmann, trans., p. 229, “On Those Who Are Sublime”

• You could ring in your wisdom with bells: the shopkeepers in the marketplace would outjingle it with pennies.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, W. Kaufmann, trans., p. 297, “The Return Home”

• Jesus said to his Jews: “The law was for slaves—love god as I love him, as his son! What do we sons of God have to do with morality!”’
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, I. Johnston, trans., § 164

• A reader nowadays hardly reads the individual words (let alone the syllables) on a page—he’s much more likely to take about five words out of twenty at random and “guess” on the basis of these five words the presumed sense they contain.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, I. Johnston, trans., § 192

• The ideal man of learning in whom the scientific instinct blossoms forth fully after a thousand complete and partial failures, is assuredly one of the most costly instruments that exist, but his place is in the hand of one who is more powerful. He is only an instrument.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, H. Zimmern, trans., § 207

• Faced with a world of “modern ideas” which would like to banish everyone into a corner and a “specialty,” a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea of “greatness,” on the basis of his own particular extensive range and multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of diversity.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, I. Johnston, trans., § 212

• This is age of the masses, who prostrate themselves before everything built on a massive scale.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, I. Johnston, trans., § 241

• From time immemorial, in all social strata in any way dependent, the ordinary man was only that which he passed for:—not being at all accustomed to fix values, he did not assign even to himself any other value than that which his master assigned to him (it is the peculiar right of masters to create values). It may be looked upon as the result of an extraordinary atavism, that the ordinary man, even at present, is still always waiting for an opinion about himself, and then instinctively submitting himself to it; yet by no means only to a “good” opinion, but also to a bad and unjust one
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, § 261 (H. Zimmern trans.)

• These English psychologists—what do they really want? We find them, willingly or unwillingly, always at the same work, that is, hauling the partie honteuse [shameful part] of our inner world into the foreground, in order to look right there for the truly effective and operative factor which has determined our development, the very place where man’s intellectual pride least wishes to find it …—what is it that really drives these psychologists always in this particular direction? Is it a secret, malicious, common instinct, perhaps one which cannot be acknowledged even to itself, for belittling humanity?
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

• Ascetic ideals reveal so many bridges to independence that a philosopher is bound to rejoice and clap his hands when he hears the story of all those resolute men who one day said No to all servitude.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals § 3.7, W. Kaufmann, trans., Basic Writings of Nietzsche (1992), p. 543

• That which Heraclitus avoided, however, is still the same at that which we shun today: the noise and democratic chatter of the Ephesians, their politics, their latest news of the “Empire,” … their market business of “today”—for we philosophers need to be spared one thing above all: everything to do with “today.” We reverence what is still, cold, noble, distant, past, and in general everything in the face of which the soul does not have to defend itself and wrap itself up.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals § 3.8, W. Kaufmann, trans., Basic Writings of Nietzsche (1992), p. 546

• A spirit that is sure of itself speaks softly.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals § 3.8, W. Kaufmann, trans., Basic Writings of Nietzsche (1992), p. 546

• The will to a system is a lack of integrity.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows” § 1.26

• When the English actually believe that they know “intuitively” what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, W. Kaufmann, trans. (1976), “Skirmishes of an untimely man” § 9.5 “George Eliot” p. 516

• What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think, and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure—as a mere automaton of “duty”?
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist § 11, in A Little Book of Aphorisms (1947), p. 229

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

• To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882)

• There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. ... They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, “An Apology for Idlers”

• There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, “An Apology for Idlers”

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense. ~ Oscar Wilde

• Some kill their love when they are young,
  And some when they are old;
  Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
  Some with the hands of Gold.
  • Oscar Wilde, Ballad of Reading Goal (1898)

• Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
  • Oscar Wilde

• He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.
  • Oscar Wilde

• A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
  • Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, ¶ 27

• We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
  • Oscar Wilde, Gilbert, in The Critic as Artist, pt. 2, Intentions (1891)

• The thoroughly well-informed man—that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
  • Oscar Wilde, Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 1, Complete Works (New York: 1989), p. 25

• The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.
  • Oscar Wilde, Lord Henry to Dorian, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 2, pp. 28-29

• Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense.
  • Oscar Wilde, Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 5, p. 57

• He never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night,
  • Oscar Wilde, Dorian’s musings, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 11, p. 106

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

• The fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.
  • George Bernard Shaw, A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)

• No sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus.
  • George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion (1913)

• Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
  • George Bernard Shaw, "Maxims for Revolutionists," #1

• If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.
  • George Bernard Shaw, "Maxims for Revolutionists," #16

George Santayana (1862-1952)

• Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
  • George Santayana, in A Little Book of Aphorisms (New York: 1947), p. 78

• Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare, if common, it must become mean.
  • George Santayana, in A Little Book of Aphorisms (New York: 1947), p. 202

• As virtue is a wider thing than morality, because it includes natural gifts and genial sympathies, or even heroic sacrifices, so wisdom is a wider thing than logic.
  • George Santayana, in A Little Book of Aphorisms (New York: 1947), p. 214

• Nature ... is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves. Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand.
  • George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1967), p. 50

• To deny consciousness ... is a relief to an overtaxed and self-impeded generation; it seems a blessed simplification. It gets rid of the undemocratic notion that by being very reflective, circumspect and subtle you might discover something that most people do not see.
  • George Santayana, “Philosophical opinion in America,” The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1967), p. 108

Irving Babbitt (1865-1933)

• The complaint is often heard at present that there is an increasing exodus from the difficult and disciplinary subjects and a rush into the soft subjects. One good sign is that those who stand for the difficult and disciplinary subjects, e.g., the professors of physics and the professors of the ancient classics, are coming more and more to see that they must co-operate and not work at cross-purposes, as they have done only too often in the past, if they are to make head against the drift toward softness.
  • Irving Babbitt, "English and the Discipline of Ideas " (1920), Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings (1981), p. 62

• The question I propose to consider is in what way one may justify the study of English on cultural and disciplinary, and not merely on sentimental or utilitarian, grounds. My own conviction is that if English is to be thus justified it must be primarily by what I am terming the discipline of ideas.

As a matter of fact one hears it commonly said nowadays that literature may be rescued from the philologist on the one hand and the mere dilettante on the other by an increase of emphasis on its intellectual content, that the teaching of literature, if it is to have virility, must be above all the teaching of ideas.

• Irving Babbitt, "English and the Discipline of Ideas " (1920), Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings (1981), p. 63

• Those who are filled with concern for the lot of humanity as a whole, especially for the less fortunate portions of it, are wont nowadays to call themselves idealists. We should at least recognize that ideals in this sense are not the same as standards and that they are often indeed the opposite of standards. It would be easy to mention institutions of learning in this country that are at present engaged in breaking down standards in the name of ideals.
  • Irving Babbitt, "English and the Discipline of Ideas " (1920), Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings (1981), pp. 64-65

• True democracy consists not in lowering the standard but in giving everybody, so far as possible, a chance of measuring up to the standard.
  • Irving Babbitt, "English and the Discipline of Ideas " (1920), Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings (1981), p. 65

• When we consider carefully what many of our so-called humanists stand for, we find that they are not humanists but humanitarians.
  • Irving Babbitt, "English and the Discipline of Ideas " (1920), Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings (1981), p. 66

• What seems to me to be driving our whole civilization toward the abyss at present is a one-sided conception of liberty, a conception that is purely centrifugal, that would get rid of all outer control and then evade or deny openly the need of achieving inner control.
  • Irving Babbitt, "English and the Discipline of Ideas " (1920), Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings (1981), p. 66

• Everything in our modern substitutes for religion—whether Baconian or Rousseauistic—will be found to converge upon the idea of service. The crucial question is whether one is safe in assuming that the immense machinery of power that has resulted from activity of the utilitarian type can be made, on anything like present lines, to serve disinterested ends; whether it will not rather minister to the egoistic aims either of national groups or of individuals.

One's answer to this question will depend on one's view of the Rousseauistic theory of brotherhood. ... To assert that man in a state of nature, or some similar state thus projected, is good, is to discredit the traditional controls in the actual world. Humility, conversion, decorum—all go by the board in favor of free temperamental overflow. Does man thus emancipated exude spontaneously an affection for his fellows that will be an effective counterpoise to the sheer expansion of his egoistic impulses? ...

Unfortunately, the facts have persistently refused to conform to humanitarian theory. There has been an ever-growing body of evidence from the eighteenth century to the Great War that in the natural man, as he exists in the real world and not in some romantic dreamland, the will to power is, on the whole, more than a match for the will to service. To be sure, many remain unconvinced by this evidence. Stubborn facts, it has been rightly remarked, are as nothing compared with a stubborn theory. Altruistic theory is likely to prove peculiarly stubborn, because, probably more than any other theory ever conceived, it is flattering: it holds out the hope of the highest spiritual benefits—for example, peace and fraternal union—without any corresponding spiritual effort.

• Irving Babbitt, "What I Believe" (1930), Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings (1981), pp. 7-8

• According to Mr. Walter Lippmann, the belief the modern man has lost is "that there is an immortal essence presiding like a king over his appetites." This immortal essence of which Mr. Lippmann speaks is, judged experimentally and by its fruits, a higher will. But why leave the affirmation of such a will to the pure traditionalist? Why not affirm it first of all as a psychological fact, one of the immediate data of consciousness, a perception so primordial that, compared with it, the denial of man's moral freedom by the determinist is only a metaphysical dream? The way would thus be open for a swift flanking movement on the behaviorists and other naturalistic psychologists, who are to be accounted at present among the chief enemies of human nature.
  • Irving Babbitt, "What I Believe" (1930), Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings (1981), pp. 9-10

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

• I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal,—that is they have ceased to be self-centered, have given up their individuality.
  • W. B. Yeats, Letter to Katharine Tynan

• Now all the truth is out,
  Be secret and take defeat
  From any brazen throat,
  For how can you compete,
  Being honor bred, with one
  Who, were it proved he lies,
  Were neither shamed in his own
  Nor in his neighbors’ eyes?
  Bred to a harder thing
  Than Triumph, turn away
  And like a laughing string
  Whereon mad fingers play
  Amid a place of stone,
  Be secret and exult,
  Because of all things known
  That is most difficult.
  • W. B. Yeats, “To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing”

Julien Benda (1867-1956)

• Since the Greeks the predominant attitude of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as (like aesthetic activity) it finds its satisfaction in itself, apart from any attention to the advantages it may procure. Most thinkers would have agreed with … Renan’s verdict that the man who loves science for its fruits commits the worst of blasphemies against that divinity. … The modern clercs have violently torn up this charter. They proclaim the intellectual functions are only respectable to the extent that they are bound up with the pursuit of concrete advantage.
  • Julien Benda, Treason of the Intellectuals (1927), pp. 151-152

André Gide (1869-1951)

At times it seems to me that I am living my life backwards, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles—wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing. ~ André Gide

• One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
  • André Gide

• I have my own virtue, which I am constantly cultivating and refining by teaching myself not to tolerate in me or my surroundings anything but the exquisite.
  • André Gide, Maurice in “Characters,” Pretexts, J. O’Brien, ed. (1964) p. 298

• It seems to me that had I not known Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or Freud or X or Z, I should have thought just as I did, and that I found in them rather an authorization than an awakening. Above all, they taught me to cease doubting myself, to cease fearing my thoughts, and to let those thoughts lead me to those lands that were not uninhabitable because, after all, I found them already there.
  • André Gide, “Characters,” Pretexts, J. O’Brien, ed. (1964) p. 306, translation modified

• The artist who is after success lets himself be influenced by the public. Generally such an artist contributes nothing new, for the public acclaims only what it already knows, what it recognizes.
  • André Gide, “Characters,” Pretexts, J. O’Brien, ed. (1964) p. 306

• O my dearest and most lovable thought, why should I try further to legitimize your birth?
  • André Gide, “Characters,” Pretexts, J. O’Brien, ed. (1964) p. 310

• Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves.
  • André Gide, “An Unprejudiced Mind,” Pretexts, J. O’Brien, ed. (1964) p. 311

• True intelligence very readily conceives of an intelligence superior to its own; and this is why truly intelligent men are modest.
  • André Gide, “An Unprejudiced Mind,” Pretexts, J. O’Brien, ed. (1964) pp. 311-312

• At times it seems to me that I am living my life backwards, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles—wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.
  • André Gide, “An Unprejudiced Mind,” Pretexts, J. O’Brien, ed. (1964) pp. 319-320

• Each joy is like manna in the desert, which spoils from one day to the next.
  • André Gide, Ménalque in The Immoralist, R. Howard trans., p. 112

• The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they’re seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?
  • André Gide, Michael in The Immoralist, R. Howard trans., p. 159

Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914)

• None of you knows what creativity means. To paint a picture, to write a poem? No! To recast one’s whole age, to impose upon it the stamp of one’s will, to fill it with beauty, to overwhelm it, to overpower it with one’s spirit.
  • Christian Morgenstern, in Zarathustra’s Children (2000), p. 178

Paul Valéry (1871-1945)

• Nothing is rarer than giving no importance to things that have none.
  • Paul Valéry, cited in André Gide, Pretexts, J. O’Brien, ed. (1964) p. 319

• Our civilization is taking on, or tending to take on, the structure and properties of a machine. . . . This machine will not tolerate less than world-wide rule; it will not allow a single human being to survive outside its control, uninvolved in its functioning. … It cannot put up with ill-defined lives within its sphere of operation. Its precision, which is its essence, cannot endure vagueness or social caprice; irregular situations are incompatible with good running order. It cannot put up with anyone whose duties and circumstances are not precisely specified.
  • Paul Valéry, cited in John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man, p. 277

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

The ‘practical’ man, as this word is often used, is one who recognizes only material needs, who realizes that men must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind. ~ Bertrand Russell

• The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
  • Bertrand Russell

• The people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject.
  • Bertrand Russell, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, December 1912, in R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991, p. 75

• The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity. Sometimes this is true; Athenian slave-owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered possible by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern technique it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization.
  • Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness” (1935)

• The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
  • Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness”

• Without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.
  • Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness”

• The ‘practical’ man, as this word is often used, is one who recognizes only material needs, who realizes that men must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind.
  • Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy, Chapter XV “The Value of Philosophy”

• Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.
  • Bertrand Russell, “The Study of mathematics”

• The love of system, of interconnection, which is perhaps the inmost essence of the intellectual impulse, can find free play in mathematics as nowhere else. The learner who feels this impulse must not be repelled by an array of meaningless examples or distracted by amusing oddities, but must be encouraged to dwell upon central principles, to become familiar with the structure of the various subjects which are put before him, to travel easily over the steps of the more important deductions. In this way a good tone of mind is cultivated, and selective attention is taught to dwell by preference upon what is weighty and essential.
  • Bertrand Russell, “The Study of mathematics”

• The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.
  • Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 2

• One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
  • Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness, chapter 9

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

• The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.
  • Rabindranath Tagore, The Fourfold Way of India (1924)

Karl Kraus (1874-1936)

• Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.
  • Karl Kraus, “In these great times,” Harry Zohn, trans., In These Great Times (Montreal: 1976), pp. 73-74

• The aesthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love.
  • Karl Kraus, Die Fackel #406, October 5, 1915, p. 138

• One day humanity will have sacrificed itself to the great factories it built for its own relief.
  • Karl Kraus, Dicta and Contradicta, J. McVity, trans. (2001), #374

• He who dispenses with the praise of the masses will not deny himself the opportunity to be his own admirer.
  • Karl Kraus, Sprüche und Widersprüche, my translation

• Only a language that has cancer is prone to neologisms.
  • Karl Kraus, Sprüche und Widersprüche, my translation

• Liberalism serves dishwater as an elixir vitae.
  • Karl Kraus, Dicta and Contradicta, J. McVity, trans. (2001), #808

• An aphorism never coincides with the truth: it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.
  • Karl Kraus, Dicta and Contradicta, J. McVity, trans. (2001), #810

• Today’s literature is prescriptions written by patients.
  • Karl Kraus, No Compromise (New York: 1977), p. 229

• Progress celebrates Pyrrhic victories over nature.
  • Karl Kraus, Half Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths, p. 122

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it. ~ G. K. Chesterton

• The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908), pp. 55-56

• We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908), p. 56

• Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
  • G. K. Chesterton, “The ethics of Elfland,” Orthodoxy (1908), p. 85

• A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art. ... The first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Utopia of Usurers (1917), p. 6

• Even the tyrant never rules by force alone; but mostly by fairy tales. And so it is with the modern tyrant, the great employer. The sight of a millionaire is seldom, in the ordinary sense, an enchanting sight: nevertheless, he is in his way an enchanter. As they say in the gushing articles about him in the magazines, he is a fascinating personality. So is a snake. At least he is fascinating to rabbits; and so is the millionaire to the rabbit-witted sort of people that ladies and gentlemen have allowed themselves to become.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Utopia of Usurers (1917), p. 19

• The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Utopia of Usurers (1917), pp. 33-34

• Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Utopia of Usurers (1917), p. 37

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed suddenly into magnificent sense. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Wie soll ich meine Seele halten, daß
sie nicht an deine rührt? Wie soll ich sie
hinheben über dich zu andern Dingen?
Ach gerne möcht ich sie bei irgendwas
Verlorenem im Dunkel unterbringen
an einer fremden stillen Stelle, die
nicht weiterschwingt, wenn deine Tiefen schwingen.

Doch alles, was uns anrührt, dich und mich,
nimmt uns zusammen wie ein Bogenstrich,
der aus zwei Saiten eine Stimme zieht.
Auf welches Instrument sind wir gespannt?
Und welcher Geiger hat uns in der Hand?
O süßes Lied.

How should I hold my soul so
it does not touch yours? How should I vault it
above you to other things?
Oh how glad I would be to submerge my soul
in something lost in the dark
in a strange silent place
that never shakes, when the depths shake.

No. Everything that touches us, you and I
plays us together like the bow that
from two strings makes one voice.
On what instrument are we taut?
And what violinist has us in her hand?
O beautiful song.

Liebeslied, Neue Gedichte, 1892, translation by peter1c

• The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed suddenly into magnificent sense.
  • Rainer Maria Rilke

• Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must”, then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.
  • Rainer Maria Rilke Letter to Franz Kappus, February 17, 1903

• What is necessary, after all, is only ... to be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn’t understand a thing about what they were doing. When you realize that their activities are shabby, that their vocations are petrified and no longer connected with life, why not then continue to look upon it all as a child would, as if you were looking at something unfamiliar, out of the depths of your own world, from the vastness of your own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation? Why should you want to give up a child’s wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.
  • Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 6

• Perhaps all professions ... are filled with hostility toward the individual, saturated with hatred by those who find themselves mute and sullen in an insipid duty.
  • Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 6

Thomas Mann (1875-1955)

• He surrendered utterly to the power that to him seemed the highest on earth, to whose service he felt called, which promised him elevation and honours: the power of the intellect, the power of the word, that lords with a smile over the unconscious and inarticulate. To this power he surrendered with all the passion of youth, and it rewarded him with all it had to give, taking from him inexorably, in return, all that it is wont to take.
  
  It sharpened his eyes and made him see through the large words which puff out the bosoms of mankind; it opened for him men’s souls and his own, made him clairvoyant, showed him the innermost part of the world and the ultimate behind men’s words and deeds.
  • Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger

Herman Hesse (1877-1962)

• The Steppenwolf ... was secretly and persistently attracted to the little bourgeois world, to those quiet and respectable homes with tidy gardens, irreproachable stair-cases and their whole modest air of order and comfort. It pleased him to set himself outside it, with his little vices and extravagances, as a queer fellow or a genius, but he never had his domicile in those provinces of life where the bourgeoisie had ceased to exist. He was not at ease with violent and exceptional persons or with criminals and outlaws, and he took up his abode always among the middle classes, with whose habits and standards and atmosphere he stood in a constant relation, even though it might be one of contrast and revolt.
  • Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf, B. Creighton, trans., (New York: 1990), pp. 50-51

• A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule.
  • Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf, B. Creighton, trans., (New York: 1990), pp. 51-52

John Erskine (1879-1951)

• We really seek intelligence not for the answers it may suggest to the problems of life, but because we believe it is life,—not for aid in making the will of God prevail, but because we believe it is the will of God. We love it, as we love virtue, for its own sake, and we believe it is only virtue’s other and more precise name.
  • John Erskine, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent (1915), pp. 26-27

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

• Men always need some idiotic fiction in the name of which they can hate one another. Once it was religion. Now it is the State.
  • Albert Einstein

Otto Weininger (1880-1903)

Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are no more than duty to oneself. They celebrate their union by the highest service of truth. ~ Otto Weininger

• Most of the time man does not do what he wills, but what he has willed. Through his decisions, he always gives himself only a certain direction, in which he then moves until the next moment of reflection. We do not will continuously, we only will intermittently, piece by piece. We thus save ourselves from willing: principle of the economy of the will. But the higher man always experiences this as thoroughly immoral.
  • Otto Weininger

• If man were not free, then he could not conceive of causality at all, and could not form any concept of it. Insight into lawfulness is already freedom from it.
  • Otto Weininger

• There are men who are willing to marry a woman they do not care about merely because she is admired by other men. Such a relation exists between many men and their thoughts.
  • Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1906), p. 104

• A man is first reverent about himself, and self-respect is the first stage in reverence for all things.
  • Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1906), p. 127

• A man is himself important precisely in proportion that all things seem important to him.
  • Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1906), p. 127

• The great genius does not let his work be determined by the concrete finite conditions that surround him, whilst it is from these that the work of the statesman takes its direction and its termination. ... It is the genius in reality and not the other who is the creator of history, for it is only the genius who is outside and unconditioned by history.
  • Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1906), p. 139

• Memory, then, is a necessary part of the logical faculty. ... The proposition A = A must have a psychological relation to time, otherwise it would be A_t1 = A_t2.
  • Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1906), p. 148

• A creature that cannot grasp the mutual exclusiveness of A and not-A has no difficulty in lying; more than that, such a creature has not even any consciousness of lying, being without a standard of truth.
  • Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1906), p. 150

• The deepest, the intelligible, part of the nature of man is that part which does not take refuge in causality, but which chooses in freedom the good or the bad.
  • Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1906), p. 158

• Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are no more than duty to oneself. They celebrate their union by the highest service of truth.
  • Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1906), p. 159

• Not only virtue, but also insight, not only sanctity but also wisdom, are the duties and tasks of mankind.
  • Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1906), p. 159

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936)

The will to power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed. ~ Oswald Spengler

• It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought. Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither ways nor aims in common.
  • Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West, Volume 1, C. Atkinson, trans., p. 300

• Everything that our present-day psychologist has to tell us—and here we refer not only to the systematic science but also in the wider sense to the physiognomic knowledge of men—relates to the present condition of the Western soul, and not, as hitherto gratuitously assumed, to “the human soul” at large.
  • Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West, C. Atkinson, trans., Volume 1, p. 303

• The will to power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.
  • Oswald Spengler

Robert Musil (1880-1942)

• The truth lies not in the middle, but rather all around, like a sack, which, with each new opinion one stuffs into it, changes its form, and becomes more and more firm.
  • Robert Musil, Helpless Europe, my translation

• We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.
  • Robert Musil, Helpless Europe

H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

• All the branches of Christianity suffer by the fact that they seem to be unable to take in the greatest contribution of the modern world to ethical theory, to wit, the concept of a moral obligation to be intelligent.
  • H. L. Mencken, in The Gist of Mencken: Quotations from America's Critic, p. 295

• Men in the mass never brook the destructive discussion of their fundamental beliefs, and that impatience is naturally most evident in those societies in which men in the mass are most influential. Democracy and free speech are not facets of one gem; democracy and free speech are eternal enemies.
  • H. L. Mencken, Introduction to The Antichrist

• This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
  • H. L. Mencken, Introduction to The Antichrist

Vilhelm Ekelund (1880-1949)

• Sometimes it is hard to avoid a certain feeling of sadness: when realizing that everything sensible has already, many times over, been excellently expressed—and expressed in vain. And note how well-hidden, pushed into obscurity, drowned by triviality's overwhelming mass—therefore, how important it is that the sensible be repeated again and again, experienced in new individuals over and over with new variations, with a new emphasis, in a new voice—continuously kept alive.
  • Vilhelm Ekelund, as translated by Lennart Bruce in The Second Light (1986), p. 71

• Whose is the world? Whose is thought? His who loves them.
  • Vilhelm Ekelund, as translated by Lennart Bruce in The Second Light (1986), p. 71

R. H. Tawney (1880-1962)

• Part of the goods which are annually produced, and which are called wealth, is, strictly speaking, waste, because it consists of articles which... either should not have been produced until other articles had already been produced in sufficient abundance, or should not have been produced at all. And some part of the population is employed in making goods which no man can make with happiness, or indeed without loss of self-respect, because he knows that they had much better not be made; and that his life is wasted in making them.
  • R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (1920), pp. 37-38

• To those who clamor, as many now do, "Produce! Produce!" one simple question may be addressed:—"Produce what?" ...What can be more childish than to urge the necessity that productive power should be increased, if part of the productive power which exists already is misapplied? Is not less production of futilities as important as, indeed a condition of, more production of things of moment?... Yet this result of inequality ... cannot be prevented, or checked, or even recognized by a society which excludes the idea of purpose from its social arrangements and industrial activity.
  • R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (1920), p. 39

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

• Work as joy, inaccessible to the psychologists.
  • Franz Kafka

José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)

The excellent man is he who condemns what he finds in his mind without previous effort, and only accepts as worthy of him what is still far above him and what requires a further effort in order to be reached. ~ José Ortega y Gasset

• The present-day writer, when he takes his pen in hand to treat a subject which he has studied deeply, has to bear in mind that the average reader, who has never concerned himself with this subject, if he reads does so with the view, not of learning something from the writer, but rather, of pronouncing judgment on him when he is not in agreement with the commonplaces that the said reader carries in his head. If the individuals who make up the mass believed themselves specially qualified, it would be a case merely of personal error, not a sociological subversion. The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.
  • José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, p. 18

• There are few men who doubt that motorcars will in five years’ time be more comfortable and cheaper than today. They believe in this as they believe the sun will rise in the morning. The metaphor is an exact one. For, in fact, the common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.
  • José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, p. 58

• That man is intellectually of the mass who, in the face of any problem, is satisfied with thinking the first thing he finds in his head. On the contrary, the excellent man is he who condemns what he finds in his mind without previous effort, and only accepts as worthy of him what is still far above him and what requires a further effort in order to be reached.
  • José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, p. 63

Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)

• The Greek word for philosopher (philosophos) connotes a distinction from sophos. It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) as distinguished from him who considers himself wise in the possession of knowledge. This meaning of the word still endures: the essence of philosophy is not the possession of the truth but the search for truth. … Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.
  • Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, R. Mannheim, trans. (New Haven: 1951), p. 12

Georges Duhamel (1884 – 1966)

Books are the friends of solitude. They develop individuality and freedom. In solitary reading a man who is seeking himself has some chance of finding himself. ~ Georges Duhamel

• If humanity were to lose its libraries, not only would it be deprived of certain treasures of art, certain spiritual riches, but, more important still, it would lose its recipes for living.
  • Georges Duhamel, In Defense of Letters (1937), pp. 17-18

• Culture is at once the expression and the reward of an effort, and any system of civilization which tends to relax effort will suffer a corresponding depreciation of culture.
  • Georges Duhamel, In Defense of Letters (1937), p. 22

• Aristocracy of the mind … is the only true aristocracy in my opinion. It is the essence, the very life of a well-built society.
  • Georges Duhamel, In Defense of Letters (1937), p. 41

• When I say, “Beware of the radio if you want to improve your mind,” … I am warning the public against their worst enemy, conformity.
  • Georges Duhamel, In Defense of Letters (1937), p. 42

• Books are the friends of solitude. They develop individuality and freedom. In solitary reading a man who is seeking himself has some chance of finding himself.
  • Georges Duhamel, In Defense of Letters (1937), p. 42

• Just as we say “listening and hearing,” “looking and seeing,” so we ought to have two expressions to distinguish active reading from passive.
  • Georges Duhamel, In Defense of Letters (1937), p. 47

Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976)

• We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.
  • Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1984), p. 4

• Contemporary Christian proclamation is faced with the question whether, when it demands faith from men and women, it expects them to acknowledge this mythical world picture from the past. If this is impossible, it has to face the question whether the New Testament proclamation has a truth that is independent of the mythical world picture, in which case it would be the task of theology to demythologize the Christian proclamation.
  
  Can the Christian proclamation today expect men and women to acknowledge the mythical world picture as true? To do so would be both pointless and impossible. It would be pointless because there is nothing specifically Christian about the mythical world picture, which is simply the world picture of a time now past which was not yet formed by scientific thinking. It would be impossible because no one can appropriate a world picture by sheer resolve, since it is already given with one’s historical situation.
  • Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1984), p. 3

• The mythology of the New Testament, also, is not to be questioned with respect to the content of its objectifying representations but with respect to the understanding of existence that expresses itself in them. What is at issue is the truth of this understanding, and the faith that affirms its truth is not bound to the New Testament’s world of representations.
  • Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1984), p. 10

• Can there be a demythologizing interpretation that discloses the truth of the kerygma as kerygma for those who do not think mythologically?
  • Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1984), p. 14

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit our the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
T. S. Eliot

• And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
  The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
  And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
  When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
  Then how should I begin
  To spit our the butt-ends of my days and ways?
  And how should I presume?
  • T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917)

• Some once said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.
  • T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

• I say to you: Make perfect your will.
  I say: Take no thought of the harvest,
  But only of proper sowing.
  • T. S. Eliot, The Rock (1934)

• They constantly try to escape
  From the darkness outside and within
  By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
  • T. S. Eliot, The Rock (1934)

• I should really like to think there’s something wrong with me —
  Because, if there isn’t then there’s something wrong,
  Or at least, very different from what it seemed to be,
  With the world itself—and that’s much more frightening!
  That would be terrible.
  • T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (1949)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Ambition is the death of thought. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Philosophy is not a body of doctrine, but an activity.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), § 4.112

• What makes a subject difficult to understand—if it is significant, important—is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions (1993), Ch. 9, “Philosophy,” p. 161

• I believe it might interest a philosopher, one who can think himself, to read my notes. For even if I have hit the mark only rarely, he would recognize what targets I had been ceaselessly aiming at.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (1969), § 387

• In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest—the one who crosses the finish line last.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1998), p. 40

• The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1998), p. 41

• You can’t be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1998), p. 44

• The philosopher is someone who has to cure many diseases of the understanding in himself, before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1998), p. 50

• You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. ... And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1998), p. 60

• If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important and effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us, and we can decide on this only with the utmost difficulty.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1998), p. 60

• The lesson in a poem is overstated if the intellectual points are nakedly exposed, not clothed by the heart.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1998), p. 62

• One keeps forgetting to go down to the foundations. One doesn’t put the question marks deep down enough.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1998), p. 71

• It seems to me that a religious belief is only (something like) passionately deciding upon a coordinate system.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1998), p. 73 [my translation]

• Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a ‘poetic mood’. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one’s thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1998), p. 75

• Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1998), p. 85 (modified translation)

• Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: “Let’s have done with it now,” and it’s having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1998), p. 86

• Ambition is the death of thought.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1998), p. 88

• Philosophy hasn’t made any progress?—If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1998), p. 98

John Middleton Murry (1889-1957)

• For a good man to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a strait and narrow path compared to which his previous rectitude was flowery license.
  • John Middleton Murry, quoted in M. C. Richards, Centering (1989)

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

Being’s poem, just begun, is man. ~ Martin Heidegger

Language still denies us its essence: that it is the house of the truth of being. Instead, language surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings. ~ Martin Heidegger

• This characteristic of Dasein’s being—this “that it is”—is veiled in its “whence” and “whither.”
  • Martin Heidegger, in Martin Heidegger (1978), p. 87

• In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the intellectual world.
  • Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, J. Glenn Gray, trans. (New York: Harper, 1968), p. 21

• By way of history, a man will never find out what history is; no more than a mathematician can show by way of mathematics—by means of his science, that is, and ultimately by mathematical formulae—what mathematics is. The essence of their spheres—history, art, poetry, language, nature, man, God—remains inaccessible to these disciplines.
  • Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, pp. 32-33

• Language still denies us its essence: that it is the house of the truth of being. Instead, language surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings.
  • Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, D. F. Krell, trans. p. 199

• Before he speaks man must first let himself be claimed again by being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say.
  • Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”, reprinted in Basic Writings, D. F. Krell, trans. p. 199

• We are too late for the gods
  and too early for being
  being’s poem, just begun, is man.
  • Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, in Basic Writings, D. F. Krell, trans. p. 37

• The average, vague understanding of being can be permeated by traditional theories and opinions about being in such a way that these theories, as the sources of the prevailing understanding, remain hidden.
  • Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, in Basic Writings, D. F. Krell, trans., p. 46

• Dasein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being. Thus it is constitutive of the being of Dasein to have, in its very being, a relation of being to this being.
  • Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, in Basic Writings, D. F. Krell, trans., p. 54

• The question of being is nothing else than the radicalization of an essential tendency of being
  • Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, in Basic Writings, D. F. Krell, trans., p. 58

• The tradition … makes what it “transmits” so little accessible that at first and for the most part it covers it over instead. What has been handed down it hands over to obviousness; it bars access to those original “wellsprings” out of which the traditional categories and concepts were in part genuinely drawn. The tradition even makes us forget such a provenance altogether. Indeed it makes us wholly incapable of even understanding that such a return is necessary.
  • Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, in Basic Writings, D. F. Krell, trans., p. 66

• Eternity, not as a static “now,” nor as a sequence of “nows” rolling off into the infinite, but as the “now” that bends back into itself. … Thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy means thinking being as time.
  • Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, D. F. Krell, trans. (New York: 1991), p. 20

• The small are always dependent on the great; they are “small” precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other “greats” and who can transform it in an original manner.
  • Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, D. F. Krell, trans. (New York: 1991), p. 35

• We think of beauty as being most worthy of reverence. But what is most worthy of reverence lights up only where the magnificent strength to revere is alive. To revere is not a thing for the petty and lowly, the incapacitated and underdeveloped. It is a matter of tremendous passion; only what flows from such passion is in the grand style.
  • Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, D. F. Krell, trans. (New York: 1991), p. 125

• Who is to determine what the perfect is? It could only be those who are themselves perfect and who therefore know what it means. Here yawns the abyss of that circularity in which the whole of human Dasein moves. What health is, only the healthy can say. Yet healthfulness is measured according to the essential starting point of health. What truth is, only one who is truthful can discern; but the one who is truthful is determined according to the essential starting point of truth.
  • Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, D. F. Krell, trans. (New York: 1991), p. 127

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976)

The confidence placed in physical theory owes much to its possessing the same kind of excellence from which pure geometry and pure mathematics in general derive their interest, and for the sake of which they are cultivated. ... We cannot truly account for our acceptance of such theories without endorsing our acknowledgement of a beauty that exhilarates and a profundity that entrances us. ~ Michael Polanyi

• The confidence placed in physical theory owes much to its possessing the same kind of excellence from which pure geometry and pure mathematics in general derive their interest, and for the sake of which they are cultivated. ... We cannot truly account for our acceptance of such theories without endorsing our acknowledgement of a beauty that exhilarates and a profundity that entrances us.
  • Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958), p. 15

• The term 'simplicity' functions then merely as a disguise for another meaning than its own. It is used for smuggling an essential quality into our appreciation of a scientific theory, which a mistaken conception of objectivity forbids us to openly acknowledge.
  • Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958), p. 16

• The descriptive sciences rely on skill and connoisseurship. At all these points the act of knowing includes an appraisal; and this personal coefficient, which shapes all factual knowledge, bridges in doing so the disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity. It implies the claim that man can transcend his own subjectivity by striving passionately to fulfil his personal obligations to universal standards.
  • Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958), p. 17

• No sincere assertion of fact is essentially unaccompanied by feelings of intellectual satisfaction or of a persuasive desire and a sense of personal responsibility.
  • Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958), p. 27

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

Everyone who achieves strives for totality, and the value of his achievement lies in that totality—that is, in the fact that the whole, undivided nature of a human being should be expressed in his achievement. But when determined by our society, as we see it today, achievement does not express a totality; it is completely fragmented and derivative. ~ Walter Benjamin

Nothing is so hateful to the philistine as the "dreams of his youth." ... For what appeared to him in his dreams was the voice of the spirit, calling him once, as it does everyone. It is of this that youth always reminds him, eternally and ominously. That is why he is antagonistic toward youth. ~ Walter Benjamin

Scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it. ~ Walter Benjamin

• Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. … Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
  • Walter Benjamin, Unpacking my Library: A Talk About Book Collecting (1931)

• Nothing is so hateful to the philistine as the "dreams of his youth." ... For what appeared to him in his dreams was the voice of the spirit, calling him once, as it does everyone. It is of this that youth always reminds him, eternally and ominously. That is why he is antagonistic toward youth.
  • Walter Benjamin, "Experience" (1913), L. Spencer and S. Jost, trans., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 1 (1996), pp. 4-5

• For the Romantics and for speculative philosophy, ... to be critical meant to elevate thinking so far beyond all restrictive conditions that the knowledge of truth sprang forth magically, as it were, from insight into the falsehood of these restrictions.
  • Walter Benjamin, "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism" (1919), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 1 (1996), p. 142

• One might, for example, speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would imply not a falsehood but merely a claim unfulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God's remembrance.
  • Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator" (1920), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 1 (1996), p. 254

• All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance.
  • Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator" (1920), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 1 (1996), p. 255

• Capitalism is presumably the first case of a blaming, rather than a repenting cult. ... An enormous feeling of guilt not itself knowing how to repent, grasps at the cult, not in order to repent for this guilt, but to make it universal, to hammer it into consciousness and finally and above all to include God himself in this guilt.
  • Walter Benjamin, "Capitalism as Religion" (1921), Translated by Chad Kautzer in The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers (2005), p. 259

• The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence.
  • Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" (1916), translated by E. Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (1996), p. 72

• Everyone who achieves strives for totality, and the value of his achievement lies in that totality—that is, in the fact that the whole, undivided nature of a human being should be expressed in his achievement. But when determined by our society, as we see it today, achievement does not express a totality; it is completely fragmented and derivative. It is not uncommon for the community to be the site where a joint and covert struggle is waged against higher ambitions and more personal goals. ... The socially relevant achievement of the average person serves in the vast majority of cases to repress the original and nonderivative, inner aspirations of the human being.
  • Walter Benjamin, "The Life of Students" (1915), as translated by R. Livingstone, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings – vol. 1: 1913-1926, ed. Michael William Jennings, Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 39

• Scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it.
  • Walter Benjamin, "The Life of Students" (1915), as translated by R. Livingstone, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings – vol. 1: 1913-1926, ed. Michael William Jennings, Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 39

Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962)

• It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.
  • Vita Sackville-West, Twelve Days (1928), p. 9

Edgar Leonard Allen (1893-1961)

Religion for [Nicholas Berdyaev] is a social phenomenon and is adapted to the needs of the masses; as such, it is embodied in visible institutions and in authoritative formulas. The mystic, on the other hand, is aristocratic in temperament and never quite at home where the masses are catered for. He cannot remain in the world of form and convention and second-hand truths which is all about us and with which official religion has to come to terms; he aspires to a contact with spiritual reality as it is, a return to the ultimate sources of his being. ~ E. L. Allen

• The message of the Bible will suffer less if thrown into a modern form than if men are turned away from it by a theological purism that is indifferent to human needs.
  • E. L. Allen, "On Demythologizing the Old Testament," Journal of Bible and Religion, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Oct. 1954), p. 236

• Religion for [Nicholas Berdyaev] is a social phenomenon and is adapted to the needs of the masses; as such, it is embodied in visible institutions and in authoritative formulas. The mystic, on the other hand, is aristocratic in temperament and never quite at home where the masses are catered for. He cannot remain in the world of form and convention and second-hand truths which is all about us and with which official religion has to come to terms; he aspires to a contact with spiritual reality as it is, a return to the ultimate sources of his being.
  • E. L. Allen, Freedom in God: A Guide to the Thought of Nicholas Berdyaev (1950)

• There was a heresy in the Church of the early centuries which taught that Christ was of one nature only, he was divine and not also human. Berdyaev would say that while that heresy has been formally repudiated in the West, it in fact largely determines the thought of Catholic and Protestant alike. That is to say, the human element in religion is sacrificed to the divine: man is the passive recipient of an absolute truth brought to him by the Church.
  • E. L. Allen, Freedom in God: A Guide to the Thought of Nicholas Berdyaev (1950)

• Berdyaev revolts against all conceptions of God as mere power which imposes itself upon men: in his discussion of the various forms of slavery to which men have been subjected in the course of history he includes "slavery to God" as one of the worst.
  • E. L. Allen, Freedom in God: A Guide to the Thought of Nicholas Berdyaev (1950)

• We may say that there are two outstanding human types, one the saint and the other the genius. Religion has tended to recognise only the first of these and to look askance at the other. ... If we accept genius as a form of God's self-expression equally with holiness, we must go on to question the assumption that humility is the basic virtue.
  • E. L. Allen, Freedom in God: A Guide to the Thought of Nicholas Berdyaev (1950)

• For [Berdyaev] the creation is to be made over again at the end of things and man is to be made God, even as in Christ God became man. What is of importance in Berdyaev is his insistence that this is not something we wait for, it is something at which we must work here and now.
  • E. L. Allen, Freedom in God: A Guide to the Thought of Nicholas Berdyaev (1950)

• Berdyaev makes an important distinction between two senses of the world freedom, between freedom as a means and freedom as an end. By the first we mean freedom to direct one's own life, to choose between good and evil as one understands them; by the second the freedom which consists in liberation from one's lower nature for the service of what is highest and best. As Berdyaev puts it, we mean by one and the same word "either that initial and irrational liberty which is prior to good and evil and determines their choice, or else that intelligent freedom which is our final liberty in truth and goodness."
  • E. L. Allen, Freedom in God: A Guide to the Thought of Nicholas Berdyaev (1950)

• It is mistaken to suppose that the liberty which consists in the love of God and the service of his truth can be arrived at otherwise than by exposing men to the risk of error.
  • E. L. Allen, Freedom in God: A Guide to the Thought of Nicholas Berdyaev (1950)

• Berdyaev distinguishes between symbolic and real expressions of the spirit. There is a symbolic morality which consists in making certain gestures, while one abstains from actually doing what those gestures imply. A Christian church, for example, may call its members to the Lord's Table as brothers in Christ, but all the while it accepts without questioning them the class-distinctions of the society around it. A constitution may declare that all men are born free and equal, while in fact all non-white persons are liable to be held as slaves and it enters no one's head to confer political rights upon women. We keep up certain conventions which are in the nature of play-acting; because we have agreed to pretend that we do certain things, we hold ourselves excused from the necessity of actually doing them.
  • E. L. Allen, Freedom in God: A Guide to the Thought of Nicholas Berdyaev (1950)

Herbert Read (1893-1968)

• I believe that the poet is necessarily an anarchist, and that he must oppose all organized conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future.
  • Herbert Read, Poetry and Anarchism

• Sentir mon Cœur is a privilege only granted to the exceptional man—the one who has the ability to find words that exactly (or, to himself, convincingly) express his feelings. … The value of words help to define the feeling itself. … The common failure is to allow habitual words and phrases, flowing spontaneously from the memory, to determine and deform the feelings.
  • Herbert Read, The Cult of Sincerity (1969), p. 16

• Why do we forget our childhood? With rare exceptions we have no memory of our first four, five, or six years, and yet we have only to watch the development of our own children during this period to realize that these are precisely the most exciting, the most formative years of life. Schachtel’s theory is that our infantile experiences, so free, so uninhibited, are suppressed because they are incompatible with the conventions of an adult society which we call ‘civilized’. The infant is a savage and must be tamed, domesticated. The process is so gradual and so universal that only exceptionally will an individual child escape it, to become perhaps a genius, perhaps the selfish individual we call a criminal. The significance of this theory for the problem of sincerity in art (and in life) is that occasionally the veil of forgetfulness that hides our infant years is lifted and then we recover all the force and vitality that distinguished our first experiences—the ‘celestial joys’ of which Traherne speaks, when the eyes feast for the first time and insatiably on the beauties of God’s creation.
  • Herbert Read, The Cult of Sincerity (1969), pp. 16-17

• The work of art … is an instrument for tilling the human psyche, that it may continue to yield a harvest of vital beauty.
  • Herbert Read, The Cult of Sincerity (1969), p. 20

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

• The two essential and important things, the indispensible things, are, first of all, intelligence, in the widest possible sense of that word, and goodwill, or in the old fashioned words, charity, love. These two things have to go hand in hand. Intelligence and knowledge without goodwill and charity are inhuman. Goodwill and charity undirected by intelligence are apt to be either impotent or misguided. The two have to go together.
  • Aldous Huxley, asked “What is basic and substantial in a man’s life?”

• And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing … a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.
  • Aldous Huxley

• Maintaining, in this matter, the attitude of a strict operationalist, the Buddha would speak only of the spiritual experience, not of the metaphysical entity presumed by the theologians of other religions, as also of later Buddhism, to be the object ... of that experience.
  • Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1944), p.45

• The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.
  • Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928)

• That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
  • Aldous Huxley, “A Case of Voluntary Ignorance,” Collected Essays (1959)

• Who lives longer? the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time.
  • Aldous Huxley, in The Shortcut (2006), p. 179

• It is because we are predominantly purposeful beings that we are perpetually correcting our immediate sensations. But men are free not to be utilitarianly purposeful. They can sometimes be artists, for example. In which case they may like to accept the immediate sensation uncorrected, because it happens to be beautiful.
  • Aldous Huxley, “One and Many,” Do What You Will (1928), p. 11

• Why did it occur to anyone to believe in only one God? And conversely why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in many gods? To both these questions we must return the same answer: Because that is how the human mind happens to work. For the human mind is both diverse and simple, simultaneously many and one. We have an immediate perception of our own diversity and of that of the outside world. And at the same time we have immediate perceptions of our own oneness.
  • Aldous Huxley, “One and Many,” Do What You Will (1928), p. 12

• There has been a general trend in recent times toward a Unitarian mythology and the worship of one God. This is the tendency which it is customary to regard as spiritual progress. On what grounds? Chiefly, so far as one can see, because we in the Twentieth Century West are officially the worshippers of a single divinity. A movement whose consummation is us must be progressive. Quod erat demonstrandum.
  • Aldous Huxley, “One and Many,” Do What You Will (1928), p. 16

• There was a time when I should have felt terribly ashamed of not being up-to-date. I lived in a chronic apprehension lest I might, so to speak, miss the last bus, and so find myself stranded and benighted, in a desert of demodedness, while others, more nimble than myself, had already climbed on board, taken their tickets and set out toward those bright but, alas, ever receding goals of Modernity and Sophistication. Now, however, I have grown shameless, I have lost my fears. I can watch unmoved the departure of the last social-cultural bus—the innumerable last buses, which are starting at every instant in all the world’s capitals. I make no effort to board them, and when the noise of each departure has died down, “Thank goodness!” is what I say to myself in the solitude. I find nowadays that I simply don’t want to be up-to-date. I have lost all desire to see and do the things, the seeing and doing of which entitle a man to regard himself as superiorly knowing, sophisticated, unprovincial; I have lost all desire to frequent the places and people that a man simply must frequent, if he is not to be regarded as a poor creature hopelessly out of the swim. “Be up-to-date!” is the categorical imperative of those who scramble for the last bus. But it is an imperative whose cogency I refuse to admit. When it is a question of doing something which I regard as a duty I am as ready as anyone else to put up with discomfort. But being up-to-date and in the swim has ceased, so far as I am concerned, to be a duty. Why should I have my feelings outraged, why should I submit to being bored and disgusted for the sake of somebody else’s categorical imperative? Why? There is no reason. So I simply avoid most of the manifestations of that so-called “life” which my contemporaries seem to be so unaccountably anxious to “see”; I keep out of range of the “art” they think is so vitally necessary to “keep up with”; I flee from those “good times” in the “having” of which they are prepared to spend so lavishly of their energy and cash.
  • Aldous Huxley, “Silence is Golden,” Do What You Will (1928), p. 55

• To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.
  • Aldous Huxley, “Spinoza’s Worm,” Do What You Will (1928), p. 75

• I'm interested in truth, I like science. But truth's a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. ... It's curious ... to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. The seemed to imagine that it could go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific research was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled—after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for.
  • Aldous Huxley, Mustapha Mond in Brave New World (1932), ch. 16

• “My dear young friend,” said Mustapha Mond, “civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended–there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears–that's what soma is.”
  • Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932), ch. 17

• “Isn't there something in living dangerously?”
  “There's a great deal in it,” the Controller replied. “Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.”
  “What?” questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.
  “It's one of the conditions of perfect health. That's why we've made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.”
  “V.P.S.?”
  “Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenalin. It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.”
  “But I like the inconveniences.”
  “We don't,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”
  “But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
  “In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you're claiming the right to be unhappy.”
  “All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.”
  • Aldous Huxley, the Savage and Controller Mustapha Mond in Brave New World (1932), ch. 17

• Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death this time; the Grey Life.
  • Aldous Huxley, Island

• I have a theory that, whenever little boys and girls are systematically flagellated, the victims grow up to think of God as 'Wholly Other'—isn't that the fashionable argot in your part of the world? Wherever, on the contrary, children are brought up without being subjected to physical violence, God is immanent. A people's theology reflects the state of its children's bottoms.
  • Aldous Huxley, Island

• We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
  
  Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or “feeling into.” Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.
  
  To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. But what if these others belong to a different species and inhabit a radically alien universe? For example, how can the sane get to know what it actually feels like to be mad? Or, short of being born again as a visionary, a medium, or a musical genius, how can we ever visit the worlds which, to Blake, to Swedenborg, to Johann Sebastian Bach, were home? And how can a man at the extreme limits of ectomorphy and cerebrotonia ever put himself in the place of one at the limits of endomorphy and viscerotonia, or, except within certain circumscribed areas, share the feelings of one who stands at the limits of mesomorphy and somatotonia? To the unmitigated behaviorist such questions, I suppose, are meaningless. But for those who theoretically believe what in practice they know to be true—namely, that there is an inside to experience as well as an outside—the problems posed are real problems, all the more grave for being, some completely insoluble, some soluble only in exceptional circumstances and by methods not available to everyone. Thus, it seems virtually certain that I shall never know what it feels like to be Sir John Falstaff or Joe Louis. On the other hand, it had always seemed to me possible that, through hypnosis, for example, or autohypnosis, by means of systematic meditation, or else by taking the appropriate drug, I might so change my ordinary mode of consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the mystic were talking about.
  • Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954), pp. 12-14

• I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
  • Aldous Huxley, describing his experiment with mescaline, The Doors of Perception (1954), p. 17

• Istigkeit—wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? “Is-ness.” The Being of Platonic philosophy—except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were—a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.
  • Aldous Huxley, describing his experiment with mescaline, The Doors of Perception (1954), pp. 17-18

• Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, “that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.” According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various “other worlds,” with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual exercises,” or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception “of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe” (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.
  • Aldous Huxley, describing his experiment with mescaline, The Doors of Perception (1954), p. 22-24

• These effects of mescalin are the sort of effects you could expect to follow the administration of a drug having the power to impair the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve. When the brain runs out of sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can't be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world. As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. ... Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event.
  • Aldous Huxley, describing his experiment with mescaline, The Doors of Perception (1954), p. 26

• How significant is the enormous heightening, under mescalin, of the perception of color! ... Man's highly developed color sense is a biological luxury—inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal. ... Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind. It would seem that, for Mind at Large, the so-called secondary characters of things are primary.
  • Aldous Huxley, describing his experiment with mescaline, The Doors of Perception (1954), pp. 26-27

• In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual. ... Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man’s biological nature.
  • Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3, p. 21

Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)

• When the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them.
  • Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1982), p. 28

• Whoever desires to live among men has to obey their laws—this is what the secular morality of Western civilization comes down to. ... Rationality in the form of such obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think.
  • Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1982), p. 29

• The distrust which peasants and children display for eloquent persons has always preserved the notion of that injustice which made language the servant of gain.
  • Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1982), pp. 38-39, translation modified

• With the abolition of otium and of the ego no aloof thinking is left. ... Without otium philosophical thought is impossible, cannot be conceived or understood.
  • Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1982), p. 39

• The new order contradicts reason so fundamentally that reason does not dare to doubt it. Even the consciousness of oppression fades. The more incommensurate become the concentration of power and the helplessness of the individual, the more difficult for him to penetrate the human origin of his misery.
  • Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1982), p. 44

• Men have been released from [concentration] camps who have taken over the jargon of their jailers and with cold reason and mad consent (the price, as it were, of their survival) tell their story as if it could not have been otherwise than it was, contending that they have not been treated so badly after all.
  • Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1982), p. 45

• If this truth has once and for all been discarded and men have decided for integral adjustment, if reason has been purged of all morality regardless of cost, and has triumphed over all else, no one may remain outside and look on. The existence of one solitary “unreasonable” man elucidates the shame of the entire nation. His existence testifies to the relativity of the system of radical self-preservation that has been posited as absolute.
  • Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1982), p. 45

• If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate—in short, emancipation of fear—then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render.
  • Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (2004)

• The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.
  • Max Horkheimer, “The latest attack on metaphysics,” Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1982), p. 133

• At present, when the prevailing forms of society have become hindrances to the free expression of human powers, it is precisely the abstract branches of science, mathematics and theoretical physics, which ... offer a less distorted form of knowledge than other branches of science which are interwoven with the pattern of daily life, and the practicality of which seemingly testifies to their realistic character.
  • Max Horkheimer, “The latest attack on metaphysics,” Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1982), p. 133

• A man discovers what he is actually worth in this world when he faces society as a man, without money, name, or powerful connections, stripped of all but his native potentialities. He soon finds that nothing has less weight than his human qualities. They are prized so low that the market does not even list them. Strict science, which acknowledges man only as a biological concept, reflects man’s lot in the actual world; in himself, man is nothing more than a member of a species.
  
  In the eyes of the world, the quality of humanity confers no title to existence, nay, not even a right of sojourn. Such title must be certified by special social circumstances stipulated in documents to be presented on demand.
  • Max Horkheimer, “The latest attack on metaphysics,” Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1982), p. 137

• The characteristic activity of science is not construction, but induction. The more often something has occurred in the past, the more certain that it will in all the future. Knowledge relates solely to what is and to its recurrence. New forms of being, especially those arising from the historical activity of man, lie beyond empiricist theory. Thoughts which are not simply carried over from the prevailing pattern of consciousness, but arise from the aims and resolves of the individual, in short, all historical tendencies that reach beyond what is present and recurrent, do not belong to the domain of science.
  • Max Horkheimer, “The latest attack on metaphysics,” Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1982), p. 144

• The individual is divided into innumerable functions, the interconnection of which are unknown. In society a man is pater familias under one aspect, business man under another, thinker under a third; to be more precise, he is not a human being at all, but all these aspects and many more in an inevitable succession.
  • Max Horkheimer, “The latest attack on metaphysics,” Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1982), p. 155

• When an active individual of sound common sense perceives the sordid state of the world, desire to change it becomes the guiding principle by which he organizes given facts and shapes them into a theory. The methods and categories as well as the transformation of the theory can be understood only in connection with his taking of sides. This, in turn, discloses both his sound common sense and the character of the world. Right thinking depends as much on right willing as right willing on right thinking.
  • Max Horkheimer, “The latest attack on metaphysics,” Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1982), p. 162

Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)

• What plethora of material goods can possibly atone for a waking life so humanly belittling, if not degrading, as the push-button tasks left to human performers?
  • Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, volume 2, in The Pentagon of Power (1967), p. 352

• If we are to express the love in our own hearts, we must also understand what love meant to Socrates and Saint Francis, to Dante and Shakespeare, to Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, to the explorer Shackleton and to the intrepid physicians who deliberately exposed themselves to yellow fever. These historic manifestations of love are not recorded in the day's newspaper or the current radio program: they are hidden to people who possess only fashionable minds.
  • Lewis Mumford, Values for Survival (1946)

• On one side is the gigantic printing press, a miracle of fine articulation, which turns out the tabloid newspaper: on the other side are the contents of the tabloid itself, symbolically recording the most crude and elementary states of emotion.
  • Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934), Chapter 6, § 9, p. 301

• Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.
  • Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934), Chapter 6, § 9, p. 301

• Western society is relapsing at critical points into precivilized modes of thought, feeling, and action because it has acquiesced too easily in the dehumanization of society through capitalist exploitation.
  • Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934), Chapter 6, § 9, p. 302

• Many psychologists have treated literature as a whole as a mere vehicle of withdrawal from the harsh realities of existence: forgetful of the fact that literature of the first order, so far from being a mere pleasure device, is a supreme attempt to face and encompass reality-an attempt beside which a busy working life involves a shrinkage and represents a partial retreat.
  • Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934), Chapter 6, § 9, p. 314-315

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998)

• The anarch is to the anarchist, what the monarch is to the monarchist.
  • Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil (1977)

Georges Bataille (1897-1962)

• We have in fact only two certainties in this world—that we are not everything and that we will die. To be conscious of not being everything, as one is of being mortal, is nothing. But if we are without a narcotic, an unbreathable void reveals itself. I wanted to be everything, so that falling into this void, I might summon my courage and say to myself: “I am ashamed of having wanted to be everything, for I see now that it was to sleep.” From that moment begins a singular experience. The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy coexist.
  • Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (1954), L. Boldt, trans. (1988), p. xxxii

• By inner experience I understand that which one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to adhere up to now, that of an experience laid bare, free of ties, even of an origin, of any confession whatever. This is why I don’t like the word mystical.
  • Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (1954), L. Boldt, trans. (1988), p. 3

• Experience is, in fever and anguish, the putting into question (to the test) of that which a man knows of being. Should he in this fever have any apprehension whatsoever, he cannot say: “I have seen God, the absolute, or the depths of the universe”; he can only say “that which I have seen eludes understanding”—and God, the absolute, the depths of the universe are nothing if they are not categories of the understanding. If I said decisively, “I have seen God,” that which I see would change. Instead of the inconceivable unknown—wildly free before me, leaving me wild and free before it—there would be a dead object and the thing of the theologian, to which the unknown would be subjugated.
  • Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (1954), L. Boldt, trans. (1988), p. 4

• Inner experience ... is not easily accessible and, viewed from the outside by intelligence, it would even be necessary to see in it a sum of distinct operations, some intellectual, others aesthetic, yet others moral. ... It is only from within, lived to the point of terror, that it appears to unify that which discursive thought must separate.
  • Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (1954), L. Boldt, trans. (1988), p. 9

• We reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge. Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it.
  • Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (1954), L. Boldt, trans. (1988), p. 12

• An extreme, unconditional human yearning was expressed for the first time by Nietzsche independently of moral goals or of serving God. ... Ardor that doesn’t address a dramatically articulated moral obligation is a paradox. ... If we stop looking at states of ardor as simply preliminary to other and subsequent conditions grasped as beneficial, the state I propose seems a pure play of lightning, merely an empty consummation. Lacking any relation to material benefits such as power or the growth of the state (or of God or a Church or a party), this consuming can’t even be comprehended. ... I’ll have to face the same difficulties as Nietzsche—putting God and the good behind him, though all ablaze with the ardor possessed by those who lay down their lives for God or the good.
  • Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, pp. xx-xxii

• What causes [fragmentation] if not a need to act that specializes us and limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? Even if it turns out to be for the general interest (which generally isn’t true), the activity that subordinates each of our aspects to a specific result suppresses our being as an entirety. Whoever acts substitutes a particular end for what he or she is, as a total being.
  • Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, p. xxvi

• I cannot exist entirely except when somehow I go beyond the stage of action. Otherwise I’m a soldier, a professional, a man of learning, not a “total human being.” The fragmentary state of humanity is basically the same as the choice of an object. When you limit your desires to possessing political power, for instance, you act and know what you have to do. … You insert your existence advantageously into time. Each of your moments becomes useful. With each moment, the possibility is given you to advance to some chosen goal, and your time becomes a march toward that goal—what’s normally called living. … Every action makes you a fragmentary existence. I hold on to my nature as an entirety only by refusing to act—or at least by denying the superiority of time, which is reserved for action.
  • Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, p. xxvii

• Life is whole only when it isn’t subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom.
  • Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, p. xxvii

• It is the positive practice of freedom, not the negative struggle against particular oppression, that has lifted me above a mutilated existence.
  • Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, p. xxvii

• An intention that rejects what has no meaning in fact is a rejection of the entirety of being.
  • Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, p. xxx

• If I give up the viewpoint of action, my perfect nakedness is revealed to me.
  • Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, p. xxx

• The preceding criticism ... justifies the following definition of the entire human: human existence as the life of “unmotivated” celebration, celebration in all meaning of the word: laughter, dancing, orgy, the rejection of subordination, and sacrifice that scornfully puts aside any consideration of ends, property, and morality.
  • Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, p. xxxii

• In previous conditions, extreme states came under the jurisdiction of the arts. ... People substituted writing (fiction) for what was once spiritual life, poetry (chaotic words) for actual ecstasies. Art constitutes a minor free zone outside action, paying for its freedom by giving up the real world. A heavy price!
  • Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, p. xxxii

• [Zarathustra] never abandoned the watchword of not having any end, not serving a cause, because, as he knew, causes pluck off the wings we fly with.
  • Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, p. xxxii

• [Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return] is what makes moments caught up in the immanence of return suddenly appear as ends. In every other system, don’t forget, these moments are viewed as means: Every moral system proclaims that “each moment of life ought to be motivated.” Return unmotivates the moment and frees life of ends.
  • Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, p. xxxiii

Kenneth Burke (1897-1993)

• We would not deny the mind; but merely remember that as the corrective of wrong thinking is right thinking, the corrective of all thinking is the body.
  • Kenneth Burke, Towards a Better Life (Berkeley: 1966), p. 9

• You moralistic dog—admitting a hierarchy in which you are subordinate, purely that you may have subordinates; licking the boots of a superior, that you may have yours in turn licked by an underling.
  • Kenneth Burke, Towards a Better Life (Berkeley: 1966), p. 9

Bertolt Brecht (1989-1956)

• Every day, I go to earn my bread
  In the exchange where lies are marketed,
  Hoping my own lies will attract a bid.
  • Bertolt Brecht, Hollywood Elegies

C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

• When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness.
  • C. S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children” (1952)

• There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.
  • C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943)

• It is the stupidest children who are the most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are the most grown-up.
  • C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (1953), Chapter 16

• You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism”. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father—who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third—”Oh you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment”, E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.
  • C. S. Lewis, “Bulverism” (1941)

• Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is “wishful thinking.” You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant—but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.
  • C. S. Lewis, “Bulverism” (1941)

• We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
  • C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952), Book I, Ch. 5

• It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go — let it die away — go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow — and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all around them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy.
  • C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952)

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)

• Either one defines “personality” and “individuality” in terms of their possibilities within the established form of civilization, in which case their realization is for the vast majority tantamount to successful adjustment. Or one defines them in terms of their transcending content, including their socially denied potentialities beyond (and beneath) their actual existence; in this case, their realization would imply transgression, beyond the established form of civilization, to radically new modes of “personality” and “individuality” incompatible with the prevailing ones. Today, this would mean “curing” the patient to become a rebel or (which is saying the same thing) a martyr.
  • Herbert Marcuse, “Critique of Neo-Freudian Revisionism,” Eros and Civilization (1955)

• Abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such “transcending” analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory.
  • Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964), p. xi

• If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. The technological processes of mechanization and standardization might release individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity. The very structure of human existence would be altered; the individual would be liberated from the work world's imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own.
  • Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964), p. 2

• Economic freedom would mean freedom from the economy—from being controlled by economic forces and relationships.
  • Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964), p. 3

• All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude.
  • Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964), p. 7

• Ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe.
  • Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964), p. 12

• The radical empiricist onslaught ... provides the methodological justification for the debunking of the mind by the intellectuals—a positivism which, in its denial of the transcending elements of Reason, forms the academic counterpart of the socially required behavior.
  • Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964), p. 13

• Art ... can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.
  • Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964), p. 62

• Whether ritualized or not, art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is.
  • Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964), p. 63

• In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things—opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave.
  • Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964), p. 71

• The societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition.
  • Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964), p. 129

Leo Strauss (1899-1973)

• Men must always have distinguished (e.g. in judicial matters) between hearsay and seeing with one’s own eyes and have preferred what one has seen to what he has merely heard from others. But the use of this distinction was originally limited to particular or subordinate matters. As regards the most weighty matters—the first things and the right way—the only source of knowledge was hearsay.
  • Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953), p. 86

• Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.
  • Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (1959), p. 68

• “Our ideas” are only partly our ideas. Most of our ideas are abbreviations or residues of the thought of other people, of our teachers (in the broadest sense of the term) and of our teachers’ teachers; they are abbreviations and residues of the thought of the past. These thoughts were once explicit and in the center of consideration and discussion. It may even be presumed that they were once perfectly lucid. By being transmitted to later generations they have possibly been transformed, and there is no certainty that the transformation was effected consciously and with full clarity. ... This means that the clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.
  • Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (1959), p. 73

• It was once said that democracy is the regime that stands or falls by virtue: a democracy is a regime in which all or most adults are men of virtue, and since virtue seems to require wisdom, a regime in which all or most adults are virtuous and wise, or the society in which all or most adults have developed their reason to a high degree, or the rational society. Democracy, in a word, is meant to be an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy. …
  There exists a whole science—the science which I among thousands of others profess to teach, political science—which so to speak has no other theme than the contrast between the original conception of democracy, or what one may call the ideal of democracy, and democracy as it is. … Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.
  • Leo Strauss, “What is liberal education,” Liberalism, Ancient and Modern (1968), pp. 4-5

• Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty. … It is at the same time a training in boldness. … It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or least popular opinions.
  • Leo Strauss, “What is liberal education,” Liberalism, Ancient and Modern (1968), p. 8

• Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for “vulgarity”; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.
  • Leo Strauss, “What is liberal education,” Liberalism, Ancient and Modern (1968), p. 8

• The emancipation of the scholars and scientists from philosophy is according to [Nietzsche] only a part of the democratic movement, i.e. of the emancipation of the low from subordination to the high. … The plebeian character of the contemporary scholar or scientist is due to the fact that he has no reverence for himself.
  • Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, p. 186

Bruno Filippi (1900-1919)

• You complain to each other about the war when you yourselves are its authors, and it continues because you put up with it! But I flee from your putridity that would sully me. Proudly alone, I break the chains that link me to you and separate myself from the pack of mangy dogs, submissive to the shepherd. I will wander the world alone carrying my hatred and scorn everywhere. Alone in struggle.
  • "The Free Art of a Free Spirit"

• Why should you care about the future? Why should you care about the progress of the people? Since you, who call yourselves anarchists, are sure to engage in a battle that is already lost for you before it has even started, since you will certainly not see the society of which you dream, and even if the people rebel, social conditions would not change for you and your rebellion would have to continue.

  So what’s the use of going down among a mass that cannot comprehend you since its conditions are such as to render you unintelligible to them? If you are rebel geniuses as you claim, you should not replace Christian self-denial and patriotic servitude with the altruism of the anarchist who sacrifices himself for a future he will not see and this for people who do not comprehend you.

  • "The Free Art of a Free Spirit"

• I, who have the strength and awareness to be my own motive force, will not be the little cog that is overwhelmed, annihilated by the heavy social gears.
  • "The Free Art of a Free Spirit"

• Rebel, because today society oppresses me and tries to prevent the free expression of my being, I use every weapon to fight it.
  • "The Free Art of a Free Spirit"

• You who are reading this can say that my prose is crazy, abnormal, as you have called my actions crazy and abnormal. But your judgment doesn’t interest me at all nor do I solicit it.
  • "The Free Art of a Free Spirit"

• I am destined to pass through this world, wandering like an invisible meteor. Precisely because I am superior, I will have to empty the entire cup of sorrow and distress with no joy to cheer me. But the harsh intoxication of drinking from the chalice of sorrow is a superb pleasure that only one who tears his soul to shreds by himself, with his own hands, is given to taste.
  • "The Free Art of a Free Spirit"

• I am gathering all the agony of the world together. Anyone who has a hidden worm gnawing away inside him, anyone dressed in mourning for the ideal, anyone who laughs scornfully at the ruin of the mind, may come. I need my sorrow to become a flood, a storm.
  • "The Federation of Sorrow"

• I am surrounded by a humanity that wants what everyone else wants. My isolated affirmation is a most serious crime.
  • "Il Me Faut Vivre Ma Vie"

• Cowardice, caressed by christianity, creates morality.
  • "Il Me Faut Vivre Ma Vie"

• I envy the savages. And I will cry to them in a loud voice: “Save yourselves, civilization is coming.”
  • "Il Me Faut Vivre Ma Vie"

Nyanaponika Thera (1901-1994)

• The lives and writings of the mystics of all great religions bear witness to religious experiences of great intensity, in which considerable changes are effected in the quality of consciousness. Profound absorption in prayer or meditation can bring about a deepening and widening, a brightening and intensifying, of consciousness, accompanied by a transporting feeling of rapture and bliss. The contrast between these states and normal conscious awareness is so great that the mystic believes his experiences to be manifestations of the divine; and given the contrast, this assumption is quite understandable. Mystical experiences are also characterized by a marked reduction or temporary exclusion of the multiplicity of sense-perceptions and restless thoughts. This relative unification of mind is then interpreted as a union or communion with the One God. ...
  
  The psychological facts underlying those religious experiences are accepted by the Buddhist and are well-known to him; but he carefully distinguishes the experiences themselves from the theological interpretations imposed upon them. After rising from deep meditative absorption (jhana), the Buddhist meditator is advised to view the physical and mental factors constituting his experience in the light of the three characteristics of all conditioned existence: impermanence, liability to suffering, and absence of an abiding ego or eternal substance. This is done primarily in order to utilize the meditative purity and strength of consciousness for the highest purpose: liberating insight. But this procedure also has a very important side effect which concerns us here: the meditator will not be overwhelmed by any uncontrolled emotions and thoughts evoked by his singular experience, and will thus be able to avoid interpretations of that experience not warranted by the facts.
  
  Hence a Buddhist meditator, while benefiting from the refinement of consciousness he has achieved, will be able to see these meditative experiences for what they are; and he will further know that they are without any abiding substance that could be attributed to a deity manifesting itself to his mind. Therefore, the Buddhist’s conclusion must be that the highest mystical states do not provide evidence for the existence of a personal God or an impersonal godhead.
  • Nyanaponika Thera, “Buddhism and the God-Idea” (1962)

• Some doubt may arise in the minds of Western men how they could be helped in their present problems by a doctrine of the far and foreign East. And others, even in the East. may ask how words spoken 2,500 years ago can have relevance to our ‘modern world’, except in a very general sense. ... Those who raise the objection of the distance in time, will certainly recall many golden words of long-dead sages and poets which strike such a deep and kindred chord in our own hearts that we very vividly feel a living and intimate contact with those great ones who have left this world long ago. Such experience contrasts with the ‘very much present’ silly chatter of society, newspapers or radio, which, when compared with those ancient voices of wisdom and beauty, will appear to emanate from the mental level of stone-age man tricked out in modern trappings. True wisdom is always young, and always near to the grasp of an open mind.
  • Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), pp. 20-21

• It is a significant fact and worth pondering upon that the Bible commences with the words: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth....”, while the Dhammapada ... opens with the words “Mind precedes things, dominates them, creates them.”
  • Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 21

• Mindfulness, though so highly praised and capable of such great achievements, is not at all a “mystical” state, beyond the ken and reach of the average person. It is, on the contrary, something quite simple and common, and very familiar to us.
  • Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 24

• Attention or mindfulness is kept to a bare registering of the facts observed, without reacting to them by deed, speech or by mental comment which may be one of self-reference (like, dislike, etc.), judgment or reflection. If during the time, short or long, given to the practice of Bare Attention, any such comments arise in one’s mind, they themselves are made objects of Bare Attention, and are neither repudiated nor pursued, but are dismissed, after a brief mental note has been made of them.
  • Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 30

• Bare Attention consists in a bare and exact registering of the object. This is not as easy a task as it may appear, since it is not what we normally do, except when engaged in disinterested investigation. Normally man is not concerned with a disinterested knowledge of “things as they truly are,” but with “handling” and judging them from the viewpoint of his self-interest, which may be wide or narrow, noble or low. He tacks labels to the things which form his physical and mental universe, and these labels mostly show clearly the impress of his self-interest and his limited vision. It is such an assemblage of labels in which he generally lives and which determines his actions and reactions.
  • Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 32

• Mind is the very element in and through which we live, yet it is what is most elusive and mysterious. Bare Attention, however, by first attending patiently to the basic facts of the mental processes, is capable of shedding light on mind’s mysterious darkness, and of obtaining a firm hold on its elusive flow.
  • Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 34

• When once clear awareness and comprehension have been firmly established in a limited but vital sector of the mind’s expanse, the light will gradually and naturally spread, and will reach even distant and obscure corners of the mind’s realm which hitherto had been inaccessible. This will mainly be due to the fact that the instrument of that search for knowledge will have undergone a radical change: the searching mind itself will have gained in lucidity and penetrative strength.
  • Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 34

• A specimen of research that is to be examined with the help of a microscope has first to be carefully prepared, cleaned, freed from extraneous matter, and firmly kept under the lens. In a similar way, the “bare object” to be examined by wisdom, is prepared by Bare Attention. It cleans the object of investigation from the impurities of prejudice and passion; it frees it from alien admixtures and from points of view not pertaining to it; it holds it firmly before the Eye of Wisdom, by slowing down the transition from the receptive to the active phase of the perceptual or cognitive process, thus giving a vastly improved chance for close and dispassionate investigation.
  • Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), pp. 34-35

• Bare Attention first allows things to speak for themselves, without interruption by final verdicts pronounced too hastily. Bare Attention gives them a chance to finish their speaking, and one will thus get to learn that, in fact, they have much to say about themselves, which formerly was mostly ignored by rashness or was drowned in the inner and outer noise in which ordinary man normally lives. Because Bare Attention sees things without the narrowing and leveling effect of habitual judgments, it sees them ever anew, as it for the first time; therefore it will happen with progressive frequency that things will have something new and worthwhile to reveal. Patient pausing in such an attitude of Bare Attention will open wide horizons to one’s understanding, denied to the strained efforts of an impatient intellect. Owing to a rash or habitual limiting, labeling, misjudging, and mishandling of things, important sources of knowledge often remain closed.
  • Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 35

• ... age-old philosophical attitudes which arise from false factual premises, with vast theoretical superstructures framed to fit those premises
  • Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 38

• It will become an immediate certainty to the meditator that mind is nothing beyond its cognizing function. Nowhere, behind or within the function, can any individual agent or abiding entity be detected. By way of one’s own direct experience, one will this have arrived at the great truth of No-soul or Impersonality (anatta; Sanskrit anatma), showing that all existence is void of an abiding personality (self, soul, over-self, etc.) or an abiding substance of any description.
  • Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 38

• This method of Bare Attention, so helpful to mind-knowledge and, through it, to world-knowledge, tallies with the procedure and attitude of the true scientist and scholar: clear definition of subject-matter and terms; unprejudiced receptivity for the instruction that comes out of the things themselves; exclusion, or at least reduction, of the subjective factor in judgment; deferring of judgment until a careful examination of facts has been made. This genuine spirit of the research worker, manifested in the attitude of Bare Attention, will always unite the Buddha-Dhamma with true science, though not necessarily with all the theories of the day. But the purpose of the Buddha-Dhamma is not the same as that of secular science which is limited to the discover and explanation of facts. The Buddha’s mind-doctrine, however, in not restricted to a theoretical knowledge of the mind, but it aims at the shaping of the mind, and, through it, of life. In that object, however, it meets with that branch of modern psychology which is devoted to the practical application of theoretical mind-knowledge.
  • Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 39

Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)

• The American polishes and refines his way of doing things—even the most commonplace—the way the French of the seventeenth century polished their maxims and aphorisms.
  • Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (New York: 1954), #171

• The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.
  • Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (New York: 1954), #172

• The nonconformist is a more stable type than the conforming individual. It is the average man of today who shows the most striking differences from people of other ages and civilizations. The rebel of today is twin brother of rebels in all ages and climes.
  • Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (New York: 1954), #175

• To spell out the obvious is often to call it into question.
  • Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (New York: 1954), #220

• We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.
  • Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (New York: 1954), #254

• The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
  • Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition (2006), #32

Mortimer Adler (1902-2001)

• The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.
  • Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book, p. 4

George Orwell (1902-1950)

• Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
  • George Orwell, 1984

• A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
  • George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)

• When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms
  • George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)

• (i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
  
  • George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)

• If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought’s powerless attempt to remain its own master.
  • Theodor Adorno, "Why still philosophy?" Critical Models (1998), p. 10

• The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority.
  • Theodor Adorno, “Why still philosophy?” Critical Models (1998), p. 10

• A world that has been thoroughly permeated by the structures of the social order, a world that so overpowers every individual that scarcely any option remains but to accept it on its own terms ... reproduces itself incessantly and disastrously. What people have forced upon them by a boundless apparatus, which they themselves constitute and which they are locked into, virtually eliminates all natural elements and becomes “nature” to them.
  • Theodor Adorno, “Why still philosophy?” Critical Models (1998), p. 12

• The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle, if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification; they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.
  • Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry Reconsidered” (1963)

• Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, J. Cumming trans., p. 7

• Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent he can make them. Their “in-itself” becomes “for him.”
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 6

• The principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition, that the Enlightenment upholds against mythic imagination, is the principle of myth itself. That arid wisdom that holds there is nothing new under the sun … merely reproduces the fantastic wisdom that it supposedly rejects: … fate that … remakes what has already been.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, J. Cumming trans., p. 12

• The blessing that the market does not enquire after one’s birth is paid for by the barterer, in that he models the potentialities that are his by birth on the production of the commodities that can be bought in the market.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, J. Cumming trans., p. 13

• With the clean separation between science and poetry the division of labor which science had helped to establish was extended to language. For science the word is first of all a sign; it is then distributed among the various arts as sound, image, or word proper, but its unity can never be restored by the addition of these arts, by synaesthesia or total art. As sign, language must resign itself to calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it. As image it must resign itself to being a likeness and, to be entirely nature, must renounce the claim to know it.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., pp. 12-13

• The prevailing antithesis between art and science ... rends the two apart as areas of culture in order to make them jointly manageable as areas of culture.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 13

• The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 17

• The more heavily the process of self-preservation is based on the bourgeois division of labor, the more it enforces the self-alienation of individuals, who must mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 23

• The technical process, to which the subject has been reified after the eradication of that process from consciousness, is as free from the ambiguous meanings of mythical thought as from meaning altogether, since reason itself has become merely an aid to the all-encompassing economic apparatus.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 23

• Reason serves as a universal tool for the fabrication of all other tools, rigidly purpose-directed and as calamitous as the precisely calculated operations of material production, the results of which for human beings escape all calculation. Reason’s old ambition to be purely an instrument of purposes has finally been fulfilled.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 23

• ... subordinating life in its entirety to the requirements of its preservation
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 24

• Since, under the work-pressure of the millennium now ending, pleasure has learned to hate itself, in its totalitarian emancipation it remains mean and mutilated through self-contempt.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 24

• [Odysseus] knows only two possibilities of escape. One he prescribes to his comrades. He plugs their ears with wax and orders them to row with all their might. Anyone who wishes to survive must not listen to the temptation of the irrecoverable, and is unable to listen only if he is unable to hear. Society has always made sure that this was the case. Workers must look ahead with alert concentration and ignore anything which lies to one side. The urge toward distraction must be grimly sublimated in redoubled exertions. Thus the workers are made practical. The other possibility Odysseus chooses for himself, the landowner, who has others to work for him. He listens, but does so while bound helplessly to the mast. ... The bonds by which he has irrevocably fettered himself to praxis at the same time keep the Sirens at a distance from praxis: their lure is neutralized as a mere object of contemplation, as art.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 26-27

• On the way from mythology to logistics, thought has lost the element of reflection on itself.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 29

• In the world of exchange the one who gives more is in the wrong; but the one who loves is always the one who loves more.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 57

• As solid citizens, philosophers ally themselves in practice with the powers they condemn in theory.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 67

• To be free of the stab of conscience is as essential to formalistic reason as to be free of love or hate.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 75

• Animism spiritualized the object, whereas industrialism objectifies the spirits of men.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 28

• The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter’s conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life. What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.
  • Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), Dedication

• The son of well-to-do parents who ... engages in a so-called intellectual profession, as an artist or a scholar, will have a particularly difficult time with those bearing the distasteful title of colleagues. It is not merely that his independence is envied, the seriousness of his intentions mistrusted, that he is suspected of being a secret envoy of the established powers. ... The real resistance lies elsewhere. The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become “practical,” a business with strict division of labor, departments and restricted entry. The man of independent means who chooses it out of repugnance for the ignominy of earning money will not be disposed to acknowledge the fact. For this he is punished. He ... is ranked in the competitive hierarchy as a dilettante no matter how well he knows his subject, and must, if he wants to make a career, show himself even more resolutely blinkered than the most inveterate specialist. The urge to suspend the division of labor which, within certain limits, his economic situation enables him to satisfy, is thought particularly disreputable: it betrays a disinclination to sanction the operations imposed by society, and domineering competence permits no such idiosyncrasies. The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract. It performs this task all the more reliably since anyone who repudiates this division of labor—if only by taking pleasure in his work—makes himself vulnerable by its standards, in ways inseparable from elements of his superiority. Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game.
  • Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 1

• Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
  • Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 20

• The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.
  • Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (1974), K. Tarnowski, trans. (1973), pp. 5-6

• ... nominalistic theory of language, in which words are interchangeable counters, untouched by history.
  • Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (1974), K. Tarnowski, trans. (1973), p. 8

• What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content. In that sense the character of the jargon would be quite formal: it sees to it that what it wants is on the whole felt and accepted through its mere delivery, without regard to the content of the words used.
  • Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (1974), K. Tarnowski, trans. (1973), p. 8

• The jargon makes it seem that ... the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin.
  • Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (1974), K. Tarnowski, trans. (1973), p. 9

• Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.
  • Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (1974), K. Tarnowski, trans. (1973), p. 9

Ludwig Hohl (1904-1980)

• Today’s laziness consists in lifeless motion.
  • Ludwig Hohl, Notes (1981), I, 3

• Work is nothing but the translation of the mortal into that which endures.
  • Ludwig Hohl, Notes (1981)

• Class consciousness—yes, the theory is all too true. But there is a third class, that of Socrates, that of the inexorable.
  • Ludwig Hohl, Notes (1981), II, 66

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987)

• Already in the ninth century BC the Hindus realized that all the deities are projections of psychological powers, and they are within you, not outside.
  • Joseph Campbell, Transformations of Myth Trough Time

• Religion is poetry misunderstood.
  • Joseph Campbell, “Mythology and the Individual,” Lecture 4

• Myths are public dreams. Dreams are private myths. By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth world in which you live.
  • Joseph Campbell, “Mythology and the Individual,” Lecture 5

• Just as in dream, the subject and the object, although they seem to be separate, are really the same, so also you are your god.
  • Joseph Campbell, “Mythology and the Individual,” Lecture 5

• The first effect is an astonishing sense of presence. Objects begin to shine, to be fascinating—things that you took for granted. There’s a story I know of four bridge players who were made to promise before they receive a shot that they would play a game of bridge after they received it. … The cards were dealt out, and when they opened the cards, they sat there fascinated. They didn’t play bridge. This is what’s known as “aesthetic arrest.” They were held. And what it represents is a new activation of consciousness. We live with things thinking only of their uses, even our friends.
  • Joseph Campbell, describing the effects of LSD, “Mythology and the Individual,” Lecture 5

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)

• Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.
  • Salvador Dalí, Dali by Dali (1970) , as quoted in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (2012), p. 737

• There’s only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.
  • Salvador Dalí

• I, the obsessed rationalist, was the only one who knew what I wanted: I was not going to submit to irrationality for its own sake, to the narcissist and passive irrationality others practiced. I would do completely the opposite. I would fight for the “conquest of the irrational.” In the meantime my friends would let themselves be overwhelmed by the irrational, succumbing, like so many others, Nietzsche included, to that romantic weakness.
  • Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 9

• I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work.
  • Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 79

Josef Pieper (1904-1997)

• In our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture—and ourselves.
  • Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948)

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975)

• ... the chronic American belief that there exists an opposition between reality and mind, and that one must enlist oneself in the party of reality.
  • Lionel Trilling 1942

Elias Canetti (1905-1994)

• Use only words which you have filled with new meaning.
  • Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 5

• Ambition is the death of thought.
  • Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 41

• You keep taking note of whatever confirms your ideas—better to write down what refutes and weakens them!
  • Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 60

• When I leaf through Fackel issues of my slave years, I am seized by horror. Anyone released from bondage must feel like this.
  • Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 64

• “He is a lesser figure than X”—how it pleases an Englishman to say that! Never suspecting what basement that would put him in.
  • Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 74

• One needs time to free oneself of wrong convictions. If it happens too suddenly, they go on festering.
  • Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 76

• I noticed in the front row a small, very pale, almost white man, old, tremendously alert, old in the only way I love old age, namely more alive for all the years, more attentive, more unrelenting, expectant and ready, as though he still had to make up his mind about most things and must not disregard anything.
  • Elias Canetti, describing Ludwig Hohl, The Secret Heart of the Clock, J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 76

• He sometimes tells himself that there is nothing more to be said, simply because he won’t get around to saying it.—How contemptible!
  • Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 92

• Everything you rejected and pushed aside—take it up again.
  • Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 106

• His great holy books, which he does not know. They are so holy that he does not dare to open them.
  • Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 132

• I repulse death with all my strength. If I accepted it, I would be a murderer.
  • Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 142

• Relearn astonishment.
  • Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 146

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)

The truthfulness which Jesus demands from his followers is the self-abnegation which does not hide sin. Nothing is then hidden, everything is brought forth to the light of day. In this question of truthfulness, what matters first and last is that a man’s whole being should be exposed, his whole evil laid bare in the sight of God. But sinful men do not like this sort of truthfulness. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

• At the end of a life spent in the pursuit of knowledge Faust has to confess: "I now see that we can nothing know." That is the answer to a sum, it is the outcome of a long experience. But as Kierkegaard observed, it is quite a different thing when a freshman comes up to the university and uses the same sentiment to justify his indolence. As the answer to a sum it is perfectly true, but as the initial data it is a piece of self-deception.
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge (1937), The Cost of Discipleship (1959), p. 51

• The truthfulness which Jesus demands from his followers is the self-abnegation which does not hide sin. Nothing is then hidden, everything is brought forth to the light of day. In this question of truthfulness, what matters first and last is that a man’s whole being should be exposed, his whole evil laid bare in the sight of God. But sinful men do not like this sort of truthfulness.
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge (1937), The Cost of Discipleship (1959), p. 138

• [Jesus'] disciples realized that they too were his enemies, and that he had overcome them by his love. It is this that opens the disciple’s eyes, and enables him to see his enemy as a brother.
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge (1937), The Cost of Discipleship (1959), p. 150

• Jesus offers his disciples a simple rule of thumb which will enable even the least sophisticated of them to tell whether his intercourse with others is on the right lines or not. All he need do is to say “I” instead of “Thou,” and put himself in the other man’s place.
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge (1937), The Cost of Discipleship (1959), p. 188

• How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (1997), p. 311

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances. ~ Hannah Arendt

• For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.
  • Hannah Arendt

• The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
  • Hannah Arendt

• Such and similar questions were answered in the past by religion on one side and common sense on the other. The religious answer is: because you will go to hell and eternal damnation; the common sense answer is: because you don't want to be murdered yourself. Both answers don' t work any longer. ... The philosophic answer would be the answer of Socrates: Since I have got to live with myself, am in fact the only person from whom I never shall be able to part, whose company I shall have to bear forever, I don't want to become a murderer; I don't want to spend my life in the company of a murderer.
  • Hannah Arendt, Letter to Mary McCarthy, responding to the question “Why should I not kill my grandmother if I want to?” August 20, 1954, Between Friends, p. 22

• Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
  • Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958), part 3, chapter 16

• Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.
  • Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1971), p. 4

• It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances.
  • Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1971), p. 7

• Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.
  • Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1971), p. 12

• If...the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to “demand” its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be. Kant—in this respect almost alone among the philosophers—was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications.
  • Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1971), p. 13

• ... the simple-minded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only excludes all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts.
  • Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1971), p. 39

• It is characteristic of the Oxford School of criticism to understand these [metaphysical] fallacies as logical non sequiturs—as though philosophers throughout the centuries had been, for reasons unknown, just a bit too stupid to discover the elementary flaws in their arguments. The truth of the matter is that elementary logical mistakes are quite rare in the history of philosophy; what appear to be errors in logic to minds disencumbered of questions that have been uncritically dismissed as “meaningless” are usually caused by semblances, unavoidable for beings whose whole existence is determined by appearance. Hence, In our context the only relevant question is whether the semblances are inauthentic or authentic ones, whether they are caused by dogmatic beliefs and arbitrary assumptions, mere mirages that disappear upon closer inspection, or whether they are inherent in the paradoxical condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world of appearances, is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it or transcend it.
  • Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1971), p. 45

Jacques Barzun (1907-2012)

• The danger is that we shall become a nation of pedants. I use the word literally and democratically to refer to the millions of people who are moved by a certain kind of passion in their pastimes as well as in their vocations. In both parts of their lives this passion comes out in shoptalk. I have in mind both the bird watchers and nature lovers: the young people who collect records and follow the lives of pop singers and movie stars; I mean the sort of knowledge possessed by “buffs” and “fans” of all species—the baseball addicts and opera goers, the devotees of railroad trains and the collectors of objects, from first editions to netsuke.
  
  They are pedants not just because they know and recite an enormous quantity of facts—if a school required them to learn as much they would scream against tyranny. It is not the extent of their information that appalls; it is the absence of any reflection upon it, any sense of relation between it and them and the world. Nothing is brought in from outside for contrast or comparison; no perspective is gained from the top of their monstrous factual pile; no generalities emerge to lighten the sameness of their endeavor.
  • Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve (1989), p. 118

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

• The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to a rigorous scrutiny, and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world, of which science is the second-order expression.
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (New York 1962, p. viii

• Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement.
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (Chicago: 1963), p. 5

• Thought without language, says Lavelle, would not be a purer thought; it would be no more than the intention to think. And his last book offers a theory of expressiveness which makes of expression not “a faithful image of an already realized interior being, but the very means by which it is realized.”
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (Chicago: 1963), p. 8

• Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution.
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (Chicago: 1963), p. 44

• De Lubac discusses an atheism which means to suppress this searching, he says, “even including the problem as to what is responsible for the birth of God in human consciousness.”
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (Chicago: 1963), p. 45

• Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (Chicago: 1963), p. 45

• Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it.
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (Chicago: 1963), p.46

• The philosopher will ask himself … if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (Chicago: 1963), p. 47

• Philosophy is in history, and is never independent of historical discourse. But for the tacit symbolism of life it substitutes, in principle, a conscious symbolism; for a latent meaning, one that is manifest. It is never content to accept its historical situation. It changes this situation by revealing it to itself.
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (Chicago: 1963), p. 57

• Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and “gives the whole show away.” The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden.
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (Chicago: 1963), p. 59

Simone Weil (1909-1943)

Just as a vagrant accused of stealing a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions. ~ Simone Weil

• Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.
  • Simone Weil

• The number 2 thought of by one man cannot be added to the number 2 thought of by another man so as to make up the number 4.
  • Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (1958), p. 82

• Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong. ... With those who have received a Christian education, the lower parts of the soul become attached to these mysteries when they have no right at all to do so. That is why such people need a purification of which St. John of the Cross describes the stages. Atheism and incredulity constitute an equivalent of such a purification.
  • Simone Weil, “Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the Divine” in The Simone Weil Reader (1957) edited by G. Panichas, pp. 417-418

• There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.
  • Simone Weil, in The New Christianity (1967) edited by William Robert Miller

• The sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.
  • Simone Weil, Prelude to Politics (1943), p. 199

• The Romans really were an atheistic and idolatrous people; not idolatrous with regard to images made of stone or bronze, but idolatrous with regard to themselves. It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism.
  • Simone Weil, Prelude to Politics (1943), p. 220

• If people were told: what makes carnal desire imperious in you is not its pure carnal element. It is the fact that you put into it the essential part of yourself—the need for Unity, the need for God—they wouldn’t believe it. To them it seems obvious that the quality of imperious need belongs to the carnal desire as such. In the same way it seems obvious to the miser that the quality of desirability belongs to gold as such, and not to its exchange value.
  • Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks

• One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love—to serve the loved one without his knowing it—is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.
  • Simone Weil, Last Notebook (1942) p. 84

• No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope. Consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater—unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.
  • Simone Weil, Last Notebook (1942) p. 308

• The eulogies of my intelligence are positively intended to evade the question “Is what she says true?”
  • Simone Weil, Letter to her parents, 1943

• There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one’s intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.
  • Simone Weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology (1986), p. 35

• A profession can confer on quite ordinary men in their exercise of it, virtues which, if they were extended to all circumstances of life, would make of them heroes or saints.
  • Simone Weil, The Great Beast (1947), p. 124

• Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.
  • Simone Weil, Analysis of Oppression (1955), p. 192

• Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.
  • Simone Weil, Chance (1947), p. 277, also in Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 97

• The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.
  • Simone Weil, Waiting for God (1951), p. 51

• School children and students who love God should never say: “For my part I like mathematics”; “I like French”; “I like Greek.” They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.
  • Simone Weil, Waiting for God (1951), p. 105

• It is not in a person's nature to desire what he already has. Desire is a tendency, the start of a movement toward something, toward a point from which one is absent.
  • Simone Weil, “Prerequisite to Dignity of Labor,” Simone Weil: An Anthology (1986), p. 245

• The effort of expression has a bearing not only on the form but on the thought and on the whole inner being. So long as bare simplicity of expression is not attained, the thought has not touched or even come near to true greatness. ... The real way of writing is to write as we translate. When we translate a text written in some foreign language, we do not seek to add anything to it; on the contrary, we are scrupulously careful not to add anything to it. That is how we have to try to translate a text which is not written down.
  • Simone Weil, letter to Gustave Thibon, in Gravity and Grace (1972), p. xi

• I am not a person with whom it is advisable to link one’s fate. Human beings have always more or less sensed this; but, I do not know for what mysterious reason, ideas seem to have less discernment.
  • Simone Weil, letter to Gustave Thibon, in Gravity and Grace (1972), p. xii

• If we know what direction the scales of society are tilted we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter side. ... We must be always ready to change sides like Justice—that fugitive from the camp of conquerors.
  • Simone Weil, in Gravity and Grace (1972), p. xvi

Human Personality (1943)

• What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium.
  • Simone Weil, Human Personality (1943), p. 59

• Rights are always asserted in a tone of contention.
  • Simone Weil, Human Personality (1943), p. 61

• If you say to someone who has ears to hear: “What you are doing to me is not just,” you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, “I have the right...” or “you have no right to...” They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention.
  • Simone Weil, Human Personality (1943), p. 63

• The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege.
  • Simone Weil, Human Personality (1943), p. 64

• Just as a vagrant accused of stealing a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions.
  • Simone Weil, Human Personality (1943), p. 68

• Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood. In them, intelligence is neither a good, nor even an asset. The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
  • Simone Weil, Human Personality (1943), p. 69

• To listen to someone is to put oneself in his place while he is speaking. To put oneself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction, or in near danger of it, is to annihilate oneself. It is more difficult than suicide would be for a happy child. Therefore the afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
  
  That is why there is no hope for the vagrant as he stands before the magistrate. Even if, through his stammerings, he should utter a cry to pierce the soul, neither the magistrate nor the public will hear it. His cry is mute. And the afflicted are nearly always equally deaf to one another; and each of them, constrained by the general indifference, strives by means of self-delusion or forgetfulness to become deaf to his own self.
  • Simone Weil, Human Personality (1943), p. 71

On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)

• "Science affirms that ..." Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk.
  • Simone Weil, “Reflections on quantum theory,” On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, R. Rees, trans. (1968), p. 57

• My purpose here is to denounce an idea which seems to be dangerous and false. ... Revolutionary trade unionists and orthodox communists are at one in considering everything that is purely theoretical as bourgeois. ... The culture of a socialist society would be a synthesis of theory and practice; but to synthesize is not the same as to confuse together; it is only contraries that can be synthesized. ... Marx’s principal glory is to have rescued the study of societies not only from Utopianism but also and at the same time from empiricism. ... Humanity cannot progress by importing into theoretical study the processes of blind routine and haphazard experiment by which production has so long been dominated. ... The true relation between theory and application only appears when theoretical research has been purged of all empiricism.
  • Simone Weil, “The teaching of mathematics,” On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, R. Rees, trans. (1968), p. 71-72

• Respectable scientists like de Broglie himself accept wave mechanics because it confers coherence and unity upon the experimental findings of contemporary science, and in spite of the astonishing changes it implies in connection with ideas of causality, time, and space, but it is because of these changes that it wins favor with the public. The great popular success of Einstein was the same thing. The public drinks in and swallows eagerly everything that tends to dispossess the intelligence in favor of some technique; it can hardly wait to abdicate from intelligence and reason and from everything that makes man responsible for his destiny.
  • Simone Weil, “Wave Mechanics,” On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, R. Rees, trans. (1968), p. 75

• Men ... ask nothing better, it would seem, than to leave their destiny, their life, and all their thoughts in the hands of a few men with a gift for the exclusive manipulation of this or that technique.
  • Simone Weil, “Wave Mechanics,” On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, R. Rees, trans. (1968), p. 75

• There are necessities and impossibilities in reality which do not obtain in fiction, any more than the law of gravity to which we are subject controls what is represented in a picture. ... It is the same with pure good; for a necessity as strong as gravity condemns man to evil and forbids him any good, or only within the narrowest limits and laboriously obtained and soiled and adulterated with evil. ... The simplicity which makes the fictional good something insipid and unable to hold the attention becomes, in the real good, an unfathomable marvel.
  • Simone Weil, “Morality and literature,” On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, R. Rees, trans. (1968), pp. 160-161

• During the last quarter of a century all the authority associated with the function of spiritual guidance ... has seeped down into the lowest publications. ... Between a poem by Valéry and an advertisement for a beauty cream promising a rich marriage to anyone who used it there was at no point a breach of continuity. So as a result of literature’s spiritual usurpation a beauty cream advertisement possessed, in the eyes of little village girls, the authority that was formerly attached to the words of priests.
  • Simone Weil, “Morality and literature,” On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, R. Rees, trans. (1968), p. 164

• When, as a result of what was called Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the priests had in fact almost entirely lost this function of guidance. Their place was taken by writers and scientists. In both cases it is equally absurd. Mathematics, physics, and biology are as remote from spiritual guidance as the art of arranging words. When that function is usurped by literature and science it proves there is no longer any spiritual life.
  • Simone Weil, “Morality and literature,” On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, R. Rees, trans. (1968), pp. 164-165

• It is not only in literature that fiction generates immorality. It does it also in life itself. For the substance of our life is almost exclusively composed of fiction. We fictionalize our future, and, unless we are heroically devoted to truth, we fictionalize our past, refashioning it to our taste. We do not study other people; we invent what they are thinking, saying, and doing. Reality provides us with some raw material, just as novelists often take a theme from a news item, but we envelop it in a fog in which, as in all fiction, values are reversed, so that evil is attractive and good is tedious.
  • Simone Weil, “Morality and literature,” On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, R. Rees, trans. (1968), pp. 161-162

• The essential characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value.
  • Simone Weil, “The responsibility of writers,” On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, R. Rees, trans. (1968), p. 167

• Dadaism and surrealism ... represented the intoxication of total license, the intoxication in which the mind wallows when it has made a clean sweep of value and surrendered to the immediate. The good is the pole towards which the human spirit is necessarily oriented, not only in action but in every effort, including the effort of pure intelligence. The surrealists have set up non-oriented thought as a model; they have chosen the total absence of value as their supreme value. Men have always been intoxicated by license, which is why, throughout history, towns have been sacked. But there has not always been a literary equivalent for the sacking of towns. Surrealism is such an equivalent.
  • Simone Weil, “The responsibility of writers,” On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, R. Rees, trans. (1968), p. 167

• Such words as spontaneity, sincerity, gratuitousness, richness, enrichment—words which imply an almost total indifference to contrasts of value—have come more often from their [the surrealists’] pens than words which contain a reference to good and evil. Moreover, this latter class of words has become degraded, especially those which refer to the good, as Valéry remarked some years ago. Words like virtue, nobility, honor, honesty, generosity, have become almost impossible to use or else they have acquired bastard meanings; language is no longer equipped for legitimately praising a man’s character.
  • Simone Weil, “The responsibility of writers,” On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, R. Rees, trans. (1968), p. 168

• In a general way, the literature of the twentieth century is essentially psychological; and psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man.
  • Simone Weil, “The responsibility of writers,” On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, R. Rees, trans. (1968), p. 168

• There is a certain kind of morality which is even more alien to good and evil than amorality is.
  • Simone Weil, “The responsibility of writers,” On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, R. Rees, trans. (1968), p. 169

Gravity and Grace (1947)

• All created things refuse to satisfy me as ends.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. xix

• Every order which transcends another can only be introduced into it under the form of something infinitely small.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. xix

• Supernatural love has no contact with force, moreover it does not protect the soul against the coldness of force, the coldness of steel. Only an earthly attachment, if it has in it enough energy, can afford protection against the coldness of steel. Armor is made of metal in the same way as the sword. If we want a love which will protect the soul from wounds we must love something other than God.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. xxii

• What evil violates is not goodness, for goodness is inviolate; only a degraded good can be violated.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. xxiv

• Beings are not sacred enough to me. May I never sully anything, even though I be utterly transformed into mud. To sully nothing, even in thought. Even in my worst moments I would not destroy a Greek statue or a fresco by Giotto. Why anything else then? Why, for example, a moment in the life of a human being who could have been happy for that moment.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 5

• It is impossible to forgive whoever ... has lowered us. We have to think that he has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 5

• Headaches. At a certain moment, the pain is lessened by projecting it into the universe, but the universe is impaired; the pain is more intense when it comes home again, but something in me does not suffer and remains in contact with the universe which is not impaired. ... Treat all sufferings in this way. Prevent them from having access to things.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 6

• A situation which is too hard degrades us through the following process: as a general rule the energy supplied by the higher emotions is limited. If the situation requires us to go beyond this limit we have to fall back on lower feelings (fear, covetousness, desire to beat the record, love of outward honours) which are richer in energy. This limitation is the key to many a retrogression.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), pp. 7-8

• A beloved being who disappoints me. I have written to him. It is impossible that he should not reply by saying what I have said to myself in his name. Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt. To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God. I am also other than I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 9 [The bracketed explanation is quoted from her Waiting on God, p. 97]

• The good seems to us as a nothingness, since there is no thing that is good. But this nothingness is not unreal. Compared with it, everything in existence is unreal.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 13

• We must leave on one side the beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in immortality. The belief in the utility of sin: etiam peccata. The belief in the providential ordering of events—in short the “consolations” which are ordinarily sought in religion.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 13

• Attachment is a manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 13

• Attachment is no more nor less than an insufficiency in our sense of reality. We are attached to the possession of a thing because we think that if we cease to possess it, it will cease to exist.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 14

• Human misery would be intolerable if it were not diluted in time. We have to prevent it from being diluted in order that it should be intolerable.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 14

• Purification is the separation of good from covetousness.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 20

• The presence of the dead person is imaginary, but his absence is very real: henceforward it is his way of appearing.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 21

• Though they [the afflicted] may have lost their ‘I’, it does not mean that they have no more egoism. Quite the reverse. ... The being is reduced to naked, vegetative egoism. An egoism without an ‘I’.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 23

• Action is the pointer which shows the balance. We must not touch the pointer but the weight.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p.

• We are drawn toward a thing because we believe it is good. We end by being chained to it because it has become necessary.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p.

• Things of the senses are real if considered as perceptible things, but unreal if considered as goods.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 45

• We accept the false values which appear to us, and when we think we are acting, we are in reality motionless, for we are still confined in the same system of values.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972)

• We must get rid of the illusion of possessing time. We must become incarnate. Man has to perform an act of incarnation, for he is disembodied by his imagination.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 48

• We believe we are rising because while keeping the same base inclinations (for instance: the desire to triumph over others) we have given them a noble object. We should, on the contrary, rise by attaching noble inclinations to lowly objects.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 48

• Fear of God in Saint John of the Cross. Is this not the fear of thinking about God when are unworthy; of sullying him by thinking about him wrongly? Through such fear the lower parts of our nature draw away from God.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 49

• The flesh is dangerous in so far as it refuses to love God, but also in so far as without fitting modesty it pushes itself forward to love him.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 49

• The determination to fight against a prejudice ... constitutes an utterly sterile effort to get rid of it. In such a case the light of attention is the only thing which is effective, and it is not compatible with polemical intention.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 49

• All the Freudian system is impregnated with the prejudice which it makes it its mission to fight—the prejudice that everything sexual is vile.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 49

• We do not have to acquire humility. There is humility in us—only we humiliate ourselves before false gods.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 54

• Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 56

• Everything which is vile or second-rate in us revolts against purity and needs, in order to save its own life, to soil this purity.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 58

• The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 58

• To assume power over is to soil. To possess is to soil.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 58

• To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 58

• The soul is the human being considered as having a value in itself.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 59

• It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 59

• To wish to escape from solitude is cowardice.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 59

• Monotony of evil: never anything new, everything about it is equivalent. ... It is because of this monotony that quantity plays so great a part. A host of women (Don Juan) or of men (Célimène), etc.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 62

• A certain inferior kind of virtue is good’s degraded image, of which we have to repent, and of which it is more difficult to repent than evil—The Pharisee and the Publican.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 63

• That which is the direct opposite of an evil never belongs to the order of higher good. It is often scarcely any higher than evil! Examples: theft and the bourgeois respect for property, adultery and the ‘respectable woman,’ the savings bank and waste, lying and ‘sincerity.’
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 63

• Good considered on the level of evil and measured against it as one opposite against another is good of the penal code order. Above there is a good which, in a sense, bears more resemblance to evil than to this low form of good.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 63

• When we are the victims of illusion we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 64

• Most people have a sense of duty about doing certain things that are bad and others that are good. The same man feels it to be a duty to sell for the highest price he can and not to steal, etc. Good for such people is on the level of evil, it is a good without light.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 64

• The false God changes suffering into violence. The true God changes violence into suffering.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 65

• The crime which is latent in us, we must inflict on ourselves.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 66

• The most criminal weakness is infinitely less dangerous than the very slightest treason, even though this should be confined to a purely inward movement of thought lasting no more than an instant.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 67

• We believe that thought alone does not commit us in any way, but it alone commits us, and license of thought includes all license. Not to think about a thing—supreme faculty.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 69

• Two conceptions of hell: the ordinary one (suffering without consolation); mine (false beatitude, mistakenly thinking oneself to be in paradise).
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 72

• The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 73

• Time leads us whither we do no wish to go.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 74

• To say that the world is not worth anything, that life is of no value, and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless what does evil take from us?
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 76

• Alexander is to a peasant proprietor what Don Juan is to a happily married husband.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 78

• Leaves and fruit are a waste of energy if our only wish is to rise.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 80

• In order that we should realize the distance between ourselves and God it was necessary that God should be a crucified slave. For we do not realize distance except in the downward direction.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 81

• To be innocent is to bear the weight of the entire universe. It is to throw away the counterweight.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 83

• God gives himself to men either as powerful or as perfect—it is for them to choose.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 83

• A lever. We lower when we want to lift. In the same way, "He who humbleth himself shall be exalted."
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 84

• We must be like the father in heaven who does not judge: by him beings judge themselves. We must let all beings come to us, and leave them to judge themselves. We must be a balance.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 85

• Bad union of opposites (bad because fallacious) is that which is achieved on the same plane as the opposites. Thus the granting of domination to the oppressed. In this way we do not get free from the oppression-domination cycle.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 91

• The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul—like pincers to catch hold of God.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 92

• Method of investigation: as soon as we have thought something, try to see in what way the contrary is true.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 93

• The sword affords deliverance (whether through its handle or its point) from the intolerable weight of our obligation.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 95

• The most commonplace truth when it floods the whole soul is like a revelation.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 105

• The wrong way of seeking. The attention fixed on a problem. Another phenomenon due to horror of the void. We do not want to have lost our labour. The heat of the chase. We must not want to find: as in the case of excessive devotion, we become dependent on the object of our efforts. We need an outward reward which chance sometimes provides and which we are ready to accept at the price of a deformation of truth..
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 106

• It is only effort without desire (not attached to an object) which infallibly contains a reward.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 106

• Love is the teacher of gods and men, for no one learns without desiring to learn.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 107

• Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 107

• As regards temptations, we must follow the example of the truly chaste woman who, when the seducer speaks to her, makes no answer and pretends not to hear him.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 107

• In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention. If we could be attentive to the same degree in the presence of a human being, ...
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 110

• Extreme purity can contemplate both the pure and the impure; impurity can do neither: the pure frightens it, the impure absorbs it.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 111

• We must not try to change within ourselves or to efface desires and aversions, pleasures and sorrows. We must submit to them passively, just as we do the impressions we receive from colors, according them no greater credit to them than in the latter case. ... We must compel ourselves by violence to act as though we had not a certain desire or aversion, without trying to persuade our sensibility—compelling it to obey. This causes it to revolt and we have to endure this revolt passively, taste of it, savor it, accept it as something outside ourselves, as the pink color of the room with the red window. ... Each time we do violence to ourselves in this spirit we make an advance, slight or great but real, in the work of training the animal within us.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 113

• When a main trains a dog to perform tricks he does not beat it for the sake of beating it, but in order to train it, and with this in view he only hits it when it fails to carry out a trick. If he beats it without any method he ends by making it unfit for any training, and that is what the wrong sort of asceticism does.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 113

• The source of my difficulties lies in the fact that, through exhaustion and an absence of vital energy, I am below the level of normal activity. And if something takes me and raises me up I am lifted above it. When such moments come it would seem to me a calamity to waste them in ordinary activities. ... I could consent to the anomaly of behavior resulting from this; but I know, or I believe I know, that I should not do so. It involves crimes of omission towards others.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 114

• Whatever I may have to bear, when God sends me suffering, I am inescapably forced to suffer all that there is to suffer. Why, when it comes to duty, should I not in like manner do all that there is to be done?
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 114

• The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 117

• There is nothing nearer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to be proud of our intelligence at the moment when we are really exercising it.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 117

• The Greeks believed that only truth was suitable for divine things—not error nor approximations. The divine character of anything made them more exacting with regard to accuracy. We do precisely the opposite.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 119

• The use of reason makes things transparent to the mind. We do not, however, see what is transparent. We see that which is opaque through the transparent—the opaque which was hidden when the transparent was not transparent. ... Reason should be employed only to bring us to the true mysteries, the true undemonstrables, which are reality. The uncomprehended hides the incomprehensible and should on this account be eliminated.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 119

• Justice. To be ready to admit that another person is something ... completely different from what we read in him.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 121

• We read, but also we are read by, others. Interferences in these readings. Forcing someone to read himself as we read him (slavery). Forcing others to read us as we read ourselves (conquest).
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), pp. 121-122

• To love our neighbour as ourselves does not mean that we should love all people equally, for I do not have an equal love for all the modes of existence of myself. Nor does it mean that we should never make them suffer, for I do not refuse to make myself suffer.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 129

• We should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of the universe.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 129

• It is better to say, ‘I am suffering’ than ‘this landscape is ugly’.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 131

• As collective thought cannot exist as thought, it passes into things (signs, machines ...). Hence the paradox: it is the thing which thinks and the man who is reduced to the state of a thing.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 139

• Our science is collective like our technics. ... We inherit not only results but methods which we do not understand.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), pp. 139-140

• How has unconsciousness infiltrated itself into methodical thought and action? To escape by return to a primitive state is a lazy solution. We have to rediscover the original pact between the spirit and the world in this very civilization of which we form a part. But it is a task which is beyond our power on account of the shortness of life and the impossibility of collaboration and succession. That is no reason for not undertaking it. The situation of all of us is comparable to that of Socrates when he was awaiting death in his prison and began to learn to play the lyre. At any rate we shall have lived.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 140

• The spirit, overcome by the weight of quantity, has no longer any other criterion than efficiency.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 140

• Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 140

• Man is a slave in so far as between action and its effect, between effort and the finished work, there is the interference of alien wills. This is the case both with the slave and the master today. Never can man deal directly with the conditions of his own action. Society forms a screen between nature and man.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 141

• To be in direct contact with nature and not with men is the only discipline. To be dependent on an alien will is to be a slave. This, however, is the fate of all men. The slave is dependent on the master and the master on the slave. This is a situation which makes us either servile or tyrannical or both at once (omnia serviliter pro dominatione) . On the contrary, when we are face to face with inert nature our only resource is to think.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 141

• To have to deal directly with things frees the spirit. To have to deal directly with men debases us if we are dependent on them, whether this dependence be in the form of submission or command.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 142

• Revolt, if it does not immediately pass into definite and effective action, is always changed into its opposite through the feeling of utter impotence which results from it. In other words the chief support of the oppressor lies precisely in the unavailing revolt of the oppressed.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 143

• The only way to preserve our dignity when submission is forced upon us is to consider our chief as a thing.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 143

• The powerful, if they carry oppression beyond a certain point, necessarily end by making themselves adored by their slaves. For the thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience. ... It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. ... Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), pp. 142-143

• The collective is the object of all idolatry.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 144

• That which we want is the absolute good. That which is within our reach is the good which is correlated to evil. We betake ourselves of it by mistake, like the prince who starts to make love to the maid instead of the mistress.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 145

• It is the social which throws the color of the absolute over the relative.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 145

• The power of the social element. Agreement between several men brings with it a feeling of reality. It brings with it also a sense of duty. Divergence, where this agreement is concerned, appears as a sin. Hence all returns to the fold are possible. The state of conformity is an imitation of grace.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 146

• Nothing seems evil to those who serve it except failure in its service.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 148

• ‘He to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little.’ This concerns someone with whom social virtue occupies a very large place. Grace finds little room to spare in him. Obedience to the Great Beast which conforms to the good—that is social virtue. A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 148

• It is impossible for an order which is higher and therefore infinitely above another to be represented in it except by something infinitely small. A grain of mustard seed, an instant mirroring eternity, etc.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 150

• A future which is completely impossible, like the ideal of the Spanish anarchists, degrades us far less and differs far less from the eternal than a possible future. It does not even degrade us at all, except through the illusion of its possibility. If it is conceived of as impossible, it transports us into the eternal.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 154

• We must wish either for that which actually exists or for that which cannot in any way exist—or, still better, for both. That which is and that which cannot be are both outside the realm of becoming.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 154

• The constant illusion of Revolution consists in believing that the victims of force, being innocent of the outrages that are committed, will use force justly if it is put into their hands.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 155

• We have to turn all our disgust into a disgust for ourselves.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 158

• To strive from necessity and not for some good—driven not drawn—in order to maintain our existence just as it is—that is always slavery.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 159

• Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 159

• It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 159

• May the eternal light give, not a reason for living and working, but a sense of completeness which makes the search for any such reason unnecessary. Failing that, the only incentives are fear and gain—fear, which implies the oppression of the people; gain, which implies the corruption of the people.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1972), p. 159

The Need for Roots (1949)

• The popular school’s job is to give more dignity to work by infusing it with thought, and not to make of the working man a thing divided into compartments, which sometimes works and sometimes thinks. Naturally, a peasant who is sowing has to be careful to cast the seed properly, and not to be thinking about lessons learned at school. But the object which engages our attention doesn’t form the whole content of our thoughts. A happy young woman, expecting her first child, and busy sewing a layette, thinks about sewing it properly. But she never forgets for an instant the child she is carrying inside her. At precisely the same moment, somewhere in a prison workshop a female convict is also sewing, thinking, too, about sewing properly, for she is afraid of being punished. One might imagine both women doing the same work at the same time, and having their attention absorbed by the same technical difficulties. And yet a whole gulf of difference lies between one occupation and the other. The whole social problem consists in making the workers pass from one to the other of these two occupational extremes. What is required is that this world and the world beyond, in their double beauty, should be present and associated in the act of work, like the child to be born in the making of the layette. Such an association can be achieved by a mode of presenting thoughts which relates them directly to the movements and operations peculiar to each sort of work, by a process of assimilation sufficiently complete to enable them to penetrate into the very substance of the individual being, and by a habit impressed upon the mind and connecting these thoughts with the work movements.
  • Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

• From modern thought to ancient wisdom the path would be short and direct, if one cared to take it.
  • Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (1949) p. 292

Rollo May (1909-1994)

• You have spent your life making molehills out of mountains—that’s what you’re guilty of. When man was tragic, you made him trivial. When he was picaresque, you called him picayune. When he sufffered passively, you described him as simpering; and when he drummed up enough courage to act, you called it stimulus and response. Man had passion; and when you were pompous and lecturing to your class you called it ‘the satisfaction of basic needs,’ and when you were relaxed and looking at your secretary you called it ‘release of tension.’ You made man over into the image of your childhood erector set or Sunday School maxims—both equally horrendous. ... You didn’t even see the man you were studying! Don’t you think I know he’s a worm at times? But that worm also stands upright and lays stone on stone to make the Parthenon. And that man paused one night on the deser beside the Nile and gazed up at the stars and wondered. And when the stars were setting he went back to his case hut in the hillside and studied the ibis legs painted on hi spottery. And he seized a charred stick from his fire and drew a triangle on the wall, and he made mathematics. And so he taught himself to tell the orbits of the stars, and learned to plant his crops by the rising and falling of the Nile. A worm do that? All that you forgot, didn’t you? ... You thought everybody could be fooled. Everybody but you. You always assumed that you, the fooler, were never fooled! Not a very consistent theory, is it?
  • Rollo May, Saint Peter accusing him in a fantasy, Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967), p. 4

Richard Weaver (1910-1963)

The prevailing conception is that education must be such as will enable one to acquire enough wealth to live on the plane of the bourgeoisie. That kind of education does not develop the aristocratic virtues. It neither encourages reflection nor inspires reverence for the good. ~ Richard Weaver

• The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetite.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948)

• Man created in the divine image, the protagonist of a great drama in which his soul was at stake, was replaced by man the wealth-seeking and -consuming animal.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 6

• In the popular arena, one can tell … that the average man … imagines that an industrious acquisition of particulars will render him a man of knowledge. With what pathetic trust does he recite his facts! He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a great many small things.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 13

• One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today. Charles Péguy has referred to modern man’s feeling of “slow economic strangulation,” his sense of never having enough to meet the requirement which his pattern of life imposes on him. Standards of consumption which he cannot meet, and which he does not need to meet, come virtually in the guise of duties.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), pp. 14-15

• The case of the Baconians is not won until it has been proved that the substitution of covetousness for wantlessness, or an ascending spiral of desires for a stable requirement of necessities, leads to a happier condition.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), pp. 14-15

• Man is constantly being assured that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness. … If he is with a business organization, the odds are great that he has sacrificed every other kind of independence in return for that dubious one known as financial.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 16

• When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder, we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 19

• That it does not matter what a man believes is a statement heard on every side today. … What he believes tells him what the world is for. How can men who disagree about what the world is for agree about any of the minutiae of daily conduct? The statement really means that it does not matter what a man believes so long as he does not take his beliefs seriously.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 23

• It is characteristic of the barbarian … to insist upon seeing a thing “as it is.” The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 24

• The member of a culture … purposely avoids the relationship of intimacy; he wants the object somehow depicted and fictionalized. … He is embarrassed when this is taken out of its context of proper sentiments and presented bare, for he feels that this is a reintrusion of that world which his whole conscious effort has sought to banish. Forms and conventions are the ladder of ascent. And hence the speechlessness of the man of culture when he beholds the barbarian tearing aside some veil which is half adornment, half concealment.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 26

• Today we have media … which actually specialize in the kind of obscenity which the cultivated, not the prurient, find repugnant. … It is contended that such material is the raw stuff of life, and that it is the duty of the organs of public information to leave no one deceived about the nature of the world. The assertion that this is the real world begs the most important question of all. The raw stuff of life is precisely what the civilized man desires to have refined, or presented in a humane framework, for which sentiment alone can afford the support. … One of the great conspiracies against philosophy and civilization, a conspiracy immensely aided by technology, is just this substitution of sensation for reflection.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), pp. 28-30

• The disappearance of the heroic ideal is always accompanied by the growth of commercialism. There is a cause-and-effect relationship here, for the man of commerce is by the nature of things a relativist; his mind is constantly on the fluctuating values of the marketplace, and there is no surer way to fail than to dogmatize and moralize about things.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 32

• Those who based their lives on the unintelligence of sentimentality fight to save themselves with the unintelligence of brutality.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), pp. 33-34

• There is no difficulty in securing enough agreement for action on the point that education should serve the needs of the people. But all hinges on the interpretation of needs; if the primary need of man is to perfect his spiritual being … then education of the mind and the passions will take precedence over all else. The growth of materialism, however, has made this a consideration remote and even incomprehensible to the majority.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 49

• The prevailing conception is that education must be such as will enable one to acquire enough wealth to live on the plane of the bourgeoisie. That kind of education does not develop the aristocratic virtues. It neither encourages reflection nor inspires reverence for the good.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 49

• The average man of the present age … does not want to be a sentimentalist in his endeavors; he wants some measure for purposeful activity; he wants to feel that through the world some increasing purpose runs. … But since his metaphysic calls only for magnitude and number, since it is becoming without a goal, it is not a source of distinctions in value. It is a system of quantitative comparison. Its effect therefore has been to collapse the traditional hierarchy and to produce economic man, whose destiny is mere activity.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 51

• In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 53

• The most important thing about the gentleman was that he was an idealist. … He was bred up to a code of self-restraint which taught resistance to pragmatic temptation. He was definitely a man of sentiment, who refused to put matters on a basis of materialism and self-aggrandizement.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 54

• In the countries of Europe, one after another, the gentleman has been ousted by politicians and entrepreneurs, as materialism has given rewards to the sort of cunning incompatible with any kind of idealism.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 55

• It is an ancient belief, going back to classical antiquity, that specialization of any kind is illiberal in a freeman. A man willing to bury himself in the details of some small endeavor has been considered lost to these larger considerations which must occupy the mind of the ruler.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 56

• … contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 56

• The former distrust of specialization has been supplanted by its opposite, a distrust of generalization. Not only has man become a specialist in practice, he is being taught that special facts represent the highest form of knowledge.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 59

• Since liberalism has become a kind of official party line, we have been enjoined against saying things about races, religions or national groups, for after all, there is no categorical statement without its implication of value, and values begin divisions among men. We must not define, subsume, or judge; we must rather rest on the periphery and display “sensibility toward the cultural expressions of all lands and peoples.” This is a process of emasculation.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 59

• The theory of empiricism is plausible because it assumes that accuracy about small matters prepares the way for valid judgment about large ones. What happens, however, is that the judgments are never made. The pedantic empiricist, buried in his little province of phenomena, imagines that fidelity to it exempts him from concern with larger aspects of reality.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 60

• Fanaticism has been properly described as redoubling one’s effort after one’s aim has been forgotten, and this definition will serve as a good introduction to the fallacy of technology, which is the conclusion that because a thing can be done it must be done. The means absorb completely, and man becomes blind to the very concept of ends.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 60

• It has been remarked that when one passes among the patients of the psychiatric ward, he encounters among the several sufferers every aspect of normal personality in morbid exaggeration. … As one passes through the modern centers of enterprise and of higher learning, he is met with similar autonomies of development. … The scientist, the technician, the scholar, who have left the One for the Many are puffed up with vanity over their ability to describe precisely some minute portion of the world. Men so obsessed with fragments can no more be reasoned with than other psychotics.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 62

• The conclusion, so vexatious to democracy, that wisdom and not popularity qualifies for rule may be forced upon us by the peril in atomic energy.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 65

• The domination of becoming produces another sort of fragmentation, which may be called “presentism.” Allen Tate has made the point that many modern people to whom the word “provincial” is anathema are themselves provincials in the to an extreme degree. Indeed, modernism is in essence a provincialism, since it declines to look beyond the horizon of the moment, just as a countryman may view with suspicion whatever lies beyond his country.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 67

• The very possibility that there may exist timeless truths is a reproach to the life of laxness and indifference which modern egotism encourages. … Ideas which have their reference to the periphery or individuum, to the particular in space and time, are false and stand in the way of integration.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 68

• Under the world view possessed by medieval scholars, the path of learning was a path of self-deprecation. … An opposite conception comes in with Bacon’s “knowledge is power.” If the aim of knowledge is domination, it is hardly to be supposed that the possessors of knowledge will be indifferent to their importance. On the contrary, they begin to swell; the seek triumphs in the material world (knowledge being meanwhile necessarily degraded to skills) which inflate their egotism and self-consideration. Such is a brief history of how knowledge passes from a means of spiritual redemption to a basis for intellectual pride.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 72

• In Greek fable, as in Christian, it is asserted that there is a forbidden knowledge which brings nothing into world but woe. Our generation has had ample demonstration of what that knowledge is. It is knowledge of the useful rather than the true and the good, of techniques rather than of ends.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 72

• In the absence of truth there is no necessity, and this observation may serve as an index to the position of the modern egotist. Having become incapable of knowing, he becomes incapable of working, in the sense that all work is a bringing of the ideal from potentiality into actuality. … The modern worker does not, save in rare instances, respond to the ideal in the task.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 73

• Before the age of adulteration it was held that behind each work there stood some conception of its perfect execution. It was this that gave zest to labor and served to measure the degree of success. To the extent that the concept obtained, there was a teleology in work, since the laborer toiled not merely to win sustenance but to see this ideal embodied in his creation. Pride in craftsmanship is well explained by saying that to labor is to pray, for conscientious effort to realize an ideal is a kind of fidelity. The craftsman of old time did not hurry, because the perfect takes no account of time and shoddy work is a reproach to character. But character itself is an expression of self-control, which does not come of taking the easiest way. Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around.
  
  When utilitarianism becomes enthroned and the worker is taught that work is use and not worship, interest in quality begins to decline. … There is a difference between expressing one’s self in form and producing quantity for a market with an eye to speculation. Péguy wished to know what had become of the honor of work. It has succumbed to the same forces as have all other expressions of honor.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), pp. 73-74

• The bourgeoisie first betrayed society through capitalism and finance, and now labor betrays it by embracing a scheme of things which sees profit only, not duty and honor, in work. This view will seem hopelessly unrealistic to those who do not admit that sentiment toward the whole is the only ultimate means of measuring value.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 75

• The leader may be chosen by the people, but he is guided by the right; and, in the same way, we may say that the worker may be employed by anyone, but that he is directed by the autonomous ideal in the task.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 76

• Much of the effort of modern politicians is devoted to convincing us that men serve best when they are serving one another. But the one consideration which would make this true is left out; service to others is the best service when the effort of all is subsumed under a transcendental conception. Material gratification does not provide this.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 77

• The idea that work is something apportioned out by men leaves people discontent with their portion and dubious about whether work is a good thing at all. … The ancient injunction to labor fades when we regard our work as cut out for us by men, who, by present dogma, are no better than ourselves. That curious modern hypostatization “service” is often called in to substitute for the now incomprehensible doctrine of vocation. It tries to secure subordination by hypothesizing something larger than the self, which turns out, however, to be only a multitude of selfish selves. The familiar change from quality to quantity may again be noted; one serves not the higher part of the self (this entails hierarchy) … but merely consumer demand. And who admires those at the top of a hierarchy of consumption? Man as a consuming animal is thus seen to be not enough.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 77

• When masses of men reach a point at which egotism reigns so blandly, can their political damnation be far off? They have rejected their only guaranty against external control, which is self-discipline, taught and practiced.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 91

• Modern man … when he looks at his daily newspaper … sees the events of the day refracted through a medium which colors them as effectively as the cosmology of the medieval scientist determined his view of the starry heavens. The newspaper is a man-made cosmos of the world of events around us at the time. For the average reader it is a construct with a set of significances which he no more thinks of examining than did his pious forbear of the thirteenth century—whom he pities for sitting in medieval darkness—think of questioning the cosmology. This modern man, too, lives under a dome, whose theoretical aspect has been made to harmonize with a materialistic conception of the world. And he employs its conjunctions and oppositions to explain the occurrences of his time with all the confidence of the now supplanted discipline of astrology.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), pp. 93-94

• Plato was disturbed by written discourse because … if an individual goes to it with a question in his mind, it “always gives one unvarying answer.”
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 95

• There is much to indicate that modern publication wishes to minimize discussion. … For one thing, there is the technique of display, with its implied evaluations. This does more of the average man’s thinking for him than he suspects. For another, there is the stereotyping of whole phrases. These are carefully chosen not to stimulate reflection, but to evoke stock responses of approbation or disapprobation. Headlines and advertising teem with them, and we seem to approach a point at which failure to make the stock response is regarded as faintly treasonable. … Journalism becomes a monstrous discourse of Protagoras, which charms by hypnotizing and thwarts that participation without which one is not a thinking man.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), pp. 96-97

• Modern publication wishes to minimize discussion. … Phrases ... are carefully chosen not to stimulate reflection, but to evoke stock responses of approbation or disapprobation. Headlines and advertising teem with them, and we seem to approach a point at which failure to make the stock response is regarded as faintly treasonable.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), pp. 96-97

• Nothing is more certain than that whatever has to court public favor for its support will sooner or later be prostituted to utilitarian ends. The educational institutions of the United States afford a striking demonstration of this truth. Virtually without exception, liberal education, that is to say, education centered about ideas and ideals, has fared best in those institutions which draw their income from private sources. They have been able … to insist that education be not entirely a means for breadwinning. This means that they have been relatively free to promote pure knowledge and the training of the mind. … In state institutions, always at the mercy of elected bodies and of the public generally, and under obligation to show practical fruits for their expenditure of money, the movement toward specialism and vocationalism has been irresistible. They have never been able to say that they will do what they will with their own because their own is not private. It seems fair to say that the opposite of the private is the prostitute.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), pp. 136-137

• In former times, when the honor of work had some hold upon us, it was the practice of a maker to give his name to the product … But, as finance capitalism grew and men and property separated, a significant change occurred in names: the new designations shed all connection with the individual and become “General,” “Standard,” “International,” “American.”
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 141

• It is likely … that human society cannot exist without some source of sacredness. Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 146

• The word is a sort of deliverance from the shifting world of appearances. The central teaching of the New Testament is that those who accept the word acquire wisdom and at the same time some identification with the eternal.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 149

• One of the most important revelations about a period comes in its theory of language, for that informs us whether language is viewed as a bridge to the noumenal or as a body of fictions convenient for grappling with transitory phenomena.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 150

• In recognizing that words have power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconductor of the current called “emotion” and its concomitant of evaluation.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 152

• The semanticists are exactly wrong in regarding language as an obstruction or series of pitfalls. Language, on the contrary, appears as a great storehouse of universal memory, or it may be said to serve as a net, not imprisoning us but supporting us and aiding us to get at a meaning beyond present meaning through the very fact that it embodies others’ experiences.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 158

• The whole tendency of empiricism and democracy in speech, dress and manners has been toward a plainness which is without symbolic significance. The power of symbolism is greatly feared by those who wish to expel from life all that is nonrational in the sense of being nonutilitarian
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 160

• For modern man, … pride reveals itself in impatience, which is an unwillingness to bear the pain of discipline. … In effect his becomes a deification of his own will; man is not making himself like a god but is taking himself as he is and putting himself in the place of God.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 183

• Education is a process by which the individual is developed into something better than he would have been without it. … The very thought seems in a way the height of presumption. For one thing, it involves the premise that some human beings can be better than others.
  • Richard Weaver, “Education and the individual,” Life Without Prejudice (Chicago: 1965), p. 43

• One of the first major steps in the direction of modern skepticism came through the victory of Occam over Aquinas in a controversy about language. The statement that modi essendi were replaced by modi significandi et intelligendi, or that ontological referents were abandoned in favor of pragmatic significations, describes broadly the change in philosophy which continues to our time. From Occam to Bacon, from Bacon to Hobbes, and from Hobbes to contemporary semanticists, the progression is clear: ideas become psychological figments, words become useful signs.
  • Richard Weaver, “The Power of the Word,” Language is Sermonic (1970), p. 36

• To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world.
  • Richard Weaver, “The Power of the Word,” Language is Sermonic (1970), p. 37

• In recognizing that words have the power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconductor of the current called “emotion” and its concomitant evaluation.
  • Richard Weaver, “The Power of the Word,” Language is Sermonic (1970), p. 37

• The young come to us creatures of imagination and strong affection; they want to feel, but they don’t know how—that is to say, they do not know the right objects and the right measures. And it is entirely certain that if we leave them to the sort of education obtainable today from extra-scholastic sources, the great majority will be schooled in the two vices of sentimentality and brutality. Now great poetry, rightly interpreted, is the surest antidote to both of these. In contrast with journalists and others, the great poets relate the events of history to a pure or noble metaphysical dream, which our students will have all their lives as a protecting arch over their system of values.
  • Richard Weaver, “The Power of the Word,” Language is Sermonic (1970), p. 51

• The discipline of poetry may be expected first to teach the evocative power of words, to introduce the student, if we may so put it, to the mighty power of symbolism, and then to show him that there are ways of feeling about things which are not provincial either in space or time.
  • Richard Weaver, “The Power of the Word,” Language is Sermonic (1970), pp. 52-53

• Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.
  • Richard Weaver, “The Power of the Word,” Language is Sermonic (1970), p. 53

• Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our world. If schools of journalism knew their business, they would graduate no one who could not render the Greek poets.
  • Richard Weaver, “The Power of the Word,” Language is Sermonic (1970), p. 53

• Until the world perceives that “good” cannot be applied to a thing because it is our own, and “bad” because it is another’s, there is no prospect of realizing community.
  • Richard Weaver, “The Power of the Word,” Language is Sermonic (1970), p. 54

• In dialectic the student ... will get training in thinking, whereas the best that he gets now is a vague admonition to think for himself.
  • Richard Weaver, “The Power of the Word,” Language is Sermonic (1970), p. 55

Paul Goodman (1911-1972)

• Social scientists ... have begun to think that “social animal” means “harmoniously belonging.” They do not like to think that fighting and dissenting are proper social functions, nor that rebelling or initiating fundamental change is a social function. Rather, if something does not run smoothly, they say it has been improperly socialized; there has been a failure in communication. ... But perhaps there has not been a failure in communication. Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable. ... We must ask the question, “Is the harmonious organization to which the young are inadequately socialized perhaps against human nature, or not worthy of human nature, and therefore there is difficulty in growing up?”
  • Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 10-11

• It is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system does not want men. They are not safe.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 14

• It is hard to grow up in a society in which one’s important problems are treated as nonexistent. It is impossible to belong to it, it is hard to fight to change it.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 36

• The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 36-37

• To want a job that exercises a man’s capacities in an enterprise useful to society, is utopian anarcho-syndicalism; it is labor invading the domain of management. No labor leader has entertained such a thought in our generation. Management has the “sole prerogative” to determine the products.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 37

• Because of their historical theory of the “alienation of labor” (that the worker must become less and less in control of the work of his hands) the Marxist parties never fought for the man-worthy job itself.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 37

• Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd (1956), p. 83

• We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd (1956), p. 94

• The irony is that in our decades, the combination of rationalism, asceticism, and individualism (the so-called Protestant Ethic) has produced precisely the system of boondoggling, luxury-consumption, and status.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd (1956), p. 143

• The ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through the could and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behavior of passengers who hardly look out the windows.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd (1956), p. 144

• When the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd (1956), p. 144

• A well-known magazine asks a man how they should refer to him, as Psychologist X, as Author X? He suggests man of letters, for that is what he is, in the eighteenth-century meaning. But they can’t buy that because the word doesn’t exist in Time-style; he cannot be that, and presumably the old function of letters cannot exist.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd (1956), p. 145

• One striking characteristic of modern education is the unanimous disapproval of exploiting the powerful feeling of shame. ... Yet in ancient education, e.g. in the Socratic dialogs, this very arousal of shame is a chief device; the teacher greets the hot flush as a capital sign that the youth is educable, he has noble aims. Such a youth has dignity in his very shame.
  
  The difference seems to be that we cannot offer available opportunities for honor, we do not have them; and therefore we must protect what shreds of dignity the youth has. Since he has no future, if we make him ashamed of his past and present, he is reduced to nothing. In other ages, the community had plenty of chances of honor, and to belong to the community itself was an honor.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd (1956), p. 149

• The way in which our society does do honor to its indubitably great men ... is a study in immunizing people against their virus. ... They are the menagerie of Very Important People who exist only for ceremonial occasions. ... This effectually prevents the two practical uses that we could make of them. We neither take seriously the simple, direct, fearless souls that they invariably are, whether humble or arrogant, to model ourselves after them because they make more sense as human beings; nor do we have recourse the them to help us when we have need of exceptional purity, magnanimity, profundity, or imagination.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd (1956), p. 152

• Few great men could pass personnel.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd (1956), p. 153

• We do not behave as if we believed that the affairs of our world were significant enough for the intervention of great men.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd (1956), p. 153

• Let me formulate the artistic disposition as follows: it is reacting with one’s ideal to the flaw in oneself and in the world, and somehow making that reaction formation solid enough in the medium so that it indeed becomes an improved bit of real world for others.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd (1956), p. 176

E. F. Schumacher (1911-1977)

• In 1930, [John Maynard Keynes] felt moved to speculate on the “economic possibilities for our grandchildren” and concluded that the day might not be all that far off when everybody would be rich. We shall then, he said, “once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.”
  
  “But beware!” he continued. “The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and far is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.” ...
  
  The Keynesian message is clear enough: Beware! Ethical considerations are not merely irrelevant, they are an actual hindrance, “for foul is useful and fair is not.” The time for fairness is not yet. The road to heaven is paved with bad intentions. ...
  
  The question with which to start my investigation is obviously this: Is there enough to go round? Immediately we encounter a serious difficulty: What is ‘enough’? Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues “economic growth” as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of “enough.” There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: “Halt! We have enough”? There is none. ...
  
  Keynes, in the same essay from which I have quoted already, advised us that the time was not yet for a “return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable.” ...
  
  If Keynes says that “foul is useful and fair is not,” he propounds a statement of fact which may be true or false; or it may look true in the short run and turn out to be false in the longer run. Which is it?
  
  I should think that there is now enough evidence to demonstrate that the statement is false in a very direct, practical sense. If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures. If whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed achieve astonishing things but they become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence. The Gross National Product may rise rapidly: as measured by statisticians but not as experienced by actual people, who find themselves oppressed by increasing frustration, alienation, insecurity, and so forth. After a while, even the Gross National Product refuses to rise any further, not because of scientific or technological failure, but because of a creeping paralysis of non-cooperation, as expressed in various types of escapism on the part, not only of the oppressed and exploited, but even of highly privileged groups. ...
  
  The foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity, in the modern sense, because such prosperity, if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy, which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man. ...
  
  Man is far too clever to be able to survive without wisdom. No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom. The assertion that “foul is useful and fair is not” is the antithesis of wisdom. The hope that the pursuit of goodness and virtue can be postponed until we have attained universal prosperity and that by the single-minded pursuit of wealth, without bothering our heads about spiritual and moral questions, we could establish peace on earth, is an unrealistic, unscientific, and irrational hope.
  • E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (1973), pp. 22-30

• The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one’s dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war.
  • E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (1973), p. 31

Max Frisch (1911-1991)

• Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.
  • Max Frisch, Homo Faber, Michael Bullock, trans. (1959),

E. M. Cioran (1911-1995)

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich. ~ E. M. Cioran

• Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
  • E. M. Cioran

• The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for truth.
  • E. M. Cioran

• The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.
  • E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born (1973)

• To go still further than Buddha, to raise oneself above Nirvana, to learn to do without it..., to be stopped by nothing, not even the notion of deliverance, regarding it as a mere way-station, an embarrassment, an eclipse.
  • E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born (1973)

• True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.
  • E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered (1983)

Weston La Barre (1911-1996)

• We have too long supposed that the Unknown mysterium tremendum et fascinosum of religion was outside us, when in fact that Unknown, although ego-alien or unconscious, was all the while within us: the alleged “supernatural” is the human “subconscious.”
  • Weston La Barre, Flesh of the Gods (1972), p. 261

• Like the paranoid schizophrenic, the vatic personality pretends to be talking about the grandiose outside cosmic world, but he is really talking grandiosely in symbolic ways only about his narcissistic self and his inner world. The mystic pretends to discard his sensory self in order to meld with the cosmic Self; but in discarding his senses he abjures his only connection with the cosmos and re-encounters only himself. The realities he expounds are inside him.
  • Weston La Barre, Flesh of the Gods (1972), p. 265

Jacques Ellul (1912-1994)

We must unmask the ideological falsehoods of the many powers, and especially we must show that the famous theory of the rule of law which lulls the democracies is a lie from beginning to end. ~ Jacques Ellul

• In a society such as ours, it is almost impossible for a person to be responsible. A simple example: a dam has been built somewhere, and it bursts. Who is responsible for that? Geologists worked out. They examined the terrain. Engineers drew up the construction plans. Workmen constructed it. And the politicians decided that the dam had to be in that spot. Who is responsible? No one. There is never anyone responsible. Anywhere. In the whole of our technological society the work is so fragmented and broken up into small pieces that no one is responsible. But no one is free either. Everyone has his own, specific task. And that's all he has to do.
  
  Just consider, for example, that atrocious excuse… It was one of the most horrible things I have ever heard. The director of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was asked at the Nuremburg trials trials, “But didn’t you find it horrible? All those corpses?” He replied, “What could I do? I couldn’t process all those corpses. The capacity of the ovens was too small. It caused me many problems. I had no time to think about these people. I was too busy with the technical problem of my ovens.” That is the classic example of an irresponsible person. He carries out his technical task and isn’t interested in anything else.
  • Jacques Ellul, The Betrayal by Technology (1993)

• I know many people who like watching commercials because they're so funny. They provide relaxation and diversion. People come home after a day's work, from which they derive little satisfaction, and feel the need for diversion and amusement. The word diversion itself is already very significant. When Pascal uses the word diversion he means that people who follow the path of God deviate from the path which leads them to God as a result of diversion and amusement. Instead of thinking of God, they amuse themselves. So, instead of thinking about the problems which have been created by technology and our work we want to amuse ourselves.
  • Jacques Ellul, The Betrayal by Technology (1993)

• Mankind in the technological world is prepared to give up his independence in exchange for all kinds of facilities and in exchange for consumer products and a certain security. In short, in exchange for a package of welfare provisions offered to him by society. As I was thinking about that I couldn't help recalling the story in the Bible about Esau and the lentil broth. Esau, who is hungry, is prepared to give up the blessings and promise of God in exchange for some lentil broth. In the same way, modern people are prepared to give up their independence in exchange for some technological lentils.
  • Jacques Ellul, The Betrayal by Technology (1993)

• The question now is whether people are prepared or not to realize that they are dominated by technology. And to realize that technology oppresses them, forces them to undertake certain obligations and conditions them. Their freedom begins when they become conscious of these things. For when we become conscious of that which determines our life we attain the highest degree of freedom.
  • Jacques Ellul, The Betrayal by Technology (1993)

• We must not think of the problem in terms of a choice between being determined and being free. We must look at it dialectically, and say that man is indeed determined, but that it is open to him to overcome necessity, and that this act is freedom. Freedom is not static but dynamic; not a vested interest, but a prize continually to be won. The moment man stops and resigns himself, he becomes subject to determinism. He is most enslaved when he thinks he is comfortably settled in freedom.
  • Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1964), p. xxxiii

• As long as technique was represented by exclusively by the machine, it was possible to speak of “man and machine.” The machine remained an external object, and man (though significantly influenced by it in his professional, private, and psychic life) remained none the less independent. He was in a position to assert himself apart from the machine; he was able to adopt a position with respect to it.
  
  But when technique enters into every area of life, including the human, it ceases to be external to man and becomes his very substance. It is no longer face to face but is integrated with him, and it progressively absorbs him. In this respect, technique is radically different from the machine. This transformation, so obvious in modern society, is the result of the fact that technique has become autonomous.
  • Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1964), p. 6

• Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends.
  • Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1964), p. 19

• No technique is possible when men are free. When technique enters into the realm of social life, it collides ceaselessly with the human being to the degree that the combination of man and technique is unavoidable, and that technical action necessarily results in a determined result. Technique requires predictability and, no less, exactness of prediction. It is necessary, then, that technique prevail over the human being. For technique, this is a matter of life or death. Technique must reduce man to a technical animal, the king of the slaves of technique. Human caprice crumbles before this necessity; there can be no human autonomy in the face of technical autonomy. The individual must be fashioned by techniques, either negatively (by the techniques of understanding man) or positively (by the adaptation of man to the technical framework), in order to wipe out the blots his personal determination introduces into the perfect design of the organization.
  • Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1964), p. 138

• Should anarchists vote? ... For my part, like many anarchists, I think not. To vote is to take part in the organization of the false democracy that has been set up forcefully by the middle class. ... The political game can produce no important changes in our society and we must radically refuse to take part in it.
  • Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 14

• We must unmask the ideological falsehoods of the many powers, and especially we must show that the famous theory of the rule of law which lulls the democracies is a lie from beginning to end.
  • Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 16

• I believe that the anarchist fight, the struggle for an anarchist society, is essential, but I also think that the realizing of such a society is impossible.
  • Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 19

• We can denounce not merely the abuses of power but power itself.
  • Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 23

• In his cynical way Napoleon said that the clergy control the people, the bishops the clergy, and he himself the bishops. No one could state more clearly the real situation that the church was an agent of state propaganda.
  • Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 28

• It is impossible for the state or society or an institution to be Christian. Since being Christian presupposes an act of faith, it is plainly impossible for an abstraction like the state.
  • Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 28

• The Jews ... primarily see in God not the universal Creator but their Liberator.
  • Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 39

• Why freedom? If we accept that God is love, and that it is human beings who are to respond to this love, the explanation is simple. Love cannot be forced, ordered, or made obligatory. It is necessarily free. If God liberates, it is because he expects and hopes that we will come to know him and love him.
  • Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 39

• All national rulers, no matter what the nation or the political regime, lord it over their subjects. There can be no political power without tyranny.
  • Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 61

• Jesus does not advocate revolt or material conflict. ... He reverses the question, and as so often challenges his interlocutors: "But you ... it must not be the same among you." In other words, do not be so concerned about fighting kings. Let them be. Set up a marginal society which will not be interested in such things, in which there will be no power, authority or hierarchy. Do not do things as they are usually done in society, which you cannot change. Create another society on another foundation.
  • Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 62

John Passmore (1914-2004)

• If “humility” means nothing more than the capacity to learn from criticism, then it has an undoubted value; but if “humility” means a willingness to submit to authority—to abandon or to modify what one is doing merely because it does not accord with the teachings of the Bible or the thoughts of Chairman Mao—then it is death to the spirit: the proper name for it, indeed, is “servility.”
  • John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man, p. 289

Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970)

• Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a mordant protest written soon after the [1952] election, found the intellectual “in a situation he has not known for a generation.” After twenty years of Democratic rule, during which the intellectual had been in the main understood and respected, business had come back into power, bringing with it “the vulgarization which has been the almost invariable consequence of business supremacy.”
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 4

• Anti-intellectualism ... has been present in some form and degree in most societies; in one it takes the form of the administering of hemlock, in another of town-and-gown riots, in another of censorship and regimentation, in still another of Congressional investigations.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 20

• Anti-intellectualism ... first got its strong grip on our ways of thinking because it was fostered by an evangelical religion that also purveyed many humane and democratic sentiments. It made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality. It has become formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian. Hence, as far as possible, our anti-intellectualism must be excised from the benevolent impulses upon which it lives by constant and delicate acts of intellectual surgery which spare these impulses themselves.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), pp. 22-23

• The professional man lives off ideas, not for them. ... He has acquired a stock of mental skills that are for sale. The skills are highly developed, but we do not think of him as being an intellectual if certain qualities are missing from his work—disinterested intelligence, generalizing power, free speculation, fresh observation, creative novelty, radical criticism. At home he may happen to be an intellectual, but at his job he is a hired mental technician who uses his mind for the pursuit of externally determined ends. It is this element—the fact that ends are set from some interest or vantage point outside the intellectual process itself—which characterizes both the zealot, who lives obsessively for a single idea, and the mental technician, whose mind is used not for free speculation but for a salable end. The goal here is external and not self-determined, whereas the intellectual life has a certain spontaneous character and inner determination. It has also a peculiar poise of its own, which I believe is established by a balance between two basic qualities in the intellectual’s attitude toward ideas—qualities that may be designated as playfulness and piety.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 27

• An intellectual ... lives for ideas—which means that he has a sense of dedication to the life of the mind which is very much like a religious commitment. This is not surprising, for in a very important way the role of the intellectual is inherited from the office of the cleric: it implies a special sense of the ultimate value in existence of the act of comprehension. Socrates, when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living, struck the essence of it. We can hear the voices of various intellectuals in history repeating their awareness of this feeling, in accents suitable to time, place and culture. “The proper function of the human race, taken in the aggregate,” wrote Dante in De Monarchia, “is to actualize continually the entire capacity possible to the intellect, primarily in speculation, then through its extension and for its sake, secondarily in action.” The noblest thing, and the closest possible to divinity, is thus the act of knowing.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), pp. 27-28

• Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 28

• It is the historic glory of the intellectual class of the West in modern times that, of all the classes which could be called in any sense privileged, it has shown the largest and most consistent concern for the well-being of the classes which lie below it in the social scale.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 29

• The intellectual ... may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. Although there have been zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the essence.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 29

• If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea. The effect is as observable in politics as in theology: the intellectual function can be overwhelmed by an excess of piety expended within too contracted a frame of reference.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 29

• Piety, then, needs a counterpoise, something to prevent it from being exercised in an excessively rigid way; and this it has, in most intellectual temperaments, in the quality I would call playfulness. We speak of the play of the mind; and certainly the intellectual relishes the play of the mind for its own sake, and finds in it one of the major values in life. What one thinks of here is the element of sheer delight in intellectual activity. Seen in this guise, intellect may be taken as the healthy animal spirits of the mind, which come into exercise when the surplus of mental energies is released from the tasks required for utility and mere survival. “Man is perfectly human,” said Schiller, “only when he plays.” And it is this awareness of an available surplus beyond the requirements of mere existence that his maxim conveys to us. Veblen spoke often of the intellectual faculty as “idle curiosity”—but this is a misnomer in so far as the curiosity of the playful mind is inordinately restless and active. This very restlessness and activity gives a distinctive cast to its view of truth and its discontent with dogmas.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 30

• As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 30

• Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 30

• In using the terms play and playfulness, I do not intend to suggest any lack of seriousness; quite the contrary. Anyone who has watched children, or adults, at play will recognize that there is no contradiction between play and seriousness, and that some forms of play induce a measure of grave concentration not so readily called forth by work.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 30

• Intellect is neither practical nor impractical; it is extra-practical.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 30

• To the zealot overcome by his piety and to the journeyman of ideas concerned only with his marketable mental skills, the beginning and end of ideas lies in their efficacy with respect to some goal external to intellectual processes.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 31

• Historically, it may be useful to fancy playfulness and piety as being the respective residues of the aristocratic and priestly backgrounds of the intellectual function. The element of play seems to be rooted in the ethos of the leisure class, which has always been central in the history of creative imagination and humanistic learning. The element of piety is reminiscent of the priestly inheritance of the intellectuals: the quest for and the possession of truth was a holy office. As their legatee, the modern intellectual inherits the vulnerability of the aristocrat to the animus of Puritanism and egalitarianism and the vulnerability of the priest to anticlericalism and popular assaults upon hierarchy. We need not be surprised, then, if the intellectual’s position has rarely been comfortable in a country which is, above all others, the home of the democrat and the antinomian.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), pp. 32-33

• The intellectual’s ... playfulness, in its various manifestations, is likely to seem to most men a perverse luxury; in the United States the play of the mind is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgence. His piety is likely to seem nettlesome, if not actually dangerous. And neither quality is considered to contribute very much to the practical business of life.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 33

• There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 37

• Intellect needs to be understood not as some kind of claim against the other human excellences for which a fatally high price has to be paid, but rather as a complement to them without which they cannot be fully consummated.
  • Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 46

Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980)

• In the process of teaching and writing one must constantly consider the thoughts of men with different ideas. And prolonged and ever-new exposure to a wide variety of outlooks—together with the criticism many professors seek from both their students and their colleagues—is a more profound experience than most people realize. It is a long-drawn-out trial by fire, marked by frequent disillusionment, discoveries, and despair, and by a growing regard for honesty, which is surely one of the most difficult of all the virtues to attain. What one comes up with in the end owes quite as much to this continual encounter as it does to any other experience.
  • Walter Kaufmann, “The faith of a heretic,” Harper's Magazine, February 1959

• We have no wish to indoctrinate; we want to teach our students to resist indoctrination and not accept as authoritative the beliefs of other men or even the ideas that come to us as in a flash of illumination. Even if one has experiences that some men would call mystical—and I have no doubt that I have had many—it is a matter of integrity to question such experiences and any thoughts that were associated with them as closely and as honestly as we should question the “revelations” of others. To be sure, it is easier to grant others their “revelations” as “true for them” while insisting on one's own as “true for oneself.” Such intellectual sluggishness parades as sophistication. But true tolerance does not consist in saying, “You may be right, but let us not make hard demands on ourselves: if you will put your critical intelligence to sleep, I'll put mine to bed, too.” True tolerance remains mindful of the humanity of those who make things easy for themselves and welcomes and even loves honest and thoughtful opposition above less thoughtful agreement.
  • Walter Kaufmann, “The faith of a heretic,” Harper's Magazine, February 1959

• Popular Buddhism with its profuse idolatry, its relics, and its superstitions repels me, and I have reservations even about the teachings of the Buddha. I admire much of his profound analysis of man's condition: the world has no purpose; it is up to us to give our lives a purpose; and we cannot rely on any supernatural assistance. Life is full of suffering, suffering is rooted in desire and attachment, and much desire and attachment are rooted in ignorance. By knowledge, especially of the Buddha's teachings, it is possible to develop a pervasive detachment, not incompatible with a mild, comprehensive compassion—and to cease to suffer. But ... the price for the avoidance of all suffering is too high. Suffering and sacrifice can be experienced as worthwhile: one may find beauty in them and greatness through them.
  • Walter Kaufmann, “The faith of a heretic,” Harper's Magazine, February 1959

• I do not read [the Old Testament] as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too.
  • Walter Kaufmann, “The faith of a heretic,” Harper's Magazine, February 1959

• Nietzsche [in The Gay Science § 143] denounced monotheism for preaching the existence of one Normalgott as a single norm which suggests somehow that there is also a Normalmensch: a norm to which all men must conform and a bar to the development of individuality. It was the advantage of polytheism, Nietzsche contends, that it allowed for a “multiplicity of norms.” (Gay Science § 143)
  • Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche, p. 308

• Faith takes the place of action: instead of perfecting oneself, one has faith that Christ was perfect
  • Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche, p. 346, describing Nietzsche’s view of Luther

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

• And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
  You command is clear as a lading-list.
  Anything else must not, for you, be thought
  To exist.
  And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,
  We half-identify the blind impress
  All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
  But to confess,
  On that green evening when our death begins,
  Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
  Since it applied only to one man once,
  And that one dying.
  • Philip Larkin, “Continuing to Live”

Philip Rieff (1922-2006)

• Analytic therapy is thus a form of re-education; Freud specifically called it that. It is re-education so far as it eliminates those symptoms through which the patient has tried, mistakenly, to resolve the contradictions in his life.
  • Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

• What hope there is derives from Freud’s assumption that human nature is not so much a hierarchy of high-low, and good-bad, as his predecessors believed, but rather a jostling democracy of contending predispositions, deposited in every nature in roughly equal intensities. … Psychoanalysis is full of such mad logic; it is convincing only if the student of his own life accepts Freud’s egalitarian revision of the traditional idea of a hierarchical human nature.
  • Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

• Both Socrates and Christ taught economic man to be at least slightly ashamed of himself when he failed to sacrifice the lower capacity to the higher. Freud is America’s great teacher, despite his ardent wish to avoid that fate. For it was precisely the official and parental shams of high ideals that Freud questioned. In their stead, Freud taught lessons which Americans, prepared by their own national experience, learn easily: survive, resign yourself to living within your moral means, suffer no gratuitous failures in a futile search for ethical heights that no longer exist—if they ever did.
  • Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

• The alternatives with which Freud leaves us are grim only if we view them from the perspective of some past possibility. … The grimness is relieved by the gaiety of being free from the historic Western compulsion of seeking large and general meanings for small and highly particular lives.
  • Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

• The ascetic was limited, and often broken, in his organizational usefulness by a naïve dedication to principle.
  • Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

• Symbolic impoverishment ceases to be a problem precisely because the rich have found functional equivalents for a system of compelling moral demands, in analysis and art, which may be said to be a mode of self-reverence.
  • Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

• In classical cultures, an ascended class had to justify itself before those now below in the social structure. But the culture revolution of our time has eliminated this need for class- as well as self-justification. Nevertheless, those below still seek to emulate the ascendant social class, without being convinced of its superiority.
  • Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

• The United States and the post-Stalinist Soviet Union … share the same cultural aims. Both issue from the assumption that wealth is a superior and adequate substitute for symbolic impoverishment. Both American and Soviet cultures are essentially variants of the same belief in wealth as the functional equivalent of a high civilization. In both cultures, the controlling symbolism has been stripped down to belief in the efficacy of wealth. Quantity has become quality. The answer to all questions of “what for?” is “more.”
  • Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

• Only cultureless societies can exist without presiding presences. No presence can preside when all are subject to abandonments quick as their adoptions. Our passionate truths are so provisional, they move so quickly with the electrified times, that none can prepare us to receive them deeply into ourselves, as character.
  • Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers (1973)

• The collegiate young are being re-educated before they have been educated. From our collegiate ranks, the therapeutic will appear a re-educated man, one who can conquer even his subtler inhibitions; his final know-how will be to irrationalize his rationality and play games, however intellectualized, with all god-terms in order to be ruled by none. In their moral modestly therapeutics will be capable of anything; they will know that everything is possible because they will not be inhibited by any truth. Far more destructively than earlier interdict-burdened character types, the therapeutic will be the warring state writ small; he may be even cannier, less sentimental, stronger in ego, shifting about his principles and impulses like so many stage props.
  • Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers (1973)

Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)

• To know oneself means, among other things, to know oneself qua non-sage: that is, not as a sophos, but as a philo-sophos, someone on the way toward wisdom.
  • Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 90

• We may get some idea of the change in perspective that may occur in our reading and interpretation of the philosophical works of antiquity when we consider them from the point of view of the practice of spiritual exercises. Philosophy then appears in its original aspect: not as a theoretical construct, but as a method for training people to live and to look at the world in a new way. It is an attempt to transform mankind. Contemporary historians of philosophy are today scarcely inclined to pay attention to this aspect, although it is an essential one. The reason for this is that, in conformity with a tradition inherited from the Middle Ages … they consider philosophy to be purely abstract-theoretical activity.
  • Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 107

• With the advent of medieval Scholasticism, … we find a clear distinction between theologia and philosophia. Theology became conscious of its autonomy qua supreme science, which philosophy was emptied of its spiritual exercises, which, from now on, were relegated to Christian mysticism and ethics. Reduced to the rank of a “handmaid of theology,” philosophy’s role was henceforth to furnish theology with conceptual—and hence purely theoretical—material. When, in the modern age, philosophy regained its autonomy, it still retained many features inherited from this medieval conception. In particular, it maintained its purely theoretical character, which even evolved in the direction of a more and more thorough systemization. Not until Nietzsche, Bergson, and existentialism does philosophy consciously return to being a concrete attitude, a way of life and of seeing the world.
  • Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 107

• Socrates had no system to teach. Throughout, his philosophy was a spiritual exercise, an invitation to a new way of life, active reflection, and living consciousness.
  • Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase, p. 157

• Every person—whether Greek or Barbarian—who is in training for wisdom, leading a blameless, irreproachable life, chooses neither to commit injustice nor return it unto others, but to avoid the company of busybodies, and hold in contempt the places where they spend their time—courts, councils, marketplaces, assemblies—in short, every kind of meeting or reunion of thoughtless people. ... People such as these, who find their joy in virtue, celebrate a festival their whole life long.
  • Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 264

• There was a Socratic style of life (which the Cynics were to imitate), and the Socratic dialogue was an exercise which brought Socrates’ interlocutor to put himself in question, to take care of himself, and to make his soul as beautiful and wise as possible.
  • Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 269

• One of the characteristics of the university is that it is made up of professors who train professors, or professionals training professionals. Education was this no longer directed toward people who were to be educated with a view to become fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in other that they might learn how to train other specialists. This is the danger of “Scholasticism,” that philosophical tendency which began to be sketched at the end of antiquity, developed in the Middle Ages, and whose presence is still recognizable in philosophy today.
  • Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 270

• Philosophy—reduced, as we have seen, to philosophical discourse—develops from this point on in a different atmosphere and environment from that of ancient philosophy. In modern university philosophy, philosophy is obviously no longer a way of life, or a form of life—unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy.
  • Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 271

• One could say that what differentiates ancient from modern philosophy is the fact that, in ancient philosophy, it was not only Chrysippus or Epicurus who, just because they had developed a philosophical discourse, were considered philosophers. Rather, every person who lived according to the precepts of Chrysippus or Epicurus was every bit as much a philosopher as they.
  • Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase, p. 272

• Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists.
  • Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase, p. 272

• Philosophy in antiquity was an exercise practiced at each instant. It invites us to concentrate on each instant of life, to become aware of the infinite value of the each present moment, once we have replaced it within the perspective of the cosmos. The exercise of wisdom entails a cosmic dimension. Whereas the average person has lost touch with the world, and does not see the world qua world, but rather treats the world as a means of satisfying his desires, the sage never ceases to have the whole constantly present to mind.
  • Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase, p. 273

• Just as virtuous praxis consists in choosing no other goal than virtue and in wanting to be a good person without seeking any particular interest, so theoretical praxis consists in choosing no goal other than knowledge. It means wanting to know for its own sake, without pursuing any other particular, egoistic interest which would be alien to knowledge. This is an ethics of disinterestedness and objectivity.
  • Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy, Michael Chase trans., p. 81

• Whereas Platonism and Aristotelianism were reserved for an elite which had the “leisure” to study, carry out research, and contemplate, Epicureanism and Stoicism were addressed to everyone: rich and poor, male and female, free citizens and slaves. Whoever adopted the Epicurean or Stoic way of life would be considered a philosopher, even if he or she did not develop a philosophical discourse
  • Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy, Michael Chase trans., p. 108

• It is as though, by suppressing the state of dissatisfaction which had absorbed him is the search for a particular object, he [Epicurus] was finally free to become aware of something extraordinary, already present in him unconsciously: the pleasure of his own existence
  • Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy, Michael Chase trans., p. 116, describing the doctrines of Epicurus

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)

• When the native hears a speech about Western culture he pulls out his knife—or at least he makes sure it is within reach. The violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and of thought of the native mean that, in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when Western values are mentioned in front of him.
  • Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of The Earth (1963), p. 43

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

• We must free ourselves from the sacralization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and human relations as thought.
  • Michel Foucault, “Practicing criticism, or, is it really important to think?”, interview by Didier Eribon, May 30-31, 1981, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. L. Kriztman (1988), p. 155

• Modern man no longer communicates with the madman ... There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.
  • Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, preface to the 1961 edition

• What is constitutive is the action that divides madness, and not the science elaborated once this division is made.
  • Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, R. Howard, trans. (1988), Preface

Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)

• I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.
  • Noam Chomsky, Red and Black Revolution

• Controversy may rage as long as it adheres to the presuppositions that define the consensus of elites, and it should furthermore be encouraged within these bounds, thus helping to establish these doctrines as the very condition of thinkable thought while reinforcing the belief that freedom reigns.
  • Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions (1989)

• Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
  • Noam Chomsky, Interview on WBAI, January 1992

• The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
  • Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, 1998

• It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.
  • Noam Chomsky, “The World After September 11th”, AFSC Conference at Tufts University, Massachusetts, December 8, 2001

Milan Kundera (b. 1929)

• The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
  • Milan Kundera, as quoted in The Guardian (1988-06-03)

• Every novel says to the reader: ‘Things are not as simple as you think.’ That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers.
  • Milan Kundera

• How sweet it would be to forget the monster that saps our brief lives as cement for its vain monuments.
  • Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere, cited in Testaments Betrayed (1995), p. 17

• Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the view­point of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.
  • Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed (1995), p. 7

• The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.
  • Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, M. Heim, trans. (New York: 1984)

Allan Bloom (1930-1992)

• Hobbes and Locke, and the American Founders following them, intended to palliate extreme beliefs, particularly religious beliefs, which lead to civil strife. … In order to make this arrangement work, there was a conscious, if covert, effort to weaken religious beliefs, partly by assigning—as a result of a great epistemological effort—religion to the realm of opinion as opposed to knowledge. But the right to freedom of religion belonged to the realm of knowledge. Such rights are not matters of opinion. No weakness of conviction was desired here. … It was possible to expand the space exempt from legitimate social and political regulation only by contracting the claims to moral and political knowledge. ... In the end it begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all. ... The inflamed sensitivity induced by radicalized democratic theory finally experiences any limit as arbitrary and tyrannical. There are no absolutes; freedom is absolute. Of course the result is that, on the one hand, the argument justifying freedom disappears and, on the other, all beliefs begin to have the attenuated character that was initially supposed to be limited to religious belief.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 28

• Only in the Western nations, i.e., those influenced by Greek philosophy, is there some willingness to doubt the identification of the good with one’s own way. One should conclude from the study of non-Western cultures that not only to prefer one’s own way but to believe it best, superior to all others, is primary and even natural—exactly the opposite of what is intended by requiring students to study these cultures. What we are really doing is applying a Western prejudice—which we covertly take to indicate the superiority of our culture—and deforming the evidence of those other cultures to attest to its validity. The scientific study of other cultures is almost exclusively a Western phenomenon, and in its origin was obviously connected with the search for new and better ways, or at least for validation of the hope that our own culture really is the better way, a validation for which there is no felt need in other cultures. … In attacking ethnocentrism, what they actually do is to assert unawares the superiority of their scientific understanding and the inferiority of the other cultures which do not recognize it at the same time that they reject all such claims to superiority.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 36

• History and the study of cultures do not teach or prove that values or cultures are relative. All to the contrary, that is a philosophical premise that we now bring to our study of them. This premise is unproven and dogmatically asserted for what are largely political reasons. History and culture are interpreted in the light of it, and then are said to prove the premise. Yet the fact that there have been different opinions about good and bad in different times and places in no way proves that none is true or superior to others. To say that it does so prove is as absurd as to say that the diversity of points of view expressed in a college bull session proves there is no truth. On the face of it, the difference of opinion would seem to raise the question as to which is true or right rather than to banish it. The natural reaction is to try to resolve the difference, to examine the claims and reasons for each opinion.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 39

• It was always known that there were many and conflicting opinions about the good, and nations embodying each of them. Herodotus was at least as aware as we are of the rich diversity of cultures. But he took that observation to be an invitation to investigate all of them to see what was good and bad about each and find out what he could learn about good and bad from them. Modern relativists take that same observation as proof that such investigation is impossible and that we must be respectful of them all. Thus students, and the rest of us, are deprived of the primary excitement derived from the discovery of diversity.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 40

• Men are likely to bring what are only their prejudices to the judgment of alien peoples. Avoiding that is one of the main purposes of education. But trying to prevent it by removing the authority of men’s reason is to render ineffective the instrument that can correct their prejudices.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 40

• Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled. It is historicism’s ruse to remove all resistance to history, which in our day means public opinion, a day when public opinion already rules.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 41

• Television enters not only the room, but also the tastes of old and young alike, appealing to the immediately pleasant and subverting whatever does not conform to it.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 59

• Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois, meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 59

• My grandparents found reasons for the existence of their family and the fulfillment of their duties in serious writings, and they interpreted their special sufferings with respect to a great and ennobling past. … There was a respect for real learning, because it had a felt connection with their lives. … I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been educated in the American way, all of whom are M.D.s or Ph.D.s, have any comparable learning. When they talk about heaven and earth, the relations between men and women, parents and children, the human condition, I hear nothing but clichés, superficialities, the material of satire.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 60

• The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 60

• Their souls are like mirrors, not of nature, but of what is around.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 61

• The contempt for the heroic is only an extension of the perversion of the democratic principle that denies greatness and wants everyone to feel comfortable in his skin without having to suffer unpleasant comparisons. Students have not the slightest notion of what an achievement it is to free oneself from public guidance and find resources for guidance within oneself. … Liberation from the heroic only means that they have no resource whatsoever against conformity to the current “role models.” They are constantly thinking of themselves in terms of fixed standards that they did not make. Instead of being overwhelmed by Cyrus, Theseus, Moses or Romulus, they unconsciously act out the roles of the doctors, lawyers, businessmen or TV personalities around them. One can only pity young people without admirations they can respect or avow, who are artificially restrained from the enthusiasm for great virtue.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), pp. 66-67

• Man is a being who must take his orientation by his possible perfection. To attempt to suppress this most natural of all inclinations because of possible abuses is, almost literally, to throw out the baby with the bath. Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly. As it now stands, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 67

• Civilization or, to say the same thing, education is the taming or domestication of the soul’s raw passions—not suppressing or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy—but forming and informing them as art.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 71

• Students are not in a position to know the pleasures of reason; they can only see it as a disciplinary and repressive parent.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 72

• Education is not sermonizing to children against their instincts and pleasures, but providing a natural continuity between what they feel and what they can and should be.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 80

• A true political or social order requires the soul to be like a Gothic cathedral, with selfish stresses and strains helping to hold it up. Abstract moralism condemns certain keystones, removes them, and then blames both the nature of the stones and the structure when it collapses.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), pp. 129-130

• [Freud’s psychology] turned out to be psychology without the psyche, i.e., without the soul. Freud just did not give a satisfying account of all the things we experience. Everything higher had to be a repression of something lower, and a symbol of something else rather than itself. … Aristotle said that man has two peaks, each accompanied by intense pleasure: sexual intercourse and thinking. … Freud saw only one focus in the soul, the same one as the brutes have, and had to explain all psychology’s higher phenomena by society’s repression or other such versions of the Indian rope trick.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), pp. 136-137

• Freud’s “know thyself” led them to the couch, where they emptied their tank of the compressed fuel, which was intended to power them on their flight from opinion to knowledge.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 137

• Nihilism in its most palpable sense means that the bourgeois has won, that the future, all foreseeable futures, belong to him, that all heights above him and all depths beneath him are illusory and that life is not worth living on these terms.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), pp. 157-158

• Americans … do not naturally apply the term “bourgeois” to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to call themselves middle class, but that does not carry with it any determinate spiritual content. … The term “middle class” does not have any of the many opposites that bourgeois has, such as aristocrat, saint, hero, or artist—all good.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 158

• Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory procedure and a practically costly one. The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look to his real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in him, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise him perfection or salvation but merely buys him off.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 177

• Honesty compels serious men, on examination of their consciences, to admit that the old faith is no longer compelling. It is the very peak of Christian virtue that demands the sacrifice of Christianity.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), pp. 195-196

• It is Nietzsche’s merit that he was aware that to philosophize is radically problematic in the cultural, historicist dispensation. He recognized the terrible intellectual and moral risks involved. At the center of his every thought was the question “How is it possible to do what I am doing?” He tried to apply to his own thought the teachings of cultural relativism. This practically nobody else does. For example, Freud says that men are motivated by desire for sex and power, but be did not apply those motives to explain his own science or his own scientific activity. But if he can be a true scientist, i.e., motivated by love of the truth, so can other men, and his description of their motives is thus mortally flawed. Or if he is motivated by sex or power, he is not a scientist, and his science is only one means among many possible to attain those ends. This contradiction runs throughout the natural and social sciences. They give an account of things that cannot possibly explain the conduct of their practitioners. The highly ethical economist who speaks only about gain, the public-spirited political scientist who sees only group interest are symptomatic of the difficulty of providing a self-explanation for science and a ground for the theoretical life.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), pp. 203-204

• When the liberal … teaching became dominant, as is the case with most victorious causes, good arguments became less necessary; and the original good arguments, which were difficult, were replaced by plausible simplifications—or by nothing. The history of liberal thought since Locke and Smith has been one of almost unbroken decline in philosophic substance.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 210

• The man without ideology, the one possessing science, can look to the economic infrastructure and see that Plato’s political philosophy, which teaches that the wise should rule, is only a rationalization for the aristocrats’ position in a slave economy; or that Hobbes’s political philosophy, which teaches man’s freedom in the state of nature and the resulting war of all against all, is only the cover for the political arrangements suitable for the rising bourgeoisie. This point of view provides the foundation for intellectual history, which tells the story behind the story. Instead of looking at Plato and Hobbes for information about what courage is—a subject important to us—we should see how their definitions of courage suited those who controlled the means of production. But what applies to Plato and Hobbes cannot apply to Marx; otherwise the very assertion that these thinkers were economically determined would be itself a deception, simply the ideology for the new exploiters Marx happens to serve. The interpretation would self-destruct. He would not know what to look for in the thinkers who were inevitably and unconsciously in the grip of the historical process, for he would be in the same condition as they were.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 218

• In the absence of anything else to which to turn, the common beliefs of most men are almost always what will determine judgment. This is just where tradition used to be most valuable. … Tradition does provide a counterpoise to and a repair from the merely current, and contains the petrified remains of old wisdom (along with much that is not wisdom). The active presence of a tradition in a man’s soul gives him a resource against the ephemeral, the kind of resource that only the wise can find simply within themselves. The paradoxical result of the liberation of reason is greater reliance on public opinion for guidance, a weakening of independence.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), pp. 246-247

• Although every man in democracy thinks himself individually the equal of every other man, this makes it difficult to resist the collectivity of equal men. If all opinions are equal, then the majority of opinions, on the psychological analogy of politics, should hold sway.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 247

• Unless there is some strong ground for opposition to majority opinion, it inevitably prevails. This is the really dangerous form of the tyranny of the majority, not the kind that actively persecutes minorities but the kind that breaks the inner will to resist because there is no qualified source of nonconforming principles and no sense of superior right. The majority is all there is. What the majority decides is the only tribunal.
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 247

Harvey Mansfield (b. 1932)

• Politics is about who deserves to be more important: which leader from which party with which ideas. Politics assumes that the contest for importance is important; in a grander sense it assumes that human beings are important. Political science today avoids this question. It is inspired by the famous title of a book by Harold D. Lasswell, published in 1935, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How? The focus is on the benefits you get—what, when, and how. It ought to be on the who—on who you think you are and why you are so important as to deserve what you get.
  • Harvey Mansfield, “How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science”

• The ambition of political science, to be scientific in the manner of natural science, is the reason why it ignores the question of importance. Scientific truth is objective and is no respecter of persons; it regards the concern for importance as a source of bias, the enemy of truth. Individuals in science can claim prizes, nations can take pride in them, but this sort of recognition is outside science, which is in principle and fact a collective, anonymous enterprise.
  • Harvey Mansfield, “How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science”

• The self is a simplification of the notion of soul, created to serve the purposes of the modern sciences of psychology and economics, both of which want you to be happy in a simple, straightforward way they can count.
  • Harvey Mansfield, “How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science”

• If self-interest is obvious, it is not really your very own; it has been generalized, perhaps artificially.
  • Harvey Mansfield, “How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science”

• The demand for more civility in politics today should be directed toward improving the quality of our insults, seeking civility in wit rather than blandness.
  • Harvey Mansfield, “How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science”

Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

• One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling... which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views.
  • Susan Sontag, Rolling Stone Interview

• Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning.
  • Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, p. 6

• The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.
  • Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

• Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
  • Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, p. 7

• Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable.
  • Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, p. 8

• The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
  • Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation,

• In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
  • Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, p. 14

Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

• The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.
  • Carl Sagan

Sarah Kofman (1934-1994)

• Dialectics and reflection play the same role for the philosopher as does verse for the poet.
  • Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor (1972), Duncan Large, trans. (Stanford: 1983), p. 13

• Things are never beautiful by themselves but appear so to anyone who projects on to them his superabundance of life. But just as unconscious activity is unaware of itself as such, so man ‘forgets himself’ as the cause of these ‘beauties’ and imagines that the world itself is laden with them.
  • Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor (1972), Duncan Large, trans. (Stanford: 1983), p. 29

Albert Nolan (b. 1934)

• The sinners would have included those who did not pay their tithes (one tenth of their income) to the priests, and those who were negligent about the sabbath rest and about ritual cleanliness. The laws and customs on these matters were so complicated that the uneducated were quite incapable of understanding what was expected of them. Education in those days [Biblical times] was a matter of knowing ... the law and all its ramifications. The illiterate and uneducated were inevitably lawless and immoral. The ‘am ha-arez, or uneducated peasants, ‘the rabble who know nothing of the law’ (John 7:49) were regarded by even the most enlightened Pharisees, like Hillel, as incapable of virtue and piety.
  • Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 23

• The sinners ... did not even have the consolation of feeling they were in God’s good books. The educated people told them that they were displeasing to God and “they ought to know.”
  • Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 24

• The sinners ... had been taught to think of sin as the failure of observe laws of which they were usually quite ignorant. Sin was therefore not always a fully deliberate act.
  • Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 26

• The remarkable thing about Jesus was that, although he came from the middle class and had no appreciable disadvantages himself, he mixed socially with the lowest of the low and identified himself with them. He became an outcast by choice.
  
  Why did Jesus do this? What would make a middle-class man talk to beggars and mix socially with the poor? What would make a prophet associate with the rabble who know nothing of the law? The answer comes across very clearly in the gospels: compassion.
  • Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 27

• Miracles are very often thought of, both by those who believe in them and by those who do not, as events, or purported events, that contradict the laws of nature and that therefore cannot be explained by science or reason. But this is not at all what the Bible means by a miracle, as any Biblical scholar will tell you. “The laws of nature” is a modern scientific concept. The Bible knows nothing about nature, let alone the laws of nature.
  • Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 33

• Rejoicing and celebrating with sinners was incomprehensibly scandalous (Luke 15:1). They [the Pharisees] could only assume that he [Jesus] had become a pleasure-seeker, “a drunkard and a glutton” (Luke 7:34).
  • Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 42

• There can be no doubt that Jesus was a remarkably cheerful person and that his joy, like his faith and hope, was infectious. This was in fact the most characteristic and most noticeable difference between Jesus and John [the Baptist]. As we shall see later, Jesus feasted while John fasted (Luke 7:31-34).
  • Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 42

• The Christian belief in heaven originated after the death of Jesus with the idea that he had been taken up into heaven or exalted to the right hand of God.
  • Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 46

• Many Christians have been misled for centuries about the nature of God’s kingdom by the well-known mistranslation of Luke 17:21: “The kingdom of God is within you.” Today all serious scholars and translators would agree that the test should read: “The kingdom of God is among you or in your midst.” The Greek word entos can means “within” or “among.”
  • Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 46

• The kingdom of God, like any other kingdom, cannot be within a man; it is something within which a man can live.
  • Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 47

• The much quoted text, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36) does not mean that the kingdom is not, or will not be, in this world or on this earth. ... When Jesus and his disciples are said to be in the world but not of the world, the meaning is clear enough. Although they live in the world they are not worldly, they do not subscribe to the present values and standards of the world. ... The values of the kingdom [of God] are different from, and opposed to, the values of this world. There is no reason for thinking that it means the kingdom will float in the air somewhere above the earth or that it will be an abstract entity without any tangible social and political structure.
  • Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 48

• “Those who humble themselves will be exalted” is not a promise of future prestige to those who have no prestige now or to those who have given up all reliance upon prestige. It is the promise that they will no longer be treated as inferior but will receive full recognition as human beings. Just as the poor are not promised wealth but the satisfaction of their needs—no one shall want; so the little ones are not promised status and prestige but the full recognition of their dignity as human beings.
  • Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 57

• The leaders and scholars of Jesus’ time had first enslaved themselves to the law. This not only enhanced their prestige in society, it also gave them a sense of security. Man fears the responsibility of being free. It is often easier to let others make the decisions or to rely upon the letter of the law. Some men want to be slaves.
  
  After enslaving themselves to the letter of the law, such men always go on to deny freedom to others. They will not rest until they have imposed the same oppressive burdens upon everyone (Matt 23:4,15).
  • Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 71

• Jesus wanted to liberate everyone from the law—from all laws. But this could not be achieved by abolishing or changing the law. He had to dethrone the law. He had to ensure that the law be man’s servant and not his master (Mark 2:27-28). Man must therefore take responsibility for his servant, the law, and use it to serve the needs of mankind.
  • Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 72

Edward Said (1935-2003)

• For the intellectual class, expertise has usually been a service rendered, and sold, to the central authority of society. This is the trahison des clercs of which Julien Benda spoke in the 1920s. Expertise in foreign affairs, for example, has usually meant the legitimization of the conduct of foreign policy and, what is more to the point, a sustained investment in revalidating the role of experts in foreign affairs. The same sort of thing is true of literary critics and professional humanists, except that their expertise is based upon noninterference in what Vico grandly calls the world of nations but which prosaically might just as well be called “the world.” We tell our students and our general constituency that we defend the classics, the virtues of a liberal education, and the precious pleasures of literature even as we also show ourselves to be silent (perhaps incompetent) about the historical and social world in which all these things take place. ...

  Humanists and intellectuals accept the idea that ... cultural types are not supposed to interfere in matters for which the social system has not certified them.

  • Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), pp. 2-3

• The intellectual origins of literary theory in Europe were, I think it is accurate to say, insurrectionary. The traditional university, the hegemony of determinism and positivism, the reification of ideological bourgeois “humanism,” the rigid barriers between academic specialties: it was powerful responses to all these that linked together such influential progenitors of today’s literary theorist as Saussure, Lukács, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. Theory proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that all the domains of human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity. ...

  Literary theory, whether of the Left or the Right, has turned its back on these things. This can be considered, I think, the triumph of the ethic of professionalism. But it is no accident that the emergence of so narrowly defined a philosophy of pure textuality and critical noninterference has coincided with the ascendancy of Reaganism.

  • Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), pp. 3-4

Donald Phillip Verene (b. 1937)

• Contemporary philosophy illustrates Hegel’s dictum that philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, for in our age philosophy yields to the objectifying technical impulse and loses its ancient task of pursuing the Socratic ideal of the wisdom of the examined life.
  • Donald Phillip Verene, Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (1997), p. 191

Jon Sobrino (b. 1938)

• God is not simply power, as most people were inclined to think. God is love, and he manifests himself in the dialectics of an impotent love. ... The emperor is not God. Jesus desacralizes that kind of power and its claim to be the absolute mediation of God. The pax romana is not the kingdom of God. The political organization of Rome might dazzle the world with its power, but it was oppressive; hence there was nothing sacred or divine about it. ... In Jesus' eyes God's ultimate historical word is love, whereas the ultimate historical word of power in the human world is oppression. Jesus' journey to the cross is a trial dealing with the authentic nature of power.
  • Christology at the Crossroads (1978), p. 369

• At its beginnings there was very powerful meditation on the presence of Christ in the oppressed Indians, which objectively pointed toward a christology of the "body of Christ." Guamán Poma, for example, said, "By faith we know clearly that where there is a poor person there is Jesus Christ himself," and Bartolomé de las Casas declared, "In the Indies I leave Jesus Christ, our God, being whipped and afflicted, and buffeted and crucified, not once but thousands of times, as often as the Spaniards assault and destroy those people." But this original christological insight did not thrive, and what became the tradition was a christology based on the dogmatic formulas, in which—however well they were known and understood—what was stressed was the divinity of Christ rather than his real and lived humanity.
  • Jesus the Liberator (1991) p. 11

• The sublime title "Christ" is an adjective which only receives its specific value from the specificity of the noun, Jesus of Nazareth. If Jesus is forgotten, then it becomes possible to fill the adjective with whatever suits at the time, without checking whether Jesus was like that or not, or whether this means leaving the world sunk in its wretchedness or not; or worse still, without asking if this image legitimates the tragedy of the world or brings liberation from it.
  • Jesus the Liberator (1991) p. 15

• On the one hand, there is the type of sinner whom, in present-day language, we would call ‘oppressor.’ Their basic sin consists in oppressing, placing intolerable burdens on others, acting unjustly and so on. On the other hand, there are those who sin ‘from weakness’ or those ‘legally considered sinners’ according to the dominant religious view.

  Jesus takes a very different approach to each group. He offers salvation to all, and makes demands of all, but in a very different way. He directly demands a radical conversion of the first group, an active cessation from oppressing. For these, the coming of the Kingdom is above all a radical need to stop being oppressors.

  • Jesus the Liberator (1991) pp. 96-97

• The ideal person cannot be thought of as the whole person developed from the possibilities of the present-day person, but as the "new man" who, to become such, has to pass through the critique and negation of the present-day person.
  • Jesus the Liberator (1991) p. 117

Anthony Giddens (b. 1938)

• Political economy ... founds its theory of society upon the self-seeking of the isolated individual. Political economy, in this way, “incorporates private property into the very essence of man.”
  • Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), p. 14 (Quote is from Marx, Early Writings (1964), p. 148)

• The main form of crude communism is based upon emotional antipathy towards private property, and asserts that all men should be reduced to a similar level, so that everyone has an equal share of property. This is not genuine communism, Marx asserts, since it rests upon the same sort of distorted objectification of labor as is found in the theory of political economy. Crude communism of this sort becomes impelled towards a primitive asceticism, in which the community has become the capitalist instead of the individual. In crude communism, the rule of property is still dominant, but negatively: “Universal envy setting itself up as a power is only a camouflaged form of cupidity which re-establishes itself and satisfies itself in a different way.”
  • Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), p. 16 (Quote is from Marx, 'Early Writings (1964), p. 154)

• The main defect of idealism in philosophy and history is that it attempts to analyze the properties of societies by inference from the content of the dominant systems of ideas in those societies. But this neglects altogether the fact that there is not a unilateral relationship between values and power: the dominant class is able to disseminate ideas which are the legitimations of its position of dominance. Thus the ideas of freedom and equality which come to the fore in bourgeois society cannot be taken at their “face value,” as directly summing up social reality; on the contrary, the legal freedoms which exist in bourgeois society actually serve to legitimize the reality of contractual obligations in which propertyless wage-labor is heavily disadvantaged as compared to the owners of capital. ... While ideologies obviously show continuity over time, neither this continuity. nor any changes which occur, can be explained purely in terms of their internal content. Ideas do not evolve on their own account; they do so as elements of the consciousness of men living in society.
  • Anthony Giddens, describing Marx’s view, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), pp. 41-42

Benjamin R. Barber (b. 1939)

• Not only psychiatry itself but also the values reflected in its statistical definition of “normalcy” serve to condition men to habitual, unthinking, conformist behavior.
  • Benjamin R. Barber, “Forced to be Free: An Illiberal Defense of Liberty,” Superman and Common Men (New York: 1971), pp. 68-69

J. M. Coetzee (b. 1940)

As during the time of kings it would have been naive to think that the king’s firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naive to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest. The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict. ~ J. M. Coetzee

• Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether.
  • J. M. Coetzee, “Erasmus’s Praise of Folly: Rivalry and Madness,” Neophilologus 76 (1992), p. 1

• It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from ‘the wise man’s mouth’ but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.
  • J. M. Coetzee, “Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry,” Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996), p. 94

• As during the time of kings it would have been naive to think that the king’s firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naive to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest. The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict.
  • J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (2008), p. 14

• If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a candidate for political office, subject yourself to the scrutiny and the vote of fellow citizens. Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian.
  • J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (2008), p. 15

• Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who submits to no such moral test. To hold on to power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary.
  • J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (2008), p. 17

• The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.
  • J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (2008), p. 17

• The typical reaction of liberal intellectuals is to seize on the contradiction here: How can something be both wrong and right, or at least both wrong and OK, at the same time? What liberal intellectuals fail to see is that this so-called contradiction expresses the quintessence of the Machiavellian and therefore the modern, a quintessence that has been thoroughly absorbed by the man in the street. The world is ruled by necessity, says the man in the street, not by some abstract moral code. We have to do what we have to do. If you wish to counter the man in the street, it cannot be by appeal to moral principles, much less by demanding that people should run their lives in such a way that there are no contradictions between what they say and what they do. Ordinary life is full of contradictions; ordinary people are used to accommodating them. Rather, you must attack the metaphysical, supra-empirical status of necessità and show that to be fraudulent.
  • J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (2008), p. 17

Quentin Skinner (b. 1940)

• The lack of freedom suffered by those who advise the powerful may of course be due to coercion or force. But the slavish behavior typical of such counselors may equally well be due to their basic condition of dependence and their understanding of what their clientage demands of them. As soon as they begin to ‘slide into a blind dependence upon one who has wealth and power’, they begin to desire ‘only to know his will’, and eventually ‘care not what injustice they do, if they may be rewarded’.
  • Quentin Skinner, describing the view of Algernon Sidney, Liberty Before Liberalism (1998), p. 93

• To Namier it had seemed obvious that political theories act as the merest ex post facto rationalisations of political behaviour. If we are looking for explanations of political action, he maintained, we must seek them at the level of ‘the underlying emotions, the music, to which ideas are a mere libretto, often of very inferior quality’. For critics of Namier such as Sir Herbert Butterfield, the only possible retort seemed to be to go back to a famous dictum of Lord Acton's to the effect that ideas are often the causes rather than the effects of public events. But this response duly incurred the scorn of Namier and his followers for the alleged naiveté of supposing that political actions are ever genuinely motivated by the principles used to rationalise them.
  • Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (1998), p. 104

• One of the present values of the past is as a repository of values we no longer endorse, of questions we no longer ask. One corresponding role for the intellectual historian is that of acting as a kind of archaeologist, bringing buried intellectual treasure back to the surface, dusting it down and enabling us to consider what we think of it.
  • Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (1998), p. 112

• It is remarkably difficult to avoid falling under the spell of our own intellectual heritage. As we analyse and reflect on our normative concepts, it is easy to become bewitched into believing that the ways of thinking about them bequeathed to us by the mainstream of our intellectual traditions must be the ways of thinking about them. … The history of philosophy, and perhaps especially of moral, social and political philosophy, is there to prevent us from becoming too readily bewitched. The intellectual historian can help us to appreciate how far the values embodied in our present way of life, and our present ways of thinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made at different times between different possible worlds. This awareness can help to liberate us from the grip of any one hegemonal account of those values and how they should be interpreted and understood. Equipped with a broader sense of possibility, we can stand back from the intellectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit of enquiry what we should think of them.
  • Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (1998), pp. 116-117

John Carroll (b. 1944)

• Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype—the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 12

• In so far as the intention of education is to train the child for a vocation it is a millstone around his neck.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 34

• The attachment to a rationalistic, teleological notion of progress indicates the absence of true progress; he whose life does not unfold satisfyingly under its own momentum is driven to moralize it, to set up goals and rationalize their achievement as progress.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 34

• Education is the strongest weapon available for restricting the questions people ask, controlling what they think, and ensuring that they get their thoughts ‘from above’.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 34

• By punishing the criminal the moral man hopes to dissuade the evil imprisoned in his own breast from escaping. Fear of self is projected in hatred of the immoral other.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 35

• Stirner and Nietzsche … reveal how prone morality is to being used as a means of rationalization, a cloak for concealing violent and brutish passions, and making their sadistic expression a virtue.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 38

• Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 38

• The virtual suppression of ethical discussion after 1845 produces the semblance of purely descriptive analysis, dressed in the mantle of positivist objectivity, analysis which is, in fact, strung to a framework of crude, because unexplicated, moral assumptions.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace(1974), p. 80

• Stirner’s political praxis is quixotic. It accepts the established hierarchies of constraint as given. … Not liable to any radical change, they constitute part of the theatre housing the individual’s action. … The egoist uses the elements of the social structure as props in his self-expressive act.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace(1974), p. 85

• Nietzsche … explicates his preferred distinction between good and bad individuals as non-condemnatory of the latter. A ‘bad person’ is merely devoid of what Nietzsche personally considers to be noble or virtuous qualities; he is not morally evil. Nietzsche’s aim is … to defuse morality of reactive emotion. … It would be futile, tactless, and cruel, he suggests, to try to change a bad person, one with whom one does not empathize; his formula advises: ‘Where you cannot love, pass by’. No one should be blamed for what he is; there is no point in lamenting fate.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace(1974), p. 91

• The ugliness of the ideological lies in its legitimating the pursuit of the trivial.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace(1974), p. 92

• Copernicus and Darwin undermined man’s image of himself as the ‘measure of all things’. Newton provided him with a new hope … that of ‘man as the measurer of all things’.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace(1974), p. 97

• Ownership of thought depends on the thinker not subordinating himself to a ‘ruling thought’. This is particularly difficult, argues Stirner, … for language itself is a network of ‘fixed ideas’. Truths emerge only when language is reworked and possessed individually.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace(1974), p. 107

• Stirner … holds to a joy-principle rather than to a pleasure-principle.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace(1974), p. 143

• Modern anthropology … opposes the utilitarian assumption that the primitive chants as he sows seed because he believes that otherwise it will not grow, the assumption that his economic goal is primary, and his other activities are instrumental to it. The planting and the cultivating are no less important than the finished product. Life is not conceived as a linear progression directed to, and justified by, the achievement of a series of goals; it is a cycle in which ends cannot be isolated, one which cannot be dissected into a series of ends and means.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace(1974), pp. 150-151

• The Inquisitor is the forgiving father, the scientific materialist, and the social engineer. He is the most compassionate, and honest, of politicians; he takes on great burdens of responsibility in order to protect his subjects from ethical doubt. But he also suppresses any attempt to expand their self-consciousness: he is the ‘great simplifier’, the shepherd to a flock of carefree children.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace(1974), p. 153

• Unlike Hegel’s progress model of history, which moves by stages, each containing its own logic of growth and decline, the economic model develops as the simple function of one money-variable over time, with a long-term trend which increases monotonically.
  • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace(1974), p. 168

Russell Jacoby (b. 1945)

• Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. ... The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), p. 1

• The application of planned obsolescence to thought itself has the same merit as its application to consumer goods; the new is not only shoddier than the old, it fuels an obsolete social system that staves off its replacement by manufacturing the illusion that it is perpetually new.
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), p. xvii

• Exactly because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged; to be transcended it must first be remembered.
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), p. 5

• The original Marxist notion of ideology was conveniently forgotten because it inconveniently did not exempt common sense and empiricism from the charge of ideology.
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), pp. 6-7

• The sundering of a scientific from a poetic truth is the primal mark of the administrative mind.
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), p. 9

• In accepting the bourgeois form of reason as Reason itself, Roszak does his bit to perpetuate its reign.
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), p. 10

• Freud’s link to a Hegelian tradition—with which he otherwise shares little—is in the deliberate renunciation of common sense. “A person who professes to believe in commonsense psychology,” Freud is reported saying once, “and who thinks psychoanalysis is ‘far-fetched’ can certainly have no understanding of it, for it is common sense which produces all the ills we have to cure.”
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), pp. 19-20

• The Adlerians, in the name of “individual psychology,” take the side of society against the individual.
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), p. 23

• Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), p. 25

• [Freud's] concepts are radical in their pursuit of society where it allegedly does not exist: in the privacy of the individual. Freud undid the primal bourgeois distinction between private and public, the individual and society. ... Freud exposed the lie that subject was inviolate; he showed that at every point is was violated.
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), p. 26

• Freudian concepts exposed the fraud of the existence of the “individual.” To be absolutely clear here: the Freudian concepts expose the fraud, not so as to perpetuate it, but undo it. That is, unlike the mechanical behaviorists, the point was not to prove that the individual was an illusion; rather it was to show to what extent the individual did not yet exist.
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), p. 30

• The post-Freudians ... have fallen victim to the ravages of the intellectual division of labor.
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), p. 58

• Dialectical logic is loyal to the contradictions, not by the reasoning of “on the one hand and the other” but by tracing the contradictions to their fractured source.
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), p. 60

• The concept of “human existence” suggests an abstract human condition; “class existence” indicts bad conditions. The former suggests a nonexistent egalitarianism, as if master and slave, owner and worker, bomber and bombed all participate in the same universal abstraction. ... The human condition for the rich is the inhuman one for the impoverished.
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), p. 62

• Instead of ideologically synchronizing contradictions, or assigning them to separate halls of the academy, critical theory seeks to articulate them.
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), p. 73

• Those seeking to work out the relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis have not been immune to the intellectual division of labor that severs the life nerve of dialectical thought.
  • Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), p. 74

• What does cultural pluralism signify in the absence of economic pluralism? Perhaps the question seems meaningless. Yet the apparent lack of meaning signals the intellectual retreat. The economic structure of society—call it advanced industrial society or capitalism or the market economy—stands as the invariant; few can imagine a different economic project. The silent agreement says much about multiculturalism. No divergent political or economic vision animates cultural diversity. From the most militant Afrocentrism to the most ardent feminists, all quarters subscribe to very similar beliefs about work, equality and success. The secret of cultural diversity is its political and economic uniformity. The future looks like the present with more options. Multiculturalism spells the end of utopia.
  • Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia (1999), pp. 39-40

Terence McKenna (1946-2000)

• We're playing with half a deck as long as we tolerate that the cardinals of government and science should dictate where human curiosity can legitimately send its attention and where it can not.
  • Terence McKenna, Non-Ordinary States Through Vision Plants (1988)

• Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.
  • Terence McKenna, “Shamanism and the Archaic Revival”

John Trudell (1946-2015)

We have to understand who we are and where we fit in the natural order of the world because our oppressor deals in illusions. They tell us that it is power, but it is not power. They may have all the guns and they may have all the racist laws and judges, and they may control all the money, but that is not power. These are imitations of power and they are only ‘power’ because in our minds we allow it to be power. ~ John Trudell

Our obligations and loyalty should not be to a government that has proven time and time again that it is the enemy of the people unless the people are rich in dollars. ... The Earth gives us life, not the American government. The earth gives us life, not the multi-national corporate government. The Earth gives us life. We need to have the Earth. We must have it, otherwise our life will be no more. So we must resist what they do. ~ John Trudell

• There are insane people who wish to rule the world. They wish to continue to rule the world on violence and repression, and we are all the victims of that violence and repression.

• They are going to become more brutal. They are going to become more oppressive.

• We have to understand who we are and where we fit in the natural order of the world because our oppressor deals in illusions. They tell us that it is power, but it is not power. They may have all the guns and they may have all the racist laws and judges, and they may control all the money, but that is not power. These are imitations of power and they are only ‘power’ because in our minds we allow it to be power.

• This oppressor, this machine that has gone mad and run amok, it is beserk. They keep telling us, "progress.” They keep telling us “face reality.” Well, let’s deal with reality. Reality is the Earth can no longer take this attack. We can no longer allow this Thing to continue when it’s polluting the air, it’s polluting the water, polluting our food.

• They pollute the air, they pollute the water, they pollute our food, they pollute our minds.

• Our obligations and loyalty should not be to a government that will not take care of our needs. Our obligations and loyalty should not be to a government that has proven time and time again that it is the enemy of the people unless the people are rich in dollars.

• The Earth gives us life, not the American government. The earth gives us life, not the multi-national corporate government. The Earth gives us life. We need to have the Earth. We must have it, otherwise our life will be no more. So we must resist what they do.

Raymond Geuss (b. 1947)

• Nietzsche seems sometimes to replace the “transcendence” which stands at the center of traditional accounts—the existence of a transcendent God, or, failing that, a transcendental viewpoint—with that of a continually transcending activity. … There is no single, final perspective, but given any one perspective, we can always go beyond it.
  • Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton: 2005), pp. 8-9

• The idea that all problems either have a solution or can be shown to be pseudo-problems is not one I share.
  • Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton: 2005), p. 9

• Asking what the question is, and why the question is asked, is always asking a pertinent question.
  • Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 17

• Neither the good nor the true is self-realizing, so it is not generally a sufficient explanation of why people believe that X that X is true, or of why people do Y that Y is good.
  • Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (2008)

Camille Paglia (b. 1947)

• Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects government to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of its authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as a tyrant father but demands it behave as nuturant mother.
  • Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990), pp. 2-3

• Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature. Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men. Hence the sexes are caught in a comedy of historical indebtedness. Man, repelled by his debt to a physical mother, created an alternate reality, a heterocosm to give him the illusion of freedom. Woman, at first content to accept man’s protections but now inflamed with desire for her own illusory freedom, invades man’s systems and suppresses her indebtedness to him as she steals them. … She has inherited the anxiety of influence.
  • Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990), p. 9

• Most of western culture is a distortion of reality. But reality should be distorted; that is, imaginatively amended. The Buddhist acquiescence to nature is neither accurate about nature nor just to human potential.
  • Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990), p. 13

Eckhart Tolle (b. 1948)

“I am bored.”
Who knows this?
“I am sad.”
Who knows this?
You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.

• When you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• Create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• You can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• The ego ... reduces the present to a means to an end.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• Cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• Instead of quoting the Buddha, be the Buddha.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• Even such a seemingly trivial and “normal” thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong—defending the mental position with which you have identified—is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation. ... Both are illusions.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• Make it your practice to withdraw attention from past and future whenever they are not needed. Step out of the time dimension as much as possible in everyday life.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• Start by observing the habitual tendency of your mind to want to escape from the Now. You will observe that the future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it. Another factor has come in, something that is not of the mind: the witnessing presence.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• Be present as the watcher of your mind.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• If you then become excessively focused on the goal, ... the Now is no longer honored. It becomes reduced to a mere stepping stone to the future, with no intrinsic value. Clock time then turns into psychological time. Your life’s journey is no longer an adventure, just an obsessive need to arrive.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• A state of consciousness totally free of all negativity ... is the liberated state to which all spiritual teachings point. It is the promise of salvation, not in an illusory future but right here and now.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• Hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now and therefore your unhappiness.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• If there is no joy, ease, or lightness in what you are doing, it does not necessarily mean that you need to change what you are doing. It may be sufficient to change the how. “How” is always more important than “what.” See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• Do not be concerned with the fruit of your action—just give attention to the action itself.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• The moment your attention turns to the Now, you feel a presence, a stillness, a peace. You no longer depend on the future for fulfillment and satisfaction—you don’t look to it for salvation.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• But if your destination, or the steps you are going to take in the future, take up so much of your attention that they become more important to you than the step you are taking now, then you completely miss the journey’s inner purpose, which has nothing to do with where you are going or what you are doing, but everything to do with how. It has nothing to do with future but everything to do with the quality of your consciousness at this moment.
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

• Close your eyes and say to yourself: “I wonder what my next thought is going to be.” Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole?
  • Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p. 77

• Movements developed within all major religions that represented not only a rediscovery, but in some cases an intensification of the light of the original teaching. This is how Gnosticism and mysticism came into existence in early and medieval Christianity, Sufism in the Islamic religion, Hasidism and Kabbala in Judaism, Advaita Vedanta in Hinduism, Zen and Dzogchen in Buddhism. ... Unlike mainstream religion, their teachings emphasized realization and inner transformation.
  • Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth (2004), Chapter 2

• “I am bored.” Who knows this?
  “I am angry, sad, afraid.” Who knows this?
  You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.
  • Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks (2003)

• On the surface it seems that the present moment is only one of many, many moments. Each day of your life appears to consist of thousands of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more deeply, is there not only one moment, ever? Is life ever not this moment? This one moment, now, is the only thing you can never escape from. The one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens. No matter how much your life changes. One thing is certain. Its always now. Since there is no escape from the now, why not welcome it, become friendly with it.
  • Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks (2003)

Alain Finkielkraut (b. 1949)

• DeMaistre and Bonald … wanted to teach men submission, to give them the religion of established power, to substitute, in Bonald’s phrase, “the evidence of authority for the authority of evidence.”
  • Alain Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought, D. O’Keefe, trans. (London: 1988), p. 22

James Richardson (b. 1950)

• The cynic suffers the form of faith without love. Incredulity is his piety.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #16

• The viruses that co-opt the machinery of our cells; the stories we allow to enter and explain us.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #27

• If you do everything for one reason, then all you have done will become meaningless when the reason does.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #41

• Value yourself according to the burdens you carry, and you will find everything a burden.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #52

• On what is valuable thieves and the law agree.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #75

• Books serve us simply by opening a window on all we wanted to say and feel and think about. We may not even notice that they have not said it themselves till we go back to them years later and do not find what we loved in them. You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #92

• A belief is a question we have put aside so we can get on with what we believe we have to do.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #100

• The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #112

• Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #114

• Only the dead have discovered what they cannot live without.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #120

• Often you only have to ask What would I do if I were not afraid?
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #121

• Success is whatever humiliation everyone has agreed to compete for.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #135

• The god of many cannot remain the true god.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #138

• I’m surprised that multiple personalities are so much less common in reality than in fiction: what a little disorder it would take, a distraction, a sleep, for one of our minor characters to imagine he was the star, to speak out for everyone else. And that’s what it would be, a change of billing, not of authorship. For you do not write your play—you are just the character in it called The Playwright. The real writer, you never meet.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #139

• Seizing on a piece of business, I become tiny, eager, efficient: roiled water I cannot see into.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #146

• If I do not waste time, I am wasting my time.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #146

• What did you do today? Nothing say our little children, and so do I. What we most are is what we keep mistaking for nothing.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #155

• I don’t know what’s meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #165

• To practice Sincerity is to burden everyone else with believing you.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #170

• Let me have my dreams but not what I dream of.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #197

• Water deepens where it has to wait.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #224

• It’s amazing that I sit at my job all day and no one sees me clearly enough to say What is that boy doing behind a desk?
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #247

• Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don’t understand.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #251

• He does not deserve your praise, but he deserves to be treated as if someday he might.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #293

• The best way to get people to do what you want is not to be too particular about what you want.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #295

• First he gathered what he needed. Then he needed to keep gathering what he used to need.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #314

• It is less important to escape pain than to avoid exceptionless rules.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #326

• The new gets old much faster than the old gets older.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #348

• The man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #349

• Envy is ashamed of itself. If it weren’t hanging back, it would go all the way to emulation and love.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #355

• Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #398

• I lied. And my embarrassment was so great that I changed everything else to make the lie true.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #403

• Say too soon what you think and you will say what everyone else thinks.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #405

• The mind is like a well-endowed museum, only a small fraction of its holdings on view at any one time.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #407

• I am not unambitious. I am just too ambitious for what you call ambitions.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #412

• Judging itself brings the pain of being judged. The wicked judge mistakes this for another crime of the accused and lengthens his sentence.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #441

• Patience is decisive indecision.
  • James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001), #451

• Happiness, like water, is always available, but so often it seems we’d prefer a different drink.
  • James Richardson, Interglacial (2004), Aphorism #2

• Birds of prey don’t sing.
  • James Richardson, Interglacial (2004), Aphorism #7

• How often feelings are circular. How embarrassing to be embarrassed. How annoying to be annoyed.
  • James Richardson, Interglacial (2004), Aphorism #27

• Happiness is the readiness to be happy.
  • James Richardson, Interglacial (2004), Aphorism #33

• There is no road to the land without roads.
  • James Richardson, Interglacial (2004), Aphorism #99

• That others know: science. That others choose: politics.
  • James Richardson, Interglacial (2004), Aphorism #112

• Solitude takes time. One becomes alone, like a towel drying.
  • James Richardson, Interglacial (2004), Aphorism #115

• I worked so hard to understand it that it must be true.
  • James Richardson, Interglacial (2004), Aphorism #131

Michel Onfray (b. 1959)

• Subversion consists in leading a philosophical life in which the dominant virtues of our mercantile era (money, power, wealth, ostentation, honors, search for celebrity, futility, mundanity, passion for appearances, ...) are completely ignored and replaced without fanfare by real values: being in contrast to having; power over oneself and not over others; indifference towards money - whether we have it or not, nothing will be done to get it; supremacy of inner life against the empire of the eyes of the other upon self; refusal of honors, of the sense of being preferred, of the sense of honor; indifference towards celebrity - whether one has it or not, the important thing is to do nothing to get it; the desire to build oneself in depth, away from mundane superficiality; in short, the sculpting of the self as a deed for you, and not as a fiction for the other.
  • Michel Onfray

Jason Stanley (b. 1969)

• Elites in civil society invariably acquire a flawed ideology to explain their possession of an unjust amount of the goods of society. The purpose of the flawed ideology is to provide an apparently factual (in the best case, apparently scientific) justification for the otherwise manifestly unjust distribution of society’s goods. ... As a mechanism of social control, the elite seek to instill the ideology in the negatively privileged groups. By this route, the negatively privileged groups acquire the beliefs that justify the very structural features of their society that cause their oppression.
  • Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works (Princeton University Press: 2015), p. 269

Alain de Botton (b. 1969)

• Socrates compared living without thinking systematically to practicing an activity like pottery or shoemaking without following or even knowing of technical procedures. One would never imagine that a good pot or shoe would result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex task of directing one’s life could be undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals? Perhaps because we don’t believe that directing our lives is in fact complicated. Certain difficult activities look very difficult from the outside, while other equally difficult activities look very easy. Arriving at sound views on how to live falls into the second category, making a pot or a shoe into the first.
  • Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy (New York: 2000), p. 21

• Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. … At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question “What will make me happy?” as “What will make me healthy?” … Our souls do not spell out their troubles.
  • Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy (New York: 2000), pp. 53-54

Merold Westphal

• To assume that one’s existential task is completed when the individual is brought into right relation with society, that is, when the individual has been socialized, is to absolutize society and confuse society with God.
  • Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, p. 35

Mark Slouka

• The alarm rings and we’re off, running so hard that by the time we stop we’re too tired to do much of anything except nod in front of the TV, which, like virtually all the other voices in our culture, endorses our exhaustion, fetishizes and romanticizes it and, by daily adding its little trowelful of lies and omissions, helps cement the conviction that not only is this how our three score and ten must be spent but that the transaction is both noble and necessary.
  • Mark Slouka, “Quitting the paint factory: On the virtues of idleness,” Harper’s, November 2004

• Forget the visions of sanctioned leisure: the view from the deck in St. Moritz, the wafer-thin TV. Consider the price.
  • Mark Slouka, “Quitting the paint factory: On the virtues of idleness,” Harper’s, November 2004

• Leisure is permissible, we understand, because it costs money; idleness is not, because it doesn’t. Leisure is focused; whatever thinking it requires is absorbed by a certain task: sinking that putt, making that cast, watching that flat-screen TV. Idleness is unconstrained, anarchic. Leisure—particularly if it involves some kind of high-priced technology—is as American as a Fourth of July barbecue. Idleness, on the other hand, has a bad attitude. It doesn’t shave; it’s not a member of the team; it doesn’t play well with others. It thinks too much, as my high school coach used to say. So it has to be ostracized.
  • Mark Slouka, “Quitting the paint factory: On the virtues of idleness,” Harper’s, November 2004

Brian Leiter

• The Marxian theory of ideology predicts that the ruling ideas in any well functioning society will be ideas that promote the interests of the ruling class in that society, i.e., the class that is economically dominant. By the “ruling ideas” we should understand Marx to mean the central moral, political and economic ideas that dominate discussion in the mass media and in the corridors of power in that society. The theory is not peculiar to Marx, since the “classical realists” of antiquity like the Sophists and Thucydides advanced essentially the same theory: the powerful clothe their pursuit of self-interest in the garb of morality and justice. When Marx says that, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” (The German Ideology) and that, “Law, morality, religion are to [the proletariat] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests” (The Communist Manifesto), he is simply translating in to Marxian terms the Sophistic view “that the more powerful will always take advantage of the weaker, and will give the name of law and justice to whatever they lay down in their own interests.” (W.K.C. Guthrie, The Sophists (1971), p. 60)
  • Brian Leiter, “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud”

• A justified true belief isn’t “knowledge” when the justification for the true belief isn’t the cause of why the agent holds the belief.
  • Brian Leiter, “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud”

• On Marx’s view an individual is flourishing when ... he labors freely, meaning that work is an end-in-itself, and not merely a means to “earn a living.”
  • Brian Leiter, “Morality Critics,” The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (2007)

• Ideologies involve a mistake about their origin: agents think that the ideology arose because of its responsiveness to epistemically relevant considerations (e.g., evidence, reasons, etc.), when, in fact, it arose only because it was responsive to the interests of the dominant economic class in the existing economic system.
  • Brian Leiter, “Morality Critics,” The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (2007)

• Science may be in the interest of the ruling class, after all, but it is still responsive to epistemic norms, and so anyone with epistemic interests has reason to accept science. Ideologies, by contrast, have their genesis explained solely by their capacity to further the interests of the ruling class.
  • Brian Leiter, “Morality Critics,” The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (2007)

• Nietzsche's paradigmatic worry seems to be the following: that a nascent creative genius will come to take the norms of MPS [morality in the pejorative sense] so seriously that he will fail to realize his genius. Rather than tolerate (even welcome) suffering, he will seek relief from hardship and devote himself to the pursuit of pleasure; rather than practice what Nietzsche calls “severe self-love”, and attend to himself in the ways requisite for productive creative work, he will embrace the ideology of altruism, and reject “self-love” as improper; rather than learn how to look down on himself, to desire to overcome his present self and become something better, he will embrace the prevailing rhetoric of equality—captured nicely in the pop-psychology slogan “I'm O.K., you're O.K.”—and thus never learn to feel the contempt for self that might lead one to strive for something more.
  • Brian Leiter, “Morality Critics,” The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (2007)

Leon R. Kass

• Not being held to the usual dues expected of a licensed humanist—professing specialized knowledge or publishing learned papers—I have been able to wander freely and most profitably in all the humanistic fields. I have come to believe that looking honestly for the human being, following the path wherever it leads, may itself be an integral part of finding it. A real question, graced by a long life to pursue it among the great books, has been an unadulterated blessing.
  • Leon R. Kass, “Looking for an Honest Man”

• In contrast to 50 years ago, few licensed humanists today embrace any view of the humanities that could in fact justify making them the centerpiece of a college curriculum.
  • Leon R. Kass, “Looking for an Honest Man”

• To seek an honest man is, at once, to seek a human being worthy of the name, an honest-to-goodness exemplar of the idea of humanity, a truthful and truth-speaking embodiment of the animal having the power of articulate speech.
  • Leon R. Kass, “Looking for an Honest Man”

• I turned to [Aristotle's] De Anima (On Soul), expecting to get help with understanding the difference between a living human being and its corpse, relevant for the difficult task of determining whether some persons on a respirator are alive or dead. I discovered to my amazement that Aristotle has almost no interest in the difference between the living and the dead. Instead, one learns most about life and soul not, as we moderns might suspect, from the boundary conditions when an organism comes into being or passes away, but rather when the organism is at its peak, its capacious body actively at work in energetic relation to—that is, in “souling”—the world: in the activities of sensing, imagining, desiring, moving, and thinking.
  • Leon R. Kass, “Looking for an Honest Man”

• Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Aristotle's teaching concerns the goals of ethical conduct. Unlike the moralists, Aristotle does not say that morality is a thing of absolute worth or that the virtuous person acts in order to adhere to a moral rule or universalizable maxim. And unlike the utilitarians, he does not say morality is good because it contributes to civic peace or to private gain and reputation. Instead, Aristotle says over and over again that the ethically excellent human being acts for the sake of the noble, for the sake of the beautiful.
  
  The human being of fine character seeks to display his own fineness in word and in deed, to show the harmony of his soul in action and the rightness of his choice in the doing of graceful and gracious deeds. The beauty of his action has less to do with the cause that his action will serve or the additional benefits that will accrue to himself or another—though there usually will be such benefits. It has, rather, everything to do with showing forth in action the beautiful soul at work, exactly as a fine dancer dances for the sake of dancing finely. As the ballerina both exploits and resists the downward pull of gravity to rise freely and gracefully above it, so the person of ethical virtue exploits and elevates the necessities of our embodied existence to act freely and gracefully above them. Fine conduct is the beautiful and intrinsically fulfilling being-at-work of the harmonious or excellent soul.
  • Leon R. Kass, “Looking for an Honest Man”

Jacques Berlinerblau

• Today's secularists too often have very little accurate knowledge about religion, and even less desire to learn. This is problematic insofar as their sense of self is constructed in opposition to religion. Above all, the secularist is not a Jew, is not a Christian, not a Muslim, and so on. But is it intellectually responsible to define one's identity against something that one does not understand?
  • Jacques Berlinerblau, The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (2005), p. 1

• Secularism, at its absolute best, comprises an unrelenting commitment to judicious and self-correcting critique. ... Secularism’s “job” consists of criticizing all collective representations. Its analytical energies should be inflicted on any type of mass belief or empowered orthodoxy, whether it is religious, political, scientific, aesthetic, and so on. ... Secularism, as we envision it, is elitist and heretical by nature. When it aspires to become a popular movement, an orthodoxy, or the predicate of a nation-state, it betrays itself.
  • Jacques Berlinerblau, The Secular Bible (2005), p. 7

Andrew Abbott

• Education doesn’t have aims. It is the aim of other things.
  • Andrew Abbott, “Welcome to the University of Chicago,” Aims of Education Address, September 26, 2002

David Detmer

• Surely at least some of our logical principles … are far more evident and obvious to us than are any of the empirical generalizations we find in psychology, or in any other of the empirical sciences. Thus, to attempt to explain logic in terms of psychology is to explain the more certain by the less certain. It is, in short, to commit the fallacy of obscurum per obscurius.
  • David Detmer, Challenging Postmodernism (New York: 2003), p. 24

• There is an obscurum per obscurius problem as well. In order to know whether or not giraffes are taller than ants we must first know (a) whether or not there is a consensus that giraffes are taller than ants, and (b) if there is, whether or not the communication that produces that consensus was free, open, and undistorted. But isn’t it obvious that it is easier to determine whether or not giraffes are taller than ants than it is to determine either (a) or (b)? Or, to put it another way, wouldn’t any skeptical doubts about our ability to determine even something so obvious as that giraffes are taller than ants also be more than sufficient to wipe out any hope of being able to know about the outcome, and degree of openness, of any process of public communication?
  • David Detmer, criticizing Richard Rorty’s pragmatism in Challenging Postmodernism (New York: 2003), pp. 128-129

• Is it easier to know what our culture’s epistemic norms are in terms of which it is to be determined whether or not giraffes are taller than ants than it is to know that giraffes are taller than ants? Is our knowledge concerning the identity of those norms to be construed on a realist model, or must we rather consult our culture’s epistemic norms in order to use them to figure out the identity of those norms? If the former, why is it that we can have objective knowledge concerning the identity of our culture’s epistemic norms when we can’t have it with regard to the relative height of giraffes and ants? And if the latter, how is an infinite regress to be avoided?
  • David Detmer, criticizing Richard Rorty’s pragmatism in Challenging Postmodernism (New York: 2003), p. 130

• If our aim is the objective truth, we can have a motivation and a reason for revising our epistemic norms whenever we have reason to think they aren’t helping us optimally to reach that goal, and we can have a sounds basis for criticizing others’ claims that we should adhere to the norms. But how can we have any of these things if the truth just is whatever follows from our epistemic norms?
  • David Detmer, criticizing Richard Rorty’s pragmatism in Challenging Postmodernism (New York: 2003), p. 131

• In order to judge that something is not working, wouldn’t we have to know what it’s effects really are? … And surely some of our social practices cannot be judged to be “working” except by invoking the goal of objective truth. For example, to know whether or not the criminal justice system is working well, wouldn’t we have to know something about the accuracy of its results?
  • David Detmer, criticizing Richard Rorty’s pragmatism in Challenging Postmodernism (New York: 2003), p. 132

Sam Keen

• It has been fashionable in the twentieth century not only to debunk myth, … but to pretend that that reasonable and educated people could avoid the embarrassment of religion and the risk of metaphysics by sticking close to demonstrable facts and testable hypotheses. However, in the course of reducing our beliefs and hopes to certainties and proofs, we impoverished and deluded ourselves. The modern anti-myth reduced human life to a story without a point, a tale told by an idiot, a process without a purpose, a journey without a goal, an affair without a climax (Godot never comes), an accidental collision of mindless atoms. … We have hardly noticed that economics, technology and politics have become the new myth and metaphysic. We haven’t avoided myth and metaphysics, only created demeaning ones.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 22

• [Some of the] rules and articles of faith [of the western myth]:
  Questions that cannot be answered should not be asked.
  Knowledge and power are the twin pillars of human identity.
  Knowledge consists of organized facts.
  Sensation, intuition, and feeling are primitive, immature forms of thought.
  Wealth is created by fabricating natural, raw materials into finished products; the production of goods is the basis of value.
  Economics has replaced religion as the ultimate concern.
  The chief motivation (eros) of human beings is to accumulate and consume.
  Advertising and propaganda are the chief erotic sciences of the modern age.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), pp. 23-24

• Pleasers ... make up what Earl Shorris has called “the oppressed middle,” the middle-managers who enjoy “the comforts of fearful people” and pay by submitting to their superiors’ definitions of happiness and success.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 82

• Beneath the smiling mask, we can see the injury that results from a deficiency of rebellion. The nice ones are never quite real. They lack self-definition, self-confidence, because they have never created boundaries and limits for themselves by making decisions. Having never dared to break the taboos they suffer from shame. Their sins are ones of omission rather than commission. They “have left undone those things they ought to have done,” most especially deciding for themselves what is good and evil.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), pp. 82-83

• Living mythical-political systems are invisible to those who live within them. The problem of myth and consciousness is reflected in the old saying: We don’t know who discovered water, but it certainly wasn’t a fish. Myth is the sea of commonly accepted assumptions that are not questioned by the majority of those living within a system. To the average, normal member of society, the myth is what is natural and obvious.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 99

• It is only from the perspective of the outlaw ... that we are able to see that mythically informed normality is a form of mass hypnosis.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 99

• A society that trains us to specialize in making, doing, performing, and producing neglects to educate us in wonder and appreciation.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 102

• The gentlest and most insidious way we are dominated by the body politic is by the official versions of the good life that are implicit in advertising and propaganda. Happiness is a new car, a color TV—fill in the gap with your own “freely chosen” artificially stimulated desire.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 102

• What we should desire creeps silently inside us and replaces what we really desire. ... We take jobs, make compromises, and settle down for the long wait, for the arrival of the future that will bring the reward of happiness we so justly deserve for our sacrifice of the pleasures of the moment. The process is so slow we scarcely notice the substitution of plastic for flesh. We forget how the body sang when it ran free; how it rejoiced in stretching, rolling, skipping, dancing, walking, eating, loving, bounding, leaping, resting. Gradually the body begins to change to protect itself against the intrusion of joy or sorrow. It armors itself against the threat of playfulness and spontaneity. ... The working body is complete when it is thus armed against those emotions that would threaten the primacy of the work ethic and the pattern of delayed gratification upon which it rests.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), pp. 102-103

• The decision to become an individual, to allow oneself to be moved by the deepest impulses of the self rather than the social consensus, can only be made with fear and trembling.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 129

• The outlaw will often wonder whether asserting the right to know, to taste, to experience, to judge is not an act of arrogance. ... To become an outlaw, I must decide that my personal experience rather than the mores of the tribe is the authority upon which I will base my judgments. In a bold act of self-love and self-trust, the outlaw proclaims that individual to be higher than the universal.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 130

• There is a crucial difference between the criminal and the outlaw. The criminal is a perverse rebel who acts out against the law. ... The outlaw is a supranormal individual who cares about others too much to accept the limitations on eros that are imposed by normal life. Thus the outlaw question moves outside end beyond, not against the law. While the rebel is an antinomian, merely rejecting the established, the outlaw is motivated by a quest for autonomy.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 130-131

• The outlaw uses the knife to separate the persona from the self. The outlaw uses the warrior’s sword to cut through his own character armor to destroy the defense mechanisms that have kept him imprisoned within the citadel of personality and role.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 132

• Hero tales suggest the price of courage is beyond the ordinary budget
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 134

• It is the vocation of each person to become unique.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 134

• For the adult, all the world is a stage and the personality is the mask one wears to play the assigned role. The outlaw quietly takes a seat in the back row of the theater of the mind and watches.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), pp. 135-136

• A prime time to catch yourself putting on your personality is in the moments between sleeping and waking.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 136

• The path that leads from the persona to the self, from the adult to the outlaw, consists of learning to distinguish between false desire and true desire, or superficial desire and profound desire, or obsessive desire and free passion, ... or illusory needs and real needs.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 138

• In the presence of our addictions, we are not free to ask what we really desire. Eros is silent. The addiction floods us with the noise of its demands, the plans for its satisfaction. There is no interval for deliberation.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 139

• Kierkegaard said that the only way we can be released from the enchantment, the siren song of the myths, is to play the music through backwards. To break the spell of the ego I must recover my personal and political history, I must demythologize the private, family, and public myths that have informed me.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 140

• The standard Christian conscience does not permit the believer to look upon the self and find beauty, goodness, natural kindness, strength. Self-knowledge is tainted with self-hatred. The rules of the game of the Christian conscience are such that, when I look within, I must take the blame for all evil, all hardness of the heart that I find, but give God all the credit for any evidence of love. ... It is not surprising that the practice of meditation ... has remained under a cloud in the West, and that we have, consequently, created a culture of extroverts.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 162

• Secular culture, with the aid of psychoanalysis, has continued the old Christian habit of observing the self only to criticize it.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 162

• Meditation, like masturbation, has until recently been considered a form of self-abuse.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 162

• The difference between narcissism and self-love is a matter of depth. Narcissus falls in love not with the self, but with an image or reflection of the self—with the persona, the mask. The narcissist sees himself through the eyes of another, changes his lifestyle to conform with what is admired by others, tailors his behavior and expression of feelings to what will please others. Narcissism is ... voluntary blindness, an agreement ... not to look beneath the surface.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), p. 163

• One of the commonest perversions of love is to limit it to the private sphere.
  • Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992)

David Norton

• We are apprehensive that an ear turned to our inwardness will detect at most only meaningless murmurings, that a resort to the inner self will be a dizzying tumble into a bottomless pit. Fearing this, we anchor ourselves upon external things, we cast our lot with the fortunes of objects and events that appear to be untainted by the disease of selfhood.
  • David Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 4

• There are most certainly two distinguishable kinds of truths, “truths of reason” (that two plus two equals four) and “truths of fact” (that the sky appears blue). By his resort to his daimon Socrates added the class of “truths of self,” personal truths.
  • David Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 7

• Concerning the truth at hand he [Socrates] was saying, yes, surely, it is a truth a reason or a truth of fact, but before I offer it I must discover whether it is a personal truth and a part of myself, for otherwise I must leave its enunciation to others.
  • David Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), pp. 7-8

• To speak a truth that belongs to another is untruth, for speaking belongs to living, hence to speak another’s truth is to live a life that is not one’s own.
  • David Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 8

• The great enemy of integrity is not falsehood as such but … the attractiveness of foreign truths, truths that belong to others.
  • David Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 9

• What is commonly called liberality is the condition of being open, available to all truths. But this is precisely eclecticism, confusion, the absence of integrity.
  • David Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 9

• Because truths of different kinds exhibit the characteristics of incommensurability (their difference is such that they cannot be measured by a single standard or reduced to members of one series) and incompossibility (their difference is such that they cannot co-exist within the same system), such openness introduces both multiplicity and contradiction, and the creature in question stands “divided against himself.”
  • David Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), pp. 9-10

• Imitation is replication of particulars, emulation is adoption of an exemplified universal or principle.
  • David Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 12

• According to self-actualization ethics, it is every person’s primary responsibility first to discover the daimon within him and thereafter to live in accordance with it.
  • David Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 16

• For eudaimonism, an ethics of prohibition is a contradiction in terms.
  • David Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 30

• An undifferentiated absolute is normatively impotent because it can offer no principle for the apportionment of responsibility.
  • David Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 66

• Loyalty to life, according to Nietzsche, begins in the resolve to seek life’s principle within itself and not in something outside it—not, for example, in a God or supernature that, by being conceived as all that life is not—infinite, eternal, changeless, perfect goodness, perfect plenitude—stands as antithetical to life.
  • David Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 80

Sarah Bakewell

• Knowing that the life that remained to him could not be of great length, [Montaigne] said, “I try to increase it in weight, I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it. ... The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.”
  • Sarah Bakewell, How to Live (2010), pp. 37-38

Chris Hedges

To be judged by the state as an innocent, is to be guilty. It is to sanction, through passivity and obedience, the array of crimes carried out by the state. ~ Chris Hedges

• To be judged by the state as an innocent, is to be guilty. It is to sanction, through passivity and obedience, the array of crimes carried out by the state.
  • Chris Hedges, “Happy as a Hangman,” truthdig.com, December 6, 2010

• The United States ... celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.
  • Chris Hedges, “Why The United States Is Destroying Education,” truthdig.com April 10, 2011

• Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.
  • Chris Hedges, “Why The United States Is Destroying Education,” truthdig.com April 10, 2011

• Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside—including religious laws—are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason.
  • Chris Hedges, “Why The United States Is Destroying Education,” truthdig.com April 10, 2011

• Totalitarianism no longer comes in the form of communism or fascism. It comes now from corporations. And these corporations fear those who think and write, those who speak out and form relationships freely. Individual freedom impedes their power and their profits. Our democracy, as Snowden I think has revealed, has become a fiction. The state, through elaborate forms of political theater, seeks to maintain this fiction to keep us passive. And if we wake up, the state will not shy away from draconian measures. The goal is complete subjugation, the iron rule of our corporations and our power elite.
  • Chris Hedges, “Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion” (2014), 25:13

• Moral courage means to defy the crowd, to stand up as a solitary individual, to shun the intoxicating embrace of comradeship, and to be disobedient to authority, even at the risk of your life, for a higher principle.
  • Chris Hedges, “Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion” (2014), 26:50

• Moral courage ... is always defined by the state as treason. ... It is the courage to act and speak the truth. Thompson had it. Daniel Ellsburg had it. Malcolm X had it. Martin Luther King had it. What those in authority once said about them they say today about Snowden.
  • Chris Hedges, “Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion” (2014), 27:43

• An omnipresent surveillance state ... makes democratic dissent impossible. Any state that has the ability to inflict full spectrum dominance on its citizens is not a free state.
  • Chris Hedges, “Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion” (2014), 29:29

• The relationship between those who are constantly watched and tracked and those who watch and track them is the relationship between masters and slaves.
  • Chris Hedges, “Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion” (2014), 30:02

• The government officials, along with the courtiers and the press, ... insist that congressional and judicial oversight, the right to privacy, the rule of law, the freedom of the press, the right to express dissent remains inviolate. They use the old words and old phrases, old laws and old constitutional guarantees, to give our corporate totalitarianism a democratic veneer.
  • Chris Hedges, “Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion” (2014), 34:44

• We now live in what the German political scientist Ernst Fränkl called the dual state. Totalitarian states are always dual states. ... The outward forms of democracy, of democratic participation, voting, competing political parties, judicial oversight and legislation remain, but are hollow political stagecraft. And Fränkl called those who wield this unchecked power over the citizenry “the prerogative state.” The masses in a totalitarian structure live in what he termed “the normative state.” The normative state, he said, is defenseless against the abuses of the prerogative state.
  • Chris Hedges, “Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion” (2014), 36:15

• Societies such as ours that once had democratic traditions or periods when relative openness was possible are often the most easily seduced into totalitarian systems because those who rule and build totalitarian structures continue to pay outward fealty to the ideals, practices and forms of the old system.
  • Chris Hedges, “Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion” (2014), 40:35

Curtis White

Similar though Marx and Thoreau may be in their accounts of the consequences of living in a society defined by money, their suggestions for how to respond to it are poles apart. Forget the Party. Forget the revolution. Forget the general strike. Forget the proletariat as an abstract class of human interest. Thoreau's revolution begins not with discovering comrades to be yoked together in solidarity but with the embrace of solitude. For Thoreau, Marx's first and fatal error was the creation of the aggregate identity of the proletariat. Error was substituted for error. The anonymity and futility of the worker were replaced by the anonymity and futility of the revolutionary. A revolution conducted by people who have only a group identity can only replace one monolith of power with another, one misery with another, perpetuating the cycle of domination and oppression. In solitude, the individual becomes most human, which is to say most spiritual. ~ Curtis White

• Justice, under capitalism, works not from a notion of obedience to moral law, or to conscience, or to compassion, but from the assumption of a duty to preserve a social order and the legal “rights” that constitute that order, especially the right to property. ... It comes to this: that decision will seem most just which preserves the system of justice even if the system is itself routinely unjust.
  • Curtis White, “The spirit of disobedience: An invitation to resistance,” Harper’s, April 2006, p. 32

• Do Christian Republicans not understand the fundamental ways in which an unfettered corporate capitalism betrays Christ’s ethical vision and their own economic well-being?
  • Curtis White, “The spirit of disobedience: An invitation to resistance,” Harper’s, April 2006, p. 33

• Evangelical Christianity conspires with technical and economic rationalism. In the end, they both require a commitment to “duty” that masks unspeakable violence and injustice.
  • Curtis White, “The spirit of disobedience: An invitation to resistance,” Harper’s, April 2006, p. 33

• Thoreau's disobedience is disobedience as refusal. I won't live in your world. I will live as if your world has ended, as indeed it deserves to end. I will live as if my gesture of refusing your world has destroyed it.
  • Curtis White, “The spirit of disobedience: An invitation to resistance,” Harper’s, April 2006, p. 36

• What Marx and Thoreau shared with Christ was a sense that “the letter killeth.” What killed was not the letter as Mosaic Law but as secular “legality.” Legality had so saturated the human world that it stood before it as a kind of second nature.
  • Curtis White, “The spirit of disobedience: An invitation to resistance,” Harper’s, April 2006, pp. 36-37

• Time, for Homo economicus, is not “the stream I go a-fishing in.” It is a medium of exchange. We trade our time for money.
  • Curtis White, “The spirit of disobedience: An invitation to resistance,” Harper’s, April 2006, p. 37

• The true cost of a thing, Thoreau shrewdly observes, condensing hundreds of pages of Marxist analysis to an epigram, is “the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.”
  • Curtis White, “The spirit of disobedience: An invitation to resistance,” Harper’s, April 2006, p. 36

• Similar though Marx and Thoreau may be in their accounts of the consequences of living in a society defined by money, their suggestions for how to respond to it are poles apart. Forget the Party. Forget the revolution. Forget the general strike. Forget the proletariat as an abstract class of human interest. Thoreau's revolution begins not with discovering comrades to be yoked together in solidarity but with the embrace of solitude. For Thoreau, Marx's first and fatal error was the creation of the aggregate identity of the proletariat. Error was substituted for error. The anonymity and futility of the worker were replaced by the anonymity and futility of the revolutionary. A revolution conducted by people who have only a group identity can only replace one monolith of power with another, one misery with another, perpetuating the cycle of domination and oppression. In solitude, the individual becomes most human, which is to say most spiritual.
  • Curtis White, “The spirit of disobedience: An invitation to resistance,” Harper’s, April 2006, pp. 37-38

Yahia Lababidi

Yahia Lababidi is an Egyptian-born American aphorist and poet. His collection of aphorisms titled Signposts to Elsewhere was selected by The Independent (UK) in its 2008 "Books of the Year" competition.

Writing: talking to the page, like the last person on earth. ~ Yahia Lababidi

• One definition of success might be refining our appetites, while deepening our hunger.

• Those periods we refer to as dry spells are often secretly fertile - when our very souls are being rewritten and readied for fresh utterance.

• To maintain immaculate speech, often times silence is required.

• The heart is patient with the mind because it knows better.

• Hope is more patient than despair and so outlasts it.

• Writing: talking to the page, like the last person on earth.

• To enter each day with empty hands, trusting you will receive what you need—such is the spirituality of poverty.

• There is such a thing as spiritual deformity, a kink in the soul that keeps us from loving straight.

• The danger of cynicism is getting what you believe in: nothing.

• As in the physical realm, so in the spiritual—it takes one moment of inattention to slip and fall.

• Unaware of it then, this obsessive reading was in fact teaching me how to write.
  • Yahia Lababidi, "Sentenced to Silence, Liberated by Aphorisms" September 29, 2015

• I, who once identified with my mind, nay, worshiped at its altar, have come to feel I'm standing at the edge of it, and find that it’s thin and flat.
  • Yahia Lababidi, "Sentenced to Silence, Liberated by Aphorisms" September 29, 2015

• Always, we groped for the gold thread of the artist as mystic—high above their small, tortured self—as makers of beautiful things, seeking to harness that beauty to their great longing, in their life-long pursuit of transformation.
  • Yahia Lababidi, "Every Subject Chooses Its Author," May 9, 2016

Eliseo Vivas (1901-1993)

Eliseo Vivas (1901-1993) was a 20th-century philosopher and literary theorist.

• As philosophy becomes academic and tends to repudiate its responsibility to the culture in which it flourishes, the layman in need of wisdom and vision turns to evangelic practicalists, who confirm him in his myopic prejudice that the exclusive end of moral philosophy is actually to direct social activity toward the concrete and immediate improvement of social conditions. But, since there is no way of knowing except by arduous philosophical criticism whether the ends to which a reformer would lead us represent genuine improvement, the practicalist’s impatience with theory is at best hasty.
  • Eliseo Vivas, The Moral Life and the Ethical Life (Chicago: 1950), pp. 3-4

• With the hidden hatred of sustained intellectual effort, [the evangelist of practicalism] encourages whose who happen to listen to him in the name of reasonableness to dispense with reason.
  • Eliseo Vivas, The Moral Life and the Ethical Life (Chicago: 1950), p. 4

Future articles

Dominique Misein

• A small war is better than a big war; being a billionaire is better than being a millionaire; circumscribed catastrophes are better than extended catastrophes. How can we not see that along this road the social, political and economic conditions that render the outbreak of war, the accumulation of privilege and the continuing occurrence of catastrophes possible will continue to perpetuate themselves?
  • The Lesser Evil

• All one has to do is affirm that between two evils the worst thing one could do is to choose either one of them, and there it is: the knock of the police at the door. When one is the enemy of every party, every war, every capitalist, all exploitation of nature, one can only appear suspicious in the eyes of the authorities. In fact it is here that subversion begins. Refusing the politics of the lesser evil, refusing this socially instilled habit that induces one to preserve one’s existence rather than living it, necessarily leads one to put everything that the real world and its “necessity” drains of meaning into play.
  • The Lesser Evil

Michael Legaspi

• To suppose that humans are creatures of passion and that reason is the servant rather than the ruler of the passions would be utterly unphilosophical and fatally skeptical toward the possibility of virtue. For philosophy to produce a life characterized by wisdom, reason must be strong enough to galvanize the self against irrational impulses.
  • Michael Legaspi, Wisdom in Classical and Biblical Tradition (2018)

Sirus Kashefi

• Is He A Nihilist Dancer?
  
  He makes fun of all scriptures
  He plays with all philosophers
  He challenges all authorities
  He dances with all ideologies
  Is he is a nihilist dancer?
  • Sirus Kashefi

Teodrose Fikre

• Democracy is nothing more than a façade—a way to lull the public into a false sense of choice. In reality we the people exert zero control and have negligible influence over the governments that supposedly serve us. At best, we have been turned into hapless bystanders in our respective countries; our interests and well-being are pushed to the sideline as the capos in the halls of power work assiduously for their corporate masters. In truth, we are indentured servants as governments collude with private interests to transfer wealth upward while sinking humanity into the abyss of pervasive economic anxieties and/or total financial insolvency.
  • Teodrose Fikre, "The Age of Public Serpents" The Ghion Journal, March 31, 2019

Gilbert Mercier

• It is everywhere. In a few years, it has metastasized like a cancer, on all continents. Its fervent proponents and ill-informed supporters call it populism or nationalism. In the Italy, Germany, or Spain of the 1930s, however, this ideology of exclusion and fear, defined by a hatred of the other, together with a tyrannical executive power, was called by its proper name: fascism. Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany and Franco in Spain were the bloodthirsty tenors of capitalism’s symphony orchestra, singing the deadly opera quietly conducted by the military-industrial complex.
  • Gilbert Mercier, "The Global Rise of Fascism: Capitalism End Game?" November 5, 2018

Umair Haque

• My friends, catastrophic climate change is not a problem for fascists — it is a solution. History’s most perfect, lethal, and efficient one means of genocide, ever, period. Who needs to build a camp or a gas chamber when the flood and hurricane will do the dirty work for free? Please don’t mistake this for conspiracism: climate change accords perfectly with the foundational fascist belief that only the strong should survive, and the weak — the dirty, the impure, the foul — should perish. That is why neo-fascists do not lift a finger to stop climate change — but do everything they can to in fact accelerate it, and prevent every effort to reverse or mitigate it.
  • "How Capitalism Torched the Planet by Imploding Into Fascism" October 10, 2018

Michael Welton

• We sacrifice our time, our families, our children, our forests, our seas and our land on the altar of the market, the god to whom we owe our deepest allegiance.
  • Michael Welton, "Capitalism is the West’s Dominant Religion" May 8, 2015

Gregory Stevens

• The moment I walked into the store I was overwhelmed by greed, I wanted everything in the store, I wanted women’s clothes, men’s clothes, and everything in between. I wanted the sunglasses, fancy gym clothes, business dress clothes, tropical summer clothes, and all the basic essentials. I wanted it all. I went in needing a few basic tank tops, and the moment I walked in was the moment I wanted everything in sight. I felt overcome by the Spirit of Capitalism, I felt overcome by the Spirit of Greed, and I had a mini panic attack as I watched others gleefully accepting this evil possession.
  • Gregory Stevens, "Do Liberal Christians Worship God or Capitalism?"

• The Free Market becomes the God figure within the capitalist religion; both are omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. The Invisible Hand, working by the absolute laws of nature, justifies and produces society. Economics reproduces the theologies of capitalism, and thus the theologies of value.
  • Gregory Stevens, "Do Liberal Christians Worship God or Capitalism?"

Pierleone Porcu

• Instruments created by Power cannot fail to obey the logic that created them.
  • Pierleone Porcu, "Against Technology" (1988)

• Things become tragic when we see an identity of viewpoint between those in power and those struggling against it.
  • Pierleone Porcu, "Against Technology" (1988)

• All the base technology that is used in every field of social life today comes from military research. Its civil use obeys this logic far more than we immediately understand.
  • Pierleone Porcu, "Against Technology" (1988)

Jess C. Scott

• People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.
  • Jess C. Scott, Stephen in Literary Heroin (Gluttony): A Twilight Parody (2012)

• It's terms like 'capitalism' and 'free market' and 'supply and demand' and 'franchise' that veil the real term of 'corporate greed'.
  • Jess C. Scott, Stephen in Literary Heroin (Gluttony): A Twilight Parody (2012)

Here at the Center of the World in Revolt (2011)

• Unlike land, unlike loved ones, relations, forests, health, customs, collectivities, imagination cannot be taken by force; it can only be surrendered, but at any moment, we can recover it. It is the tiny weapon smuggled into the prison, the bare minimum for plotting a grandiose escape.
  • Lev Zlodey and Jason Radegas, Here at the Center of the World in Revolt (2011), p. 8

Jason McQuinn

• Modern slavery is officially non-existent. It has been tossed down the memory hole. It is not spoken of in polite company. Every institutional and government functionary, from the lowest levels of bureaucratic purgatory to the upper levels of elite power, knows instinctively that any explicit mention of its name as a contemporary reality means instant social death within the hierarchy. It is a rare day when it is acknowledged in any public context, even by the most radical or reckless of iconoclasts.
  • Jason McQuinn, "An Introduction to Modern Slavery," Modern Slavery, Issue #1, August 15, 2012

Why Don't the Poor Rise Up? (2017)

Why Don't the Poor Rise Up?: Organizing the Twenty-First Century Resistance (2017)

Edited by by Ajamu Nangwaya and Michael Truscello

Published by AK Press

Introduction by Affiong Limene Affiong

• In these times of mega churches overflowing with masses of poor folk desperately searching for “salvation,” the people are led to believe that salvation is lodged in a secure, albeit unidentified, location in heaven, certainly not here on earth and therefore not worth fighting for.

• Religion plays a critical role in subduing and demobilizing the poor into passivism and acceptance of their fate as destiny.

• O, who will bring back that old-time religion of revolution?

Ron Sakolsky

Civilization has cut deeply into all of our psyches, in effect, threatening to lobotomize our ability to dream. ~ Ron Sakolsky

• If everyone around you has her neck in a yoke, not only is the yoke normalized, but typically those so yoked accept it as their reality and so they "realistically" expect others to do so as well.
  • Ron Sakolsky, Breaking Loose: Mutual Acquiescence or Mutual Aid (2015), p. 14

• Mutual acquiescence can be understood as a socially lived experience in which one's peers, however inadvertently, act to reinforce the notion that misery is the only possible reality and so promulgate a shared psychological state that lubricates the wheels on the mental treadmill of submission.
  • Ron Sakolsky, Breaking Loose: Mutual Acquiescence or Mutual Aid (2015), p. 15

• Why bother trying to change things, people cynically say to each other, it’s hopeless. They fear and ridicule those rebels who refuse a life of misery, and attempt to socialize their children to accept misery as their lot in life or even as the very price of being human. Those parents who instill an unquestioning acceptance of the status quo into the next generation do so not only as a conscious means of attempting to insure their offspring’s survival in "the real world," but as an unconscious way of normalizing their own condition of resignation.
  • Ron Sakolsky, "Why Misery Loves Company," Green Anarchy, 2006

• The process of the accumulation and distribution of misery creates the oppressive regime of everyday reality that governs our daily lives and is mediated by a constant barrage of both homespun sayings like "misery loves company" and the spectacular messages and amusements that constitute the incessant drumming of the As Is.
  • Ron Sakolsky, "Why Misery Loves Company," Green Anarchy, 2006

• Civilization has cut deeply into all of our psyches, in effect, threatening to lobotomize our ability to dream.
  • Ron Sakolsky, "Why Misery Loves Company," Green Anarchy, 2006

• When I first entered academia, I had naively expected to have a work-life that was illuminated by a variety of stimulating intellectual discussions with my colleagues, but I soon found out that what they mostly talked about amongst themselves in these faculty clubs were the boring details of their professional careers.
  • Ron Sakolsky, "My Life in the Academic Gulag" in Creating Anarchy, p. 203

• Academics are taught to problematize all kinds of things, but they often don't problematize their own privileged status as professionals amidst the pressures and temptations of the corporate academic environment.
  • Ron Sakolsky, "My Life in the Academic Gulag" in Creating Anarchy, p. 205

• The lure of promotion and tenure both typically function to create an internalized process of acquiescence in which you seek to insure career advancement by gradually selling pieces of your rebel soul in return for professional and institutional rewards.
  • Ron Sakolsky, "My Life in the Academic Gulag" in Creating Anarchy, p. 208

• “Mutual acquiescence” is the social adhesive that cements the bricks of alienation and oppression which structure our daily lives into a wall of domination. ... The hierarchical power of rulers and ruling ideas are reinforced by the interpersonal collaboration of the ruled in their own servility. ... Such collusive relationships of self-enslavement in which we relinquish our potential power as individuals and collectivities are at the core of mutual acquiescence.
  • Ron Sakolsky, "Mutual Acquiescence or Mutual Aid?"

• Even as we witness Arctic ice caps melting, offshore oil wells exploding, species disappearing at an alarming rate, ramped up state terrorism, a widening net of surveillance, and an economy that is crumbling all around us; mutual acquiescence allays our uneasiness. ... Alone-together in the welcoming arms of mutual acquiescence, we accept that we are disempowered to do anything meaningful about our rapidly deteriorating situation. In fact, we no longer even see it as a problem to be overcome, but a plight that must be endured or adapted to by self-managing our own despair. In order to more fully accomplish the feat of denying our own agency, we must assure ourselves and one another that resistance is futile or even crazy. We are not only surrounded by, but seek out, relationships that do not question these authoritarian assumptions. Increasingly, we become accustomed to reluctantly accepting, unenthusiastically adjusting to, or even longing for the coming apocalypse rather than being inspired by the possibilities of a “coming insurrection” or desiring a “communion of revolt.”
  • Ron Sakolsky, "Mutual Acquiescence or Mutual Aid?"

• Precisely because we can't expect a system in which imperfect human beings are in positions of power to be free of domination, anarchists seek to abolish hierarchy.
  • Ron Sakolsky, Creating Anarchy (2005), p. 4

• Amazonian indigenous groups in Paraguay and Venezuela ... had used stone axes, and they were offered metal axes as a result of contact with the outside world. As the metal axes started to appear, people became curious about them. They didn’t reject them. They implicitly said, “We could use these metal axes, they’ll help us do our work more quickly, and then, we’ll have more time for pleasure, more time for leisure, more time for play.” In other words, they wouldn’t have to spend the same number of hours at work as they had previously done in order to insure their survival. Why work as hard as before to produce more than they actually needed or to create a surplus that had to be guarded? Consequently, they used those metal axes in a very different kind of way than is the case with work done under the mental and physical yoke of wage slavery.
  • Ron Sakolsky, Creating Anarchy (2005), p. 16

• Once we begin to look beyond the façade of electoral politics for collective solutions to our problems, we can recognize our pressing need to decolonize our minds and inspire each other in our active resistance to, and rejection of, the social, political, and economic institutions that underlie the power and authority of the nation-state. In this way, we can create fertile ground for planting the seeds of anarchy.
  • Ron Sakolsky, Creating Anarchy (2005), p. 16

Luke Orsborne

• I wanna watch you unapologetically engage with the darkness, gather it up in your hands, shape it into a wedge, and drive that wedge straight through the chest burdening armor with which this abusive culture has shackled you.
  • Luke Orsborne, Sacred Resistance (2019)

Unveiling Empire: Revelation Then and Now (1999)

By Wes Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther (Orbis Books: 1999)

• Revelation is a call to have faith in God rather than empire
  • p. xxiii

• Three times in the latter part of Revelation, the vices that characterize Babylon and preclude citizenship in New Jerusalem are listed: ...

• all those who propagate illusion (21:8)
• the one practicing abomination and illusion (21:27) ...
• loving and practicing illusion (22:15) ...

The term [illusion] is reflective of a systemic untruth that presents itself as reality. Those who propagate the myths of empire by word and deed are those who "love and practice illusion."

• pp. 179-180

• The key component of empire's ability to create in the minds of ordinary folks a false version of reality has always been control of media.
  • p. 252

• Ultimately, as with the illusions propagated by the Roman Empire, the primary illusion generated and maintained by the global capital empire today is that the world is largely as it should be and the efforts to change it are misguided at best, and dangerous at worst.
  • p. 254

• Revelation's protest is not against feeling good. John of Patmos was not inviting people to "eternal Lent" but to New Jerusalem, where real joy could be experienced. The key to understanding the seductive quality of global capital's siren call in our time is not to fight against the urge toward pleasure, but to come to recognize the whore-like nature of the beckoning smile on the TV screen or the magazine ad.
  • p. 255

• Revelation will not tolerate compromise with evil, nor should we.
  • p. 267

• The Bible Story wasn't written to be a primary source for academic dissertations, but a handbook for how people are to live in the midst of Babylon.
  • p. 271

• As I became more and more aware of how advertising attempts to seduce us into seeing its products as satisfying of our deepest desires, I became first suspicious and then outraged. As time went on, I found I couldn’t take TV ads; they made me too angry. So eventually I just stopped watching TV altogether.
  • p. 271

• The empire is so big and powerful and we're so small! I'm often tempted to respond like the folks in Revelation 13, "Who can fight against it?" The challenge for me is not to be overwhelmed and to think, in typical American fashion, that I'm facing a "problem" that can be "fixed." Rather, I'm called to recognize each moment as presenting a choice between Babylon and New Jerusalem. Most of the time, unavoidably, I find myself deeply embedded in Babylon. But I can't let that be an excuse not to struggle in the next moment to rediscover the presence of New Jerusalem.
  • p. 271

Chrisso and Odoteo

• The tyrant — and every power structure is tyrannical — is not the head of the social body, but rather the parasite that poisons its organism. Killing it is an act of liberation. The Parisian revolutionary clubs did not suffer from the beheading of king Louis XVI, nor did the Russian workers’ councils suffer from the fall of Tsar Nicholas II. Rather, the liquidation of power, i.e., the insurrectional context that brought down the ancient customs and released new energies, is what really allowed their birth and their spread. And the reintroduction of power, in Jacobin or Bolshevik form, is what really brought about the stalemate and the ruin of the process of social regeneration, bringing that which is Unknown back to that which is State.
  • Chrisso and Odoteo, Barbarians: The Disordered Insurgence (2003)

• May the barbarians break loose. May they sharpen their swords, may they brandish their battleaxes, may they strike their enemies without pity. May hatred take the place of tolerance, may fury take the place of resignation, may outrage take the place of respect. May the barbarian hordes go to the assault, autonomously, in the way that they determine. And may no parliament, no credit institution, no supermarket, no barracks, no factory ever grow again after their passage. In the face of the concrete that rises to strike the sky and the pollution that fouls it, one can well say with Dejacque that “It is not the darkness that the Barbarians will bring to the world this time, it is the light.”
  • Chrisso and Odoteo, Barbarians: The Disordered Insurgence (2003)

• There are no longer any noble ideas capable of stirring the great proletarian masses, there are no longer sweet Utopias ready to be fertilized by their lovers, there are no longer radical theories that only wait to be put into practice. All this has been overwhelmed, swept away by the imperial slime. There is only the disgust, the desperation, the repugnance of dragging our existence through the blood spilled by power and the mud flung up by obedience. And yet in the midst of this blood and mud, the will — confused in some and clearer in others — to put an end to the Empire and its deadly order once and for all can be born.
  • Chrisso and Odoteo, Barbarians: The Disordered Insurgence (2003)

Bhante Jina Lankar

The thought that another raises him from lower to higher levels of life and ultimately rescues him, tends to make man indolent and weak, supine and foolish. This kind of thinking degrades a man and smothers every spark of dignity in his moral being. Purity and impurity depend on self. No one purifies another. No one defiles another. So says the Buddha who, for the first time in the world’s history, taught His followers that deliverance from suffering should be sought independently of a deliverer. ... The Buddha, the Enlightened One, tells us that each living being is his own creator. By our actions we make our character, personality, individuality. We are all self-made. ~ Bhante Jina Lankar

• Self-purification can only come to one who is free to think out his own problems without hindrance. Others may help if one is ready to receive such help or seek it. The thought that another raises him from lower to higher levels of life and ultimately rescues him, tends to make man indolent and weak, supine and foolish. This kind of thinking degrades a man and smothers every spark of dignity in his moral being. Purity and impurity depend on self. No one purifies another. No one defiles another. So says the Buddha who, for the first time in the world’s history, taught His followers that deliverance from suffering should be sought independently of a deliverer. Others may lend us a helping hand indirectly, but deliverance from misery must be wrought out and fashioned by each one for himself upon the anvil of his own actions. The Buddha, the Enlightened One, tells us that each living being is his own creator. By our actions we make our character, personality, individuality. We are all self-made. Infinite possibilities are latent in man, and it must be man’s endeavour to develop and unfold these possibilities.

Wes Howard-Brook

• Jesus says, "Bring me a denarius and let me see it." This is the oft-ignored key to the passage: Jesus does not traffic in the imperial coin. It is not a matter of a fetishistic avoidance of an idolatrous object. Rather, Jesus, like the traditional religion that he embodies and brings to fulfillment, rejects imperial economics altogether. As we saw, the money economy began to flourish first within urban settings in the Persian Empire. The purpose of money has always been to enable trade with people with whom one is not in personal, kinship-like relationship. Jesus' discipleship community is a new family (Mk 3:32-35). It has no need for Caesar's or anyone else's coins (cf. Mk. 6:8). It's "currency" is mutual gift.
  • Wes Howard-Brook, "Come Out, My People!": God's Call Out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond (2010), pp. 404-405

Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens

• Notre société repose sur les mythes de la compétition, du progrès, de la croissance infinie. Cela a fondé notre culture occidentale et libérale. Dès qu’un fait ne correspond pas à ce futur, on préfère le déformer ou carrément le nier, comme le font les climatosceptiques ou les lobbies qui sèment le doute en contredisant les arguments scientifiques.
  • Our society rests on the myths of competition, of progress, of infinite growth. These are the founding myths of Western culture. As soon as a fact fails to correspond to this vision of the future, we prefer to distort or outright deny it. Thus the climate skeptics and lobbyists sow seeds of doubt, contradicting scientific arguments.
    • Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, as interviewed by Ivan du Roy, Jun 8, 2015

• Être catastrophiste, ce n’est ni être pessimiste, ni optimiste, c’est être lucide.
  • To be a catastrophist isn't to be a pessimist, or an optimist. It is to be lucid.
    • Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, Comment tout peut s'effondrer : Petit manuel de collapsologie à l'usage des générations présentes (How Everything Might Collapse: Little Manual of Collapsology for the Use of the Present Generation)

Mark Sentesy

Mark Sentesy is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University.

• Picture for a moment a person watching a news program on television, hearing about an injustice. Let’s say he feels powerless to do anything about it. It is important to realize that he is not powerless, since he knows how to start to do something about it, how to find out more, what people might advise or help him, and so on.
  • "How Technology Changes Ethical Experience," August 8, 2016

• When a person feels or sees injustice he will feel an impulse to act. ... If he chooses to continue watching but do nothing to remedy it, this impulse is not expressed. He turns it around onto himself, and becomes outraged at himself, and then cynical about the world. If he continues to watch, his conscience will continue to press for action, and he will become bitter, even as his lack of action makes the injustice into spectacle.
  • "How Technology Changes Ethical Experience," August 8, 2016

Justin Carson (1991-)

• In a society of plenty, I should be able to go up to anyone and say, "I'm hungry," and expect compassion rather than laughter.
  • Justin Carson, Jun 1, 2011

• When the proletarian has just made an excellent point in her argument, the bourgeois will, at just that moment, tell her she put a comma in the wrong place.
  • Justin Carson, May 14, 2016

Rory Edwin

• Television programming gives us an impression that we're presented facts to form our own opinions, but in reality, narratives are shrewdly imposed upon us. I think this is most evident in social media, where some innocuous issue (e.g., kneeling during the national anthem) becomes mainstream debate, and both sides are merely parroting previously scripted talking points.
  • October 3, 2018

Zahari Richter

• If there is a shadow government, there is also a shadow curriculum. The shadow curriculum is the set of norms and practices quietly performed and mandated and modeled by professional staff on how sociality is conducted. Gender binarism is a core part of the shadow curriculum, so is whiteness, neurotypicality and heterosexuality.
  • February 12, 2017

Zachary Bord

• Fascism is when a liberal government begins to treat its own citizens the way it has always treated the people in its

colonies.

Dariel Garner

Dariel Garner is a former venture capitalist who gave away his fortune to fight for the rights of the poor and oppressed.

• It's time to replace Cinderella stories with Siddhartha and St. Francis stories.
  • August 28, 2016

"Secret Guilt, Secret Wealth" (2016)

• Every time an organization broadcasts their commitment to deep social change, while instead prioritizing one-dimensional results for their wealthy funders, the task of dismantling multilayered systems of destruction is lost in translation.
  • Dariel Garner, "Secret Guilt, Secret Wealth," Popular Resistance, May 26, 2016

• The great fortunes of the wealthy do not come from brilliance and hard work. Great fortunes come from taking market control, from overcharging customers, short changing suppliers or treating employees as slaves.
  • Dariel Garner, "Secret Guilt, Secret Wealth," Popular Resistance, May 26, 2016

• Salk and Sabin never made a nickel off their polio vaccines. Buckminster Fuller and Einstein did not die as rich people. Galileo never patented gravity. And millions of artists, scientists, philosophers, sages and just regular people created the society we live in and passed their lives only happy to have served.
  • Dariel Garner, "Secret Guilt, Secret Wealth," Popular Resistance, May 26, 2016

• Great fortunes are stolen from the people, they are not earned.
  • Dariel Garner, "Secret Guilt, Secret Wealth," Popular Resistance, May 26, 2016

• Wealth grows organically from the earth and the society. That any one person can claim a larger share than another is unfair. The profits of a business are made from the customers, the suppliers and the employees. The business draws on the accumulated wisdom of humanity and draws its sustenance from the bounty of the earth. The only reason a CEO can claim a salary 10,000 times that of a worker, or the Walton family can own as much as 130,000,000 people, is simply because they can get away with it. The rich know that wealth is not earned but taken from the people. Only so long as we allow them to take more than their fair share can they remain rich. And only so long as we idolize and idealize the wealthy, and want to be rich ourselves, will an elite rich class persist.
  • Dariel Garner, "Secret Guilt, Secret Wealth," Popular Resistance, May 26, 2016

Werner Dannhauser (1929-2014)

Werner Dannhauser (1929-2014) was Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Cornell University.

• Since Nietzsche frequently intends to shock his readers, they may be in a position to learn from him—providing they admit that what is shocking may also be true, and that one has not refuted a thinker by recognizing the shocking consequences of his thought.
  • Werner Dannhauser, Nietzsche’s View of Socrates (Ithaca: 1974), p. 21

• Socrates was the plebeian dissector of an aristocratic society; Nietzsche is the aristocratic dissector of a plebeian society.
  • Werner Dannhauser, Nietzsche’s View of Socrates (Ithaca: 1974), p. 37

CensoredScribe

• Seemingly no major religious organization has made a serious effort in modern times to oppose professional sports citing it being a glorification of violence, an unnecessary risk to human life, resulting in numerous preventable serious injuries or being a colossal waste of time and resources that could go to the poor.
  • December 4, 2018

Mark Corske

• It makes no more sense to describe war and slavery as "man's inhumanity to man" than to describe the Nazi holocaust as "man's inhumanity to the European Jews." It makes no more sense to speak of "man's destruction of the environment" than to speak of "man's beating of children." Specific groups of people using the power of specific institutions committed the holocaust and are destroying the environment. Yet even thoughtful people devoted to peace and justice often lapse into this fallacy, saying such things as, "We dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima." I most certainly did not drop any atomic bombs on anyone. Did you?
  • Marke Corske, Engines of Domination (2012), p. 41

Susan Rosenthal

• Self-determination is the ability to make your own decisions. It is the opposite of standardization, where those with more power impose their decisions on you.
  • Susan Rosenthal, Rebel Minds: Class War, Mass suffering, and the Urgent Need for Socialism (2019)

• It is impossible to deny the right to self-determination and also relieve suffering.
  • Susan Rosenthal, Rebel Minds: Class War, Mass suffering, and the Urgent Need for Socialism (2019)

• The ‘mental-health’ industry was not established to support people, but to individualize and medicalize the social misery created by capitalist rule.
  • Susan Rosenthal, Rebel Minds: Class War, Mass suffering, and the Urgent Need for Socialism (2019)

Wikiquote contributions

Everyone who achieves strives for totality, and the value of his achievement lies in that totality—that is, in the fact that the whole, undivided nature of a human being should be expressed in his achievement. But when determined by our society, as we see it today, achievement does not express a totality; it is completely fragmented and derivative. ~ Walter Benjamin

The relation of the true artist and the true human being to his ideals is absolutely religious. The man for whom this inner divine service is the end and occupation of all his life is a priest, and this is how everyone can and should become a priest. ~ Friedrich Schlegel

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• 
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• 
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• 
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• 
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Dialectic of Enlightenment ~ The Sacred Exchange between Saint Francis and Lady Poverty ~ Epistle to the Galatians ~ First Epistle to the Corinthians ~ Second Epistle to the Corinthians ~ New International Version ~ Tonio Kröger ~ I and Thou ~ The Glass Bead Game ~ Gravity and Grace ~ Swann's Way ~ Within a Budding Grove ~ Steppenwolf ~ The Revolt of the Masses ~ Culture and Value ~ Death in Venice ~ The Girl with the Golden Eyes ~ The Man Who Laughs ~ Siddhartha ~ A Calendar of Wisdom ~ The Death of Ivan Ilyich ~ Anna Karenina ~ Culture and Anarchy ~ The Immoralist ~ The Zürau Aphorisms ~ Athenaeum Fragments ~ On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers ~ Gulliver's Travels ~ Les Caractères ~ Confessions ~ The Art of Worldly Wisdom ~ Imitation of Horace ~ Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims ~ Ornamenta Rationalia ~ Discourse on Voluntary Servitude ~ De remediis utriusque fortunae ~ The Power of Now ~ Wisdom of Solomon ~ Daybreak ~ Twilight of the Idols ~ Ecce Homo ~ The Praise of Folly ~ Memorabilia ~ Epistle to the Philippians ~ First Epistle to the Thessalonians ~ First Epistle to Timothy ~ First Epistle of Clement ~ Epistle to the Colossians ~ Epistle to the Hebrews ~ 1 Maccabees ~ Digha Nikaya ~ Against Civilization ~ Sociology of Religion ~ The Wretched of the Earth ~ Untimely Meditations ~ This Bridge Called My Back

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• 
  Constantinian shift
• 
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• 
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• 
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• 
  Religious views on capitalism

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• 
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• 
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Theme pages

• 
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• 
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• 
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People stubs

• 
  Vimalakirti
• 
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Book stubs

First Epistle of Peter ~ 1 Esdras ~ Book of Tobit ~ Book of Judith ~ First Epistle of John ~ Distichs of Cato ~ The Book of Joy ~ Protagoras ~ Little Red Songbook ~ Dissoi logoi ~ The Chicago Manual of Style ~ The Gospel of Buddha ~ Book of Habakkuk ~ Une Tempête ~ The Columbian Orator ~ Second Book of Samuel ~ Geneva Bible ~ Black Power: The Politics of Liberation ~ The Message ~ Apophthegmata Patrum

Theme stubs

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Essays on Wikiquote policy

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On Toxic Positivity

Toxic positivity is refusal to share sadness. There are plenty of reasons to be sad. The world is poised on the brink of war. Children are starving and locked in cages. Racism is rampant. Injustice is ubiquitous. Cruelty is routine, mercy exceptional.

The question is, why must sadness remain unshared and joy only be shared? This is the toxic assumption of our culture. Mandatory cheer. No moping.

People who say things like, "Don't be a downer," have many things to be sad about too. But they accept the premise that sadness is something you always experience alone. From this it's an easy downhill roll to the idea that human beings should police each other's emotional tone and prevent anything negative from entering the sanctum sanctorum of socially sanctioned toxic positivity.

Rulers show smiling faces. They reassure you everything's going to be fine. We all know it's a lie. The means of production is destroying ecosystems. Transportation infrastructure is highly reliant on nonrenewable resources. Insects, birds, animals and fish are dying. Oceans are becoming toxic to life. Smiling politicians tell you there's nothing to be sad about. Keep smiling. Sadness is something you do alone.

The problem is, I think the part of me that gets sad is the better part. The part of me that cares about the suffering of others is the part of me that gets really sad. The cheerful part is basically selfish, happy go lucky, likes to have fun, doesn't care much about the suffering of others. And this is the side the world tells me I have to bring out in public? It's remarkable people don't see how toxic this is, this policy of concealing the better part of human nature, this insistence on making mercy and kindness into renegade emotions, so happy go lucky selfishness can prance unimpeded through the emporium of narcissism.

On the Money Chasing Life

A true society is based on sharing things that don't become less when we share them with others, things like kindness, wisdom, mercy and love.

Making money is certainly not as good as being born into money. By the time you get your stash, your life is half over. The best you can do is give your kids a better life. But they won't appreciate it. So what's the point, really, of chasing money? If you succeed, you only have what others had at birth through no effort of their own.

You would think people would see the futility of chasing something that is unjustly, arbitrarily distributed in the world, something scarce that can only be had by few, something that enslaves you in its pursuit, that makes you callous, petty, cunning and alone.

Even the billionaire is petty. Every transaction in his vast empire is dictated by pettiness. A generous transaction is a mistake. Pettiness becomes a system. One by one, petty transactions add up to billions. The billionaire has many friends. But do they care about him? Or do they want his money?

When you accept the premise that you'll spend your life chasing money, you accept that you will make yourself the servant of tyrants with money, and ignore poor souls who have none. This is probably the worst aspect of the money chasing life. Human beings without money become insignificant to you. They have nothing to offer. The idea of recognizing the humanity in a homeless child, a migrant, an orphan, a widow, or anyone helpless and destitute -- this recognition can only produce a liability, and must be scrupulously avoided. The only people who matter are people with money. One day I hope to become one of the people who matter. This is how the mind infected with money lust reasons.

European society in the middle ages was built on the premise of authority of the Church. Today, society is built on the premise of authority of money. Just like the corrupt prelate who mouthed pious platitudes while tyrannizing the populace, today's tyrants mouth platitudes about productivity while trashing the planet and killing the poor.

If you have money, you are powerful, even if you have no virtues or any redeeming features whatsoever. If you lack money, you are powerless, even if you're a saint. This is the nature of the society we live in.

In a sense, it's wrong to call our society a society at all. It's really just a collection of mindless zombies chasing after money. The only thing uniting everyone is a faith in the value of money and property. But it's a strange form of unity. My community with you doesn't consist in wanting to unite with you in sharing. My community with you consists in wanting to take what you have for myself. The nature of money is that it can't be shared. If I have it, you don't. Think about the idea of building a society on something that can't be shared. A true society is based on sharing things that don't become less when we share them with others, things like kindness, wisdom, mercy and love.

"Enough with the cheesy sentiments," say the cynics. "Show me the money."

The cynics are right in a sense. Love, kindness, mercy and wisdom are imaginary sentiments that don't refer to anything tangible in the world. But the cynics forget their imaginary friend the dollar is every bit as much a social construction as love. It's just an inferior one.

The good news is that we don't have to be part of this false society based on greed. There's an alternative. I mean, to some extent I'm compelled to participate in the false society to survive. But I'm not compelled to adopt the world's values.

When I go into the world to earn my bread, I don't have to adopt the world's values. I can keep myself clean from the world's mercenary attitude by keeping myself detached from the process of buying and selling, by being content with simple food and few possessions, by getting my satisfaction from sharing feelings of warmth and kindness with others rather than competing with others and trying to impress them with the spoils of greed.

Everyone loves to divide up the world into categories. More accurately, there are two kinds of people: people who divide the world into categories and people who don't. I will add my two cents. There are two kinds of people: people who think greed is shameful and people who think greed is good. The two categories really don't get along at all. People who think greed is shameful are disgusted by petty mercenary souls. People who think greed is just fine are disgusted by the pious hypocrisy of pretentious souls who claim to despise money but still use it to buy their bread.

What can I say to the money lover to persuade them their lover is abusing them? No matter what I say they will dismiss all ideas about kindness and love as sentimental tripe, and continue their loveless life. Why? Because the money lover is surrounded by people like him. His attitude repels merciful souls, kind souls and other sentimental fools from his retinue. He will always be surrounded by people who confirm his outlook. If he accidentally encounters a kind soul, she is only a nuisance to him.

Greed mongers seek a false form of satisfaction. They always want more. They can never be satisfied. When you point out to them that the path that they're on has no logical conclusion, they will laugh at you. Why? Because they live in a world where money is the only true value. Everything else is sentimental nonsense. Of course their attachment to money is also sentimental. But they don't see that.

On Seclusion

The one who associates with people of the world or approaches them after his renunciation will certainly either fall into their traps or will defile his heart by thinking about them; or, if he is not defiled himself, yet by condemning those who are defiled, he too will himself be defiled.

John Climacus

In a corrupt world, the desire to be respected is pathological.

The corrupt world only respects assholes who join the corruption.

At every time in history, good souls have been ridiculed, taunted, tortured and killed by corrupt rulers and their corrupt hierarchy of sycophants.

Associating with assholes who accept the world's false values will inevitably defile your mind. Either (1) the false values will rub off on you, or (2) you will be forced to condemn the asshole, which means your mind will be defiled by anger.

When I encounter assholes who really believe the world is upright and wholesome, I'm tempted to start listing off the atrocities committed daily by the regime in power. But I try to resist this temptation. The assholes already know about the atrocities. They just don't care about homeless people, helpless migrants locked in cages, children being bombed. They care about money and people who have it. Human beings are a matter of indifference to them unless and until they attain celebrity status. This is the logic on which the world operates. And people who accept the world's values accept this logic. There's no way to refute them. Their false logic forms an airtight chamber that allows no mercy or kindness in or out.

There's no way to associate with people who accept the world's false values without being defiled.

Ordinarily there's no reason to notice the world's false values or think about them. They are beneath my notice. When I do notice them, my mind is instantly riled up into a state of fervent opposition and combat.

It's easy to refute the false values. Money, the world's number one value, is adorned with pictures of slaveholders. Those who have money get money by being hard-hearted, underpaying workers, ignoring homeless neighbors they might have helped. These are the people that, by the world's values, we call "respectable." Protect your mind from these false values. Do not associate with assholes who adopt the world's values. No good can come of it.

Integrity in a world of lies

The economic system is a systematic death machine. You should have seen that from the slave trade. But because you didn't see it then, it escalated to an even larger calamity, and now the whole planet is dying.

The world is feeding you a huge crock of lies. "Justice system" enforcing the most unjust inequalities and atrocities in history. Unsustainable "economic system" destroying ecosystems. Invasion called defense. Destruction called production. Tyranny called democracy. Eternal war called peace. Slavery called freedom.

Stop living the lie. Start being truthful. Stop letting other people get away with telling lies. Power structures are entirely illegitimate. We live on stolen land. Whites kept the booty of slavery. Dissenters are locked up for questioning the legitimacy of the powers or refusing to obey. Legislators take bribes. You are not free. Stop lying to yourself and others. Stop believing propaganda.

Fossil fuel companies have done us the favor of altering the geology of this planet for at least 100,000 years to come. They call their accomplishment "production." The world's governments are greedy for even more of this production. We all know it's unsustainable. But the powers intend to sustain it as long as they can, hoping they can come up with a better idea in the interim.

Life took millions of years to evolve into its present state. It was destroyed in 500 years. Why? So the ruling powers could carry out their reckless plans. Looking to create something better, the ruling powers created slavery, nuclear weapons, and are filling the atmosphere with smoke and radioactivity. We are cooking in our own fumes. The ruling powers' deliberate creations claim to be better than the random machinations of nature. But in fact they are worse. Trying to create something better, power has only destroyed what was vibrant and alive and replaced it with an unsustainable death machine.

Why do people believe the lies? It seems you can't have a conversation with anyone without hearing them make some statement that assumes the ruling powers are legitimate. Are people's brains so pickled with propaganda that they are incapable of seeing reality? Is the fact that we're ruled by homicidal tyrants too impossible to face?

The lies the propaganda teaches are easy to believe. They are comforting. They help us imagine everything is hunky dory. When flickers of reality start to shine into the cave, there are plenty of other believers to shore up your faith in the illusion.

The reality is that the fossil fuel system has already decimated wildlife. Burning dead fossils, filling the air with fumes. What could go wrong with that? The ruling powers tell us to drill. So we keep drilling. The ruling powers tell us to build nuclear weapons, build mansions, bomb the helpless, ignore the homeless. Why do you treat these commands as legitimate? Our trust in the ruling powers is leading to our doom.

The political theater you just witnessed was a propaganda stunt intended to deceive you. You got to choose a figurehead. The means of production are still owned by the same people. Politicians take bribes. You get a figurehead with a more attractive smile to process the bribes. That's all that's changed. The means of production are still owned by the same tyrants. The same tyrants own the newspapers, the universities and the politicians. The purpose of the political theater is to get you to imagine power structures are legitimate, power is your friend, power represents you, power cares about you. And you fell for that? People are incredibly gullible. And when you call them out on it, they get offended.

What does an intellectual existence entirely uncontaminated by lies look like? It is hard to know. Acceptance of certain lies has become so common that the lies have insinuated themselves into our very language. People hear the word "government" and automatically think the term implies some kind of legitimacy. Tyrannical governments have created a whole culture in which the flimsy rationalizations they use to conceal their tyranny are accepted by everyone. Unquestioning automatons carry out roles dictated by the economic system without stopping to ask whether the system is legitimate. It's not. The economic system is a systematic death machine. You should have seen that from the slave trade. But because you didn't see it then, it escalated to an even larger calamity, and now the whole planet is dying.

There's no way a mind can consent to telling lies and retain its intellectual integrity. Add to this fact the immense pressure exerted on the mind to accept the lies enforced with guns (Who owns what? That's a predetermined fact, not a political question. If you question the evidence, be prepared for the wrath of the state.) and you'll see why intellectual integrity is essentially gone from the public sphere. Anyone who tells the truth will be deplatformed by power structures, as they put someone on the platform to reiterate the system of lies. The truth-teller will be painted by the media (owned by the ruling powers) as a madman, a terrorist, a fool.

There is no way a mind can consent to telling lies and retain its intellectual integrity. The legitimacy of ruling powers is a lie that insinuates itself into your mind through fear. Intellectual integrity is destroyed in this process. It can be recovered. The recovery is difficult. The lies are so pervasive, and you must challenge them whenever and wherever they occur. You will be at war with a world full of lies. But it can be done. It should be done. Stop deceiving yourself and others.

What's the point?

What's the point of recognizing the world is corrupt if there's nothing I can do to fix it?

Corrupt rulers have succeeded in creating a hierarchy of sycophants that enforces their rule.

You and I don't have the power to overthrow this hierarchy.

But we can control how we respond to it.

In fact, there are many things we can do to lessen the power of the corrupt world over us.

1. Do not reproduce more slaves to corruption.

2. In cases where participation in corruption is voluntary (entertainment, etc.), do not participate.

3. In cases where participation in corruption is mandatory (work, etc.), participate with the body only, keeping the mind uninvolved.

4. Protect yourself from influences which propagate the illusion that the world is upright.

5. Associate with woke friends who are also in defiance of, flight from, or opposition to the corrupt world.

6. Use the trials of the corrupt world to develop your patience, endurance and stamina.

7. Keep your mind free of "might makes right" thinking.

8. Remind yourself frequently that you are an alien in the midst of a corrupt world that you don't recognize as your own.

The most important thing is to never under any circumstance allow corruption to penetrate into your mind. Guard the sense doors at all times.

Corruption wants to be loved and admired, because when it is loved and admired it is enthusiastically obeyed. Soldiers, bureaucrats and cops who enforce the corrupt order have allowed the corruption to penetrate deep into their minds. As they are enforcing corruption, they imagine they are doing good. Their minds are completely lost. Yours doesn't have to be. Keep it protected.

On Repentance

To repent is to refuse moral allegiance not only to the evil in power, but also to the former self that morally supported this evil.

A short list of crimes the U. S. government has committed in 244 years: genocide of indigenous people, theft of naive lands, slavery, Jim Crow, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, reinstatement of colonialism in the blatantly racist Marshall plan, napalm, Agent Orange, racist law enforcement, prison slavery, drone assassinations, carpet bombing, bribery, meddling in foreign elections, funding paramilitary coups, propaganda, torture, detention without trial, spying, treachery, subsidies for the rich while the poor starve, environmental calamity, sabotaging attempts to avoid environmental calamity, children in cages. Those are just a few. The list could go on.

The law tells us we should treat a corporation as a person. We judge a person by their actions and their character. The actions of the U. S. government are criminal. The character of the U. S. government is merciless, mercenary, vindictive, rapacious, corrupt, tyrannical, racist, and utterly indifferent to human and nonhuman life.

Victims of abuse often defend the character of their abuser. "His actions may be abusive," abused minds reason with themselves, "but his character is sound. He can change."

When it's impossible to flee from abuse, the tendency to admire the power of the abuser becomes even greater.

The abuser we can't escape we come instead to respect.

When the abuser senses disrespect, the abuse increases.

Respecting an abuser may be necessary for the abused to survive.

But the heart has its secret place.

My first questions for every Unitedstatesian:

1) Do you morally support the U. S. government?

2) Do you repent for morally supporting the U. S. government earlier in your life, when you were ignorant of its character and its crimes?

3) If you don't morally support the U. S. government, why do you logistically support the U. S. government (by giving your labor in exchange for its currency, etc.)?

I think there are a lot of people like me who grew up in a world where basically everyone bought into the propaganda.

The first thing I look for in people nowadays is repentance for that earlier state of moral support for evil.

It's not really possible to live under the rule of government without materially supporting this government to some degree.

We do what we have to, to survive.

However, there is never a need to morally support the regime that murders dissenters and bombs the innocent.

Fear leads us to respect the power we fear.

The problem is, people mix up respect based on fear with respect based on virtue.

This is what I call "might makes right thinking."

This is the kind of thinking I was raised with.

To repent is to refuse moral allegiance not only to the evil in power, but also to the former self that morally supported this evil.

"Don't judge others. Focus your criticism on yourself."

This is good advice. Criticism of myself includes criticism of my views as well as my actions. For most of my life I morally supported a government that bombs innocent people and locks children in cages -- there is no sparing myself this criticism.

Repentance for collective sin in which I participate is at least as important as repentance for individual sin. I repent for my own evil deeds. But these are small in comparison to evil deeds of the U. S. government in which I have been complicit by giving my consent. Most of my repentance will be for the years I morally supported the evil regime as it bombed the world.

When I "wake up" to the evil actions and character of the U. S. government, this means I must disavow my former self who was loyal to that government. My former self, a disgusting imperialist pig. I disavow all connection with that disgusting sycophant to barbarity.

Of course when churches in the U. S. talk about repentance, they always point you to your individual sins (jacking off, etc.). Well, it's easy to see why. Organized churches are materially supported by the U. S. government and its currency. They ignore the character and crimes of the U. S. government, which are in all important respects the same as the Roman empire.

No one in U. S. churches likes to talk about that nice metaphor where Saint John calls Empire "the beast." John makes fun of the cowardice of Roman citizens, nauseating sycophants who "worship the beast (the government), saying, 'Who can fight against it?'"

Most religions theoretically oppose "might makes right" as a moral principle.

But in practice religious leaders seldom turn their moral condemnation on the U. S. government. Churches allow the U. S. government to pass for what it claims to be: the glorious exception, the one government in history that happily succeeds in both might and right!

On god talk

Why do we treat human beings as if their life and death don't matter unless they have money? Why do we treat animals, plants, fish, oceans, ecosystems as if their life and death don't matter? Why do we treat the planet this way? Because we have forgotten the ancient principle, expressed differently in each of the world's ancient religions, that human beings and plants and animals and things have a worth independent of their exchange value in the economic system. In Egypt this idea is called ma'at. In the tradition of Moses, this idea is called god. God tells us that orphans and widows matter. God loves his entire creation. We should too. When we remember to love the way god loves, that's when we are repulsed by the barbarities of capitalism. We unharden our hearts. We see the suffering of others. We care for the people around us. We love our neighbors as ourselves. It's really a very simple idea. God loves his creation. We should too. We do god's will when we love the way god does. Because god is love. That means there is nothing besides love. All the rest is stories, metaphors to amplify our understanding of love. The idea that god created us means we should see our lives and our planet not as things to be trashed but as lovers to be loved. Love created us. It's not necessarily an empirical fact. It's just the right way to look at life. Love the world as god loves it. Unharden your heart. Let love make your decisions. That's the real meaning we can extract from this document that has been used for so long to oppress and deceive us.

"God talk has been used for millennia to subjugate, exploit, enslave, oppress and fleece gullible peons. I suggest you shut the fuck up about god already."

"A valid point," I said, "but your argument seems to prove too much. Numbers and words have been used for millennia to deceive and exploit people. Therefore we shouldn't use them."

My friend laughed.

"Why does the argument apply in one case but not the other?"

My friend continued to laugh but conceded it was a valid point.

"Words can be used for liberating minds," I said, "as well as for deceiving and enslaving minds. Is there something special about god talk, soul talk, etc. that makes it impossible to imagine a reparative or liberatory use of these particular terms? What in particular about the term 'god' makes it impossible to imagine we might play the music of exploitation and deception through backwards and reach a liberating conception of commitment, reverence, prayer, etc.? The liberation theology movement, for example, asks us to consider whether texts historically used by oppressors to justify oppression were created for this purpose, or only later reappropriated by oppressors to serve their purposes. (The answer seems to be, 'some of both'.) In cases where oppressive use of god talk is a later addition, not an original intention of the text, then disposing of the text is a dubious decision. Parts of the Jewish Bible are essentially state propaganda for the Davidic monarchy. But the canon also includes peasant carpenter Amos holding a plumb line up to rulers to see if they are upright and honest (7:8). Here's a prophet with a counterhegemonic message. For some reason, the Jews saw fit to preserve both sides of the dialectic of propaganda and liberation. Paul's letters contain some very dubious advice of total acquiescence to slavery and tyranny. But at least Paul warns us about 'wickedness in high places' (Eph 6:12). Matthew 25:40 teaches the way we treat the least and lowest is the way we treat our lord. The prophets teach that love of god means caring for orphans and widows, paying fair wages, 'Woe to those who deprive the poor of their rights!' (Isaiah 10:1). The book of Acts documents the socialist nature of the original communities formed under the inspiration of the messiah, where all things where shared in common (4:32). Rich assholes were killed for refusing to share their wealth (5:1-11)! If the bible were merely a tool for oppressors to use to dumbfound and subjugate restless peons, it becomes hard to imagine why tyrants prohibited vernacular translations for several centuries. Zealots drew their inspiration from the prophets in seeking to liberate themselves from the tyranny of empire. New Testament offers a lot of advice for how to keep the revolutionary spirit alive during times when revolution is impossible. Obey Caesar. We must obey to survive (especially in Rome, see Rom 13:1-7). But at the same time keep the soul from succumbing to thinking the way Caesar wants us to think. The only law is the law to love our neighbors as ourselves (Rom 13:8). A friend of the Roman empire is an enemy of God! (James 4:4). Listen rich people, weep and wail for the misery that is coming upon you! (James 5:1). These are not the words of sellouts trying to get peons to bow down to Caesar! The complete conversion of christianity into a hegemonic religion came later with Constantine. This is one reason Greek theology texts tend to be more liberatory than the post-Constantine Latin texts, although of course this is a tendency not a general rule."

My friend yawned. "Some valid points but you're not talking to Bible scholars. You're talking to ordinary people who received a religious education that was used to control and manipulate them. No one knows these obscure verses. No one knows the detailed history. The term 'god' today is 100% used as a term of control, subjection, subjugation, suppression of independent thought."

"Some truth in what you say, but again I can't help but think the argument proves too much. Terms like 'truth', 'mercy', 'kindness', 'charity' are also appropriated and used by tyrannical regimes to serve their twisted ends. It's clear from the Book of Acts that plenty of congregations in the first century absolutely refused to admit rich assholes who refused to share with their neighbors. The idea of a church where rich people sit in the front pew comes later. This is not the nature of the community that produced the original texts. This is particularly true for the more rural judaized forms of christianity documented by James. For some reason, redactors of both jewish and christian canons saw fit to include both propaganda for submission to empire and prophetic discourses of resistance."

"OK. But one might argue that these so-called liberatory discourses of resistance are kept in the canon only as tokens, to make subjugated peons imagine the text has liberatory potential, while the clerical hierarchy in fact extracts the propagandistic value of texts very efficiently and uses the texts as fabulously successful tools for subjugation."

"There's a lot of truth in what you say. But it seems you are condemning not so much the texts themselves but how they are used. You concede the bible is used as a tool to subjugate and deceive people. What better tool is there, then, to liberate these same people from subjugation and deception?"

"No, no, no. What the Bible has taught them is a credulous willingness to believe in authority. If you try to use the bible to undo the damage of the bible, you would only encourage this epistemic irresponsibility. You're encouraging 'believers' in their refusal to demand empirical evidence for their beliefs. The disease is in the method, the way the mind approaches truth. The bible demands you accept truth on authority. But a mind with an intellectual conscience must demand empirical evidence."

"Good points. But haven't contemporary epistemological ideas like empirical evidence, scientific consensus, etc. also been used to prevent people from investigating facts for themselves? 'The scientific consensus of economists is that socialism doesn't work.' Cool. Now I don't need to think for myself at all. But maybe if I read about about successful socialist communities where people really love their neighbors as themselves, which in fact have existed on all continents, I might see the cynical views of modern bourgeois economists with some suspicion. The claim that human beings act from motives of self-interest -- think about this -- this claim is supposed to be empirical. And empirically, it's true. Why? Because we live in a society that teaches us to be self-interested. It's not biology that produces this empirical regularity. It's the social conditions of production and trade. Even Darwin is not so straightforwardly nonideological and empirical as people imagine. Do all species thrive by producing more offspring than can possibly survive and allowing them to be weeded out in merciless competition? This claim has been widely criticized. There seem to be some species, including human beings, that practice forms of birth control so as to produce a reasonable number of offspring and eliminate the war of all against all for resources. In other words, the survival of the fittest is refuted by species that tailor the number of offspring to environmental conditions."

"OK, true. Many species also show diverse examples of noncompetitive behavior in hives, clans, etc."

"Yes. And darwinism turns quickly into social darwinism and becomes an ideological justification for the war of all against all in capitalism. The claim that individual human beings are self-interested egotists who reproduce constantly and consume themselves to death, etc.--these are ideological claims masquerading as empirical. I mean, the claims are true now because we live under capitalism, under a successful procreative propaganda culture, under constant bombardment with propaganda teaching egoism and consumptive gratification, etc. So an empirical claim can be very dubious because it completely masks the prior circumstances that give rise to the social milieu in which the so-called empirical association holds. Reforms of the social system are proposed based on empirical observations within it. It therefore becomes impossible to imagine any alternative social arrangement because it isn't empirical."

"That was a hot mess. But it's ironic that you talk about birth control at the same time as you talk about christianity. For centuries popes have been teaching peons to be fruitful and multiply, to make more soldiers and cheaper labor for tyrants."

"A valid point. But again, you're familiar with this particular verse because it is amplified by tyrants. What parts of the text remain unamplified? Paul actually warns the the Corinthians that it's better not to marry because the times are so bad (1 Cor 7). Caesar's evil empire thrives by invading new places. It can't possibly last. Returning to our earlier discussion, you have to remember, outside from a small community of eccentric religious zealots, the whole empire accepted the idea that Caesar was the son of god. Saying this dude Jesus was the son of God, and that even after Caesar killed him his spirit of defiance remained alive -- this is a profoundly counterhegemonic message. Look at things today, my friend. Doesn't virtually everyone worship money, celebrities, leaders?"

"And also popes."

"True, true. The ascendancy of clerical hierarchy reproduces precisely the faults of pharasaic religion Jesus criticized. As Nietzsche says, the church is precisely what Jesus came to warn you fools against."

"Peter, why can't you accept the facts? The Christianity of today is not the Christianity of the first century. You're preaching to an audience who understands what first century christianity means. This audience doesn't exist."

"A valid point. But again, the way the argument is structured, it proves too much. Return to that decisive juncture in history where bourgeois economics dismissed Marxian economic analysis on the basis of labor theory of value, and threw the entire materialist basis of economics baby out with the labor theory bathwater."

"So you're saying we have to retrace the history of Christianity to see where it went wrong."

"Yes, exactly. This is called reparative history. I think it's a better approach than forgetting."

"Yes. Forgetting only makes sense if history is progress. We should not forget Marx, Lenin and Mao just because U. S. imperialist propaganda tells us they are obsolete."

"Exactly. It comes back to the question of empiricism you raised earlier. The narrative that history is progress is of course not empirical. It is propagandistic. The GDP continues to grow only because environmental devastation, destruction of ecosystems, future costs of climate catastrophe, death from pollution, death from starvation, death from war, these are not included in GDP. But this is our metric of progress. We must be very skeptical of this idea that the present is always better than the past. The present is worldwide U. S. imperial hegemony. The present is global ecological calamity. This is not a good time to be forgetting about key decisions made in the past. Amos would tell us to hold the plumb line up to history. Ask about what was forgotten. Were forgotten ideas all wrong? Are hegemonic ideas always right?"

"Very true. To talk of history in terms of progress essentially puts a moral sanction on this ecocidal imperial atrocity we inhabit today."

"Thank you for saying that, my friend."

"But forgetting the Bible is progress. There is nothing to recover from this hot mess of superstition and irrationality."

"Perhaps you are right. But I will give you something to think about. You can decide for yourself what you think. The way the capitalist system treats human beings is unconscionable. If you have no money and no marketable skills, you are worth nothing. Why do we treat human beings as if their life and death don't matter unless they have money? Why do we treat animals, plants, fish, oceans, ecosystems as if their life and death don't matter? Why do we treat the planet this way? Because we have forgotten the ancient principle, expressed differently in each of the world's ancient religions, that human beings and plants and animals and things have a worth independent of their exchange value in the economic system. In Egypt this idea is called ma'at. In the tradition of Moses, this idea is called god. God tells us that orphans and widows matter. God loves his entire creation. We should too. When we remember to love the way god loves, that's when we are repulsed by the barbarities of capitalism. We unharden our hearts. We see the suffering of others. We care for the people around us. We love our neighbors as ourselves. It's really a very simple idea. God loves his creation. We should too. We do god's will when we love the way god does. Because god is love. That means there is nothing besides love. All the rest is stories, metaphors to amplify our understanding of love. The idea that god created us means we should see our lives and our planet not as things to be trashed but as lovers to be loved. Love created us. It's not necessarily an empirical fact. It's just the right way to look at life. Love the world as god loves it. Unharden your heart. Let love make your decisions. That's the real meaning we can extract from this document that has been used for so long to oppress and deceive us."

1. If you read to the end, you are a saint and a good friend.

2. What's the next step in the debate?

Hapless Lobster

You and me
here alone
no world
no greed
not here
something within you
better than that
something in me.

You and me
alone
separate
apart
undefiled
world of greed
can't touch us
if we don't
let it.

Mind in pain
burns all over
where it touched
world of greed.

Minds boiled alive
they laugh
when I cringe
being burned
"jump right in
to boiling pot"
they say
"like we did."

Protect yourself.

What's the
true value
of mind?

I made
a bad deal
when I sold it.

Greed's around
for a while
but present age
techniques
are more refined.

That's why
you see
my nose buried
in ancient books.

World of greed
wants to buy
your mind.

Hapless lobster
your mind
is cooking.

Are you really going
to leave mind
unprotected?

Boiling water
feels cozy
while hapless mind
cooks alive.

On academia

At first I was honestly surprised how many people I find in academia who instinctively support the establishment. I would have thought reading the texts we read would be enough to cure anyone of their faith in the establishment. But for a lot of people, I think faith in the legitimacy of the establishment is much deeper and firmer than commitment to the pursuit of truth. It is very sad. And the people at the top of every field are always the ones who have the most faith in the establishment, not the ones most committed to telling the truth. (I know you can name a few exceptions, but they are pariahs.)

I naively went to graduate school assuming that when we read texts critical of the establishment in the seminar, we take them seriously. But it turns out this is just not true. Students are embarrassed by anti-establishment texts. Professors include the texts on the curriculum just because they're canonical and they're embarrassed to have the curriculum too transparently one-sided. Students read anti-establishment books only to fulfill the requirement. No one takes them seriously.

Althusser is right about intellectuals. They are part of the aristocratic elite, or aspire to be part of the petty bourgeois elite. Their class loyalty trumps intellectual conscience, easily, without a fight.

Here's an example. Theology class. The seminar encounters a text like "The way you treat the least and lowest is the way you treat God." This obviously means you don't let your neighbors starve while hoarding resources they need to save themselves. But bourgeois students obviously want to hoard wealth. Petty bourgeois students want some wealth to hoard. So they all line up behind the tyranny of capital.

Then there was a class on idolatry. I naively expected that upon the completion of the seminar at least some students would be persuaded by some of the texts, and get ready to go start smashing idols. But when I showed this attitude, other students laughed at me.

"We're all idolaters," they said.

"Maybe true," I said. "But is that the end of the story? Idols like NFL, NASCAR, Hollywood are teaching the world the true authorities in the world are money, state and market. Maybe it would be a good idea to smash all idols controlled by the establishment (including establishment religion)."

But students weren't interested in this. The reason for their education is to rise in the establishment hierarchy, not to learn and speak the truth.

The good news is that I finally found some areas of study (discursive regimes) that really are fighting for the rights of oppressed people. I was just looking in the wrong place.

On Efficient Markets

Where do desires come from? Is it a dark place never to be examined? Should we fulfill desires without ever examining the dark hole from which they emanate? Why? Isn't this a foolish life, taking desire for a teacher, when desire comes from a place that we have never even examined, when we have no clue whether a desire is helpful or unhelpful, wise or unwise, kind or cruel?

The market doesn't distinguish between kind, humane, merciful, helpful, salutary, beneficial demands and cruel, selfish, tyrannical, harmful demands. The sole distinction is between funded and unfunded demands.

Funded demands are fulfilled, no matter how foolish (intoxicants, smut, whims, toys, mansions, yachts).

Funded demands are fulfilled, no matter how harmful and cruel (weapons).

Unfunded demands are ignored, no matter how noble and good (homeless shelters).

When you acquiesce to the premise that the intellectually disciplined part of your life will be ruled by the intellectually undisciplined and vacuous whims of the marketplace, you have committed intellectual suicide.

What is the alternative? There are many.

Try reciting this.

My mind is not part of the world of buying and selling.

My mind is separate from that, protected from that, secluded from that.

My mind overflows with loving kindness for all beings.

The world of greed has no hold on me.

I am not part of the world of greed.

The tyranny of evil cannot possibly infect me.

From the moment my mind came into this world, it has been subject to abuse, manipulation and neglect.

From day one, the world of greed has been working hard to recruit my mind into its mobile army of greed minions.

The army of greed preys on minds in at least two ways. First it preys on minds it manipulates into joining, and then it persecutes minds that refuse to assimilate. It's better to be victimized by persecution than by assimilation into the army inflicting persecution.

Fleshpots, smouldering with lust, accidentally brought a mind into this world in their heedless desire. Then, vulnerable mind, lacking training and experience, was left neglected, undeveloped, not even aware that it was worthy to be developed. Vulnerable mind was left unprotected, not even aware that it was worthy to be protected, easy prey for armies of greed.

Mind came into world with no one to nurture it, no one to care for it. Fleshpots accidentally brought mind into world in their heedless wantonness and could not even conceive of any higher fate for mind than making it a shiny, well-oiled part in the machinery of greed. Mind came into existence accidentally. Unnurtured, unprotected, it was doomed from the start.

Profiteers consumed by greed imagine no higher honor than a distinguished rank in the army of greed. These same profiteers control the media we consume. It should hardly surprise us that the false values they teach are nearly universal.

But, purely by accident, this mind encountered words that liberated it from the cycle of lust and greed. By a random lucky circumstance, mind, in its pursuit of whims and stupid pleasures, happened to stumble upon the antidote to its random, senseless existence. Mind learned that it had a greater dignity, a greater purpose than to fulfill senseless desires.

Market expects mind to work hard fulfilling demands, without examining if demands are helpful to people making demands, without examining whether demands are humane or cruel. This is an unreasonable expectation.

Market is not a worthy master for the mind. Those who take the market for their teacher and put the mind under its care commit intellectual and moral suicide.

The Buddha, the noble one, the enlightened one, the blessed one, of course also makes demands. But these demands are salutary, helpful, enlightening, liberating, profoundly beneficial to minds that hear and heed them.

Nor are demands of the blessed one expected to be fulfilled blindly and uncritically. The noble one teaches the mind to be keenly aware of the effects of practice, to continually reexamine practices and carefully assess their effects.

One of the most important demands the enlightened one makes is to assess these very same demands. Do not accept any demand without experimenting for oneself to see if it is beneficial.

The market is a corrupt teacher, an abusive master. The demands it makes don't benefit you. Most of the time they don't benefit anyone. People go to the market without knowing what's beneficial for themselves or others. It's a mass of unwisdom, ignorance and stupidity, all scientifically compiled into an elaborate system for fulfilling demands without ever examining whether they are noble and wise.

There's a better way. There's a better system. The Buddha's way includes a mechanism of self-criticism. The Buddha's system doesn't merely aggregate desires. It challenges desires. It examines and scrutinizes demands rather than fulfilling them blindly.

Where do desires come from? Is it a dark place never to be examined? Should we fulfill desires without ever examining the dark hole from which they emanate? Why? Isn't this a foolish life, taking desire for a teacher, when desire comes from a place that we have never even examined, when we have no clue whether a desire is helpful or unhelpful, wise or unwise, kind or cruel?

Of course, the cynic will say the Buddha is just another producer, fulfilling the market's demand for consolation. The cynic's worldview is based on the premise that the world is a market. Every phenomenon must be twisted to fit this premise. But the Buddha will never fit this model.

The enlightened one fulfills a need. That is true. But he doesn't fulfill a demand. He gives you something you need but didn't even know you needed. He teaches you how important your mind is, how delicate it is, how worthy it is of protection, shelter, development, cultivation and care. The world and its markets don't give a flying fuck about your mind or its development. The Buddha teaches you to demand what markets can never provide: shelter for the mind, a genuine flourishing intellectual life.

Of course in one sense the market does expect your mind to develop. It expects your mind to develop into a useful accessory, a tool to be used in its calamitous plan to fulfill all funded desires no matter how absurd and cruel. As far as developing the mind for its own sake, the market has not heard a peep about that. In the worldview of profiteers, mind has no value of its own. Mind is valuable only in terms of the price it can fetch in the slave auction. Mind has no higher dignity than to serve as a slave, either to one's own unexamined desires or to the unexamined desires of others with the money to buy.

You have been taught all your life that mind is a tool. A tool is not impressive or important in its own right. It becomes impressive only when used for a purpose. The same tyrant deceivers who teach you your mind is a tool also conveniently provide you with a purpose. Thus tyrants perfect their tyranny. Mind can imagine no higher aspiration than to perfect its capacity as a tool. The tool delivers itself gladly and willingly into the hand of tool-wielding tyrants carrying out their calamitous plans.

Remote Control

Anthropologists who study the remains of ancient societies predating European invasions -- and the few surviving indigenous societies not yet invaded -- find that in some cases these (so-called "primitive") societies were organized in hierarchical structures very reminiscent of European chains of command.

Anthropologists also find many societies in which hierarchy of the European form is remarkably absent. When hierarchy exists, it is seldom more than one level deep. In these "flat" societies obedience never exceeds the personal charismatic relationship of tribe member to tribal chief.

Here is how anthropologist Marvin Harris describes these findings:

Can humans exist without some people ruling and others being ruled? The founders of political science did not think so. "I put for a general inclination of mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death," declared Thomas Hobbes. Because of this innate lust for power, Hobbes thought that life before (or after) the state was a "war of every man against every man"—"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Was Hobbes right? Do humans have an unquenchable desire for power that, in the absence of a strong ruler, inevitably leads to a war of all against all? To judge from surviving examples of bands and villages, for the greater part of prehistory our kind got along quite well without so much as a paramount chief, let alone the all-powerful English leviathan King and Mortal God, whom Hobbes believed was needed for maintaining law and order among his fractious countrymen.

In other words, there were (and are) indigenous societies that don't accept the (Hobbesian) premise that the individual must acquiesce her or his will to an arbitrary, distant authority. In these societies, obedience is always premised on a personal relationship to the one obeyed. The member of a tribe can observe the chief and see for her or himself whether or not the chief is behaving in a virtuous way that merits obedience, or abusing power for personal profit and glory.

Let's think through the implications of these findings.

First of all, it seems clear from history (and common sense) that societies premised on obedience to arbitrary authority can build large, highly centralized and efficient military operations.

The charismatic personal relationship of ruler and ruled in "flat" indigenous societies, on the other hand, limits the size of military organizations that can form and operate under an undisputed chain of command.

Societies premised on obedience to arbitrary authority will therefore often be able to raise a large army and successfully invade the territory of indigenous peoples who lack elaborate, unconditional hierarchical structures necessary to sustain a large, effective military defense.

And this is precisely what we see in history. European regimes, the most thoroughly advanced in cultivation of obedience to arbitrary authority, invade Africa, Asia and the Americas, set up colonies, enslave the local population in labor camps, trade slaves across continents, and export resources to the homeland.

Think about what this means from the point of view of an individual human being in a recently invaded indigenous society.

As an indigenous person, pre-invasion, I live in a free society. I know the chief of my tribe. I recognize her to be a good leader. I freely give my assent to her rule based on my personal knowledge of her virtue.

Then here come European conquerors. They obey a distant king. And once they have conquered, they demand I too must obey their king. Their demand for obedience is not based on any knowledge of the character of the king. In fact, the invaders are cynically indifferent to the idea of a virtuous ruler. The only virtue they recognize is unconditional obedience. And these sycophants of power, once they take over, demand the same form of unconditional obedience from me.

What can I do? If I refuse to produce sugar and coffee for export to the king, I am whipped. I have gone from a free human being, understanding the sources of authority in my life and assenting to them, to an enslaved human being, compelled to acquiesce to distant power structures I don't recognize or understand.

Now consider things from the point of view of a child in a conquered indigenous society, say two or three generations after the invasion. By this time the culture of acquiescence to arbitrary distant authority has permeated all aspects of society. Adults in the conquered society have forgotten what it might even mean to examine the question of obedience as a moral question. The question now is merely pragmatic. Acquiesce or be killed? Obey or be locked up?

Now in order for parents and families to acclimatize a child to this new environment of unconditional acquiescence, they must teach the child to obey arbitrary authority as they do. In one sense, this indoctrination is for the child's own good. It will keep the child out of jail. In another sense, we are witnessing the violence of invasion repeated over and over in the form of violence parents inflict on children to get them to acquiesce to arbitrary authority of invaders and their system.

What happens to a society when the demand for acquiescence to arbitrary, unaccountable, distant authority replaces a personal, charismatic relationship between ruler and ruled?

For one thing, the moral accountability of the ruler vanishes. The queen is obeyed unconditionally. Her rule is not premised on treating her subjects humanely or justly. European monarchs had to pacify military leaders and local populations. But they could (and did) remain completely indifferent to the fate and feelings of slaves on other continents.

Perhaps more importantly: the moral accountability of the ruled also vanishes. The slaves, the peons, the peasants, the workers, take up the task they are assigned without ever asking whether it's the right task. Their obedience is unconditional. Therefore, they do not morally assess the commands they obey.

One of the first things colonizers do after conquering the indigenous population is use slave labor to build opulent palaces for themselves.

Now ask yourself, if the charismatic chief of a local tribe demands the tribe build a palace for him while making no allowance for the needs and demands of the tribe, how long do you think the charismatic relationship would last? A relationship based on voluntary assent rather than tyrannical authority limits the inhumanity and injustice the ruler can perpetrate on the ruled. No such limit exists for European-style systems of unconditional, impersonal domination.

Another example: the slave supervisor might be a proletarian who owns no slaves himself. But he obeys the owner of the plantation unconditionally. He mercilessly whips slaves when that's what it takes to maximize productivity. The plantation owner doesn't question the arrangement either. He got a land grant from the king in exchange for a certain quantity of exports. He too follows the institutional arrangements set up by power without any pretense of evaluating whether they are humane and fair.

Fast forward to today. The logic of unconditional obedience has been perfected. Employees do whatever employers demand and ask no questions. If employees refuse some morally repugnant task, it's easy to find someone else to do the job. A large pool of unemployed labor is maintained as reserve for the industrial army.

The unemployed are desperate for work. That is deliberate. Desperate proletarians under the whip of starvation turn out to be even more docile than slaves under whips wielded by masters.

Individuals can be inhumane and merciless. Systems can be even more inhumane and merciless than individuals.

The logic of unconditional obedience is quantified in currency. Money entitles the holder to unconditional obedience. The one who lacks must obey. Questions of conscience are displaced by "scientific" talk of supply and demand. Excel spreadsheets become masks for the arbitrary inhumanity of a system of domination that builds mansions for the rich while the poor starve and freeze in the cold.

If you're looking for a model for restructuring society, you need look no further than the Amazon, where tribes still exist with charismatic, accountable, local, humane leadership. Restructuring the existing chain of command with new faces at the top will not undo the grave mistake of assenting to distant power without knowing and seeing for ourselves that it is good.

Marvin Harris, the anthropologist I quoted before, goes on to tell about "wars" between local tribes, in which the so-called warriors desert as soon as one friend or foe is wounded.

Arbitrary authority can turn human beings into merciless killing machines. Charismatic authority doesn't disempower the conscience the way systematic authority does. If I'm accustomed to obeying the leader because she is good, I will stop obeying when she is not good. This is the only kind of authority anyone should ever recognize.

On Vitality

My vitality as a human being is intimately tied up with defiance of power structures that define human beings as disposable commodities.

I can't be fully human and at the same time obey a system that refuses to recognize the humanity of oppressed people.

We live in one of the most oppressive regimes in history.

But it doesn't look that way to us.

One way we hide oppression from ourselves is by dehumanizing its victims.

Black people are in jail for defying authorities, authorities who treat their lives as disposable. Prisoners are called "criminals" so we can pretend prison slavery is not oppressive, so we can ignore the fact that authority treats Black bodies and Black lives as disposable. Some scholars claim punitive laws were passed deliberately to increase the supply of prison slaves or to disempower the Black community.

Another example: regimes being bombed by the U. S. military are designated "rogue regimes." Why? To dehumanize victims of United States imperialism. Some scholars claim the U. S. is bombing aggressively just to sell bombs. Others claim the motive is to open up markets for energy and resource extraction on terms favorable to the S&P500. In either case, the U. S. acts as imperialist aggressor, disposing of human lives in order to make profits for the elite minority that control the financial assets of large corporations.

I also feel my vitality as a human being is very much tied up in the refusal to lie.

The authorities are lying to us. One important example: authorities tell us this is democracy. Meanwhile scholars from Lenin to Gilens and Page have proved decisively that capital controls the government and sets the agenda with only nominal resistance.

Another example: the authorities make it seem as if the state has some kind of plan to deal with the climate catastrophe. The reality: oil money flows everywhere and everyone in politics takes bribes. Oil companies are like drug pushers. They don't care how harmful product is. They just want to get the world hooked and keep the world hooked on product. The consequences are a matter of indifference to them. And if you imagine big oil can be regulated, your faith in authority would be cute if it weren't so disastrous. What prevents regulators from taking bribes?

Another example: The authorities make it seem as if U. S. foreign policy is benevolent, spreading democracy. The reality is, the U. S. opens markets for resource extraction on terms favorable to the S&P500. Local ecosystems in Africa and Asia are a matter of no concern. The fate of the working class is irrelevant. What matters are profits for the S&P500. People who control the corporations are the same people who control the U. S. government.

My vitality as a human being is intimately tied up with a refusal to lie. Once I become a liar, my spirit dies. This means I can't acquiesce to lies propagated by the government, or take part in the system lies enable by deceiving the populace.

I'm telling you, if people weren't deceived, no one would be showing up for work tomorrow. The system has gone off the rails. The planet is dying. Fascism is breaking out all over the place. Fascists have succeeded in dazing and confusing the populace, infiltrating the opposition, and generally sowing chaos all over the world. Chaos is what the S&P500 has decided will be profitable. So they sow it.

This could change at any time, but right now my vitality as a human being is threatened far more by my concerns about complicity with evil and lies than by any physical ailment. The lies make me physically sick. To assent to the lies by continuing to work for the system of death makes me nauseous.

I honestly think the time has come to just say no to this system of death. The longer we continue to obey and continue to work for the system, the greater the climate catastrophe will be. The longer we keep obeying, the more secure the state becomes in its power, and we contribute to the solidity of fascism.

If I say no, and refuse to show up to work tomorrow, the system will go on without me. From one point of view I'm shooting myself in the foot, undermining my career prospects, behaving imprudently. But this way of looking at things doesn't take account of the connection between vitality and honesty, between health and kindness, between sanity and mercy. By continuing to work for a system I know to be destructive, oppressive and evil, I put my own health at risk in many ways. Working for the sick system is making me sick. I begin to think I would rather die of natural causes than kill my spirit by serving a system that should never be served.

Your Mind is Important

Mind is bored because it's dissatisfied with what's going on inside. Bored mind is looking for something outside mind to distract mind from what's going on inside. Undeveloped mind gets bored easily. Developed mind is productive of interesting and fruitful thoughts and speculations, and doesn't need distractions. Overcoming the urge to seek distraction is what allows mind to progress from an undeveloped state to a developed state.

The culture of the present age has no higher aim than to persuade you to conform to the present age, to adopt the values of the present age (lust for money and possessions). The culture of the present age makes everything (including you!) into a commodity, for sale to the highest bidder. In the culture of the present age, there's no higher value than making (and spending) as much money as possible.

Cultures from other times and places offer other values: pursuit of wisdom, cultivation of kindness, self-restraint, self-control, seclusion from the world of corruption, separation from greed, clear thinking, awareness, mercy, etc.

If you're content with a life that has no higher aim than making and spending money, you will be content with the present age and its culture. If you want to have a meaningful life, a life of intellectual and emotional growth and flourishing, you must resist the allure of the culture of the present age and study cultures of other times and places.

It has probably always been true that those who exert no intellectual and emotional effort to improve themselves remain vacuous and superficial. But obstacles to a meaningful life of intellectual and emotional flourishing are greater and more numerous than ever. Today's culture is more hostile to development of mind than any that came before. Methods for seducing attention away from intellectual growth and self-improvement (not particularly profitable for people who sell stuff) to vacuous consumerism (very profitable for the vultures of capital) have become more and more scientific.

Try abstaining from the culture of the present age for a few months and see what happens to your mind. I expect you will find the experiment is difficult. The culture of the present age is designed to be addictive. The purveyors of the culture of selfishness and greed work very hard to make their culture irresistibly seductive and addictive.

But I'm sure you have come clean from other addictive things. You can resist this one too.

Watch what happens to your mind as you separate from the culture of the present age. At first you will probably get bored. Today's culture trains you to turn on the TV as soon as you're bored, just like you open the fridge as soon as you're hungry. But boredom is part of the mind's path from lower occupations to higher occupations. Mind is bored because it's dissatisfied with what's going on inside. Bored mind is looking for something outside mind to distract mind from what's going on inside. Undeveloped mind gets bored easily. Developed mind is productive of interesting and fruitful thoughts and speculations, and doesn't need distractions. Overcoming the urge to seek distraction is what allows mind to progress from an undeveloped state to a developed state.

Resisting the urge to reach for the quick, unhealthy fix to hunger allows you to improve your health. Resisting the urge to turn on the TV and score the quick fix to boredom allows you to work on the true, long-term fix: cultivation of intellectual and emotional flourishing.

Sadly the culture of the present age has developed many ways, very effective ways, of undermining your self-confidence and dragging you down to the altar in front of the TV. Any independent thought is a threat to the hegemony of the culture of the present age. So the present age has all kinds of methods for preventing independent thought. Any mind that deviates from mass-produced mind created by today's culture will be scoffed at, insulted, undermined. Every form of psychological manipulation in the book is used to deter the mind from the track to improvement and independence, to lure the mind back to the track of mindless obedience, spectation, production and consumption. Every chink in the armor of your confidence, every self-doubt, every weakness in your mind will be seized on by the culture of mindlessness to try to lure you back to genuflect at the altar of celebrities.

This is one reason why today's culture is full of cruel caricatures of the geek, the nerd, the weirdo. Anyone who deviates in any way from the norms of mindless production and consumption will be made to feel outcast, weird, unwelcome. But this feeling of being weird, geeky, nerdy -- like the feeling of boredom -- is only a temporary obstacle on the path to intellectual and emotional flourishing. Once you're on the path to improvement, you will attract like-minded friends. You will laugh together at the idiocy of the present age and its culture.

Your mind is important. Your mind is worth improving.

Today's culture works hard to persuade you your mind is insignificant. Celebrities are important. Billionaires are important. Your own mind? What does that matter? You are nobody, insignificant, irrelevant. That's the message you get every day from the TV. Celebrities matter. You don't. The only meaning you get to have in life is to select which celebrity will live a meaningful life for you, in your place, as your representative, while you do nothing but watch, genuflect, adore.

An important mind is worth improving. Your mind is important. Therefore, your mind is worth improving. But today's culture works hard to make you feel small, irrelevant, insignificant. Why? So you will consume the ready-made culture of today (very profitable for the denizens of greed) and refuse the path of intellectual and emotional progress.

Celebrities matter. You don't. That's the message dinned into your ears twenty four seven by the culture that tries to control you. Your only choice is which celebrity you will adore. If you have any grandiose ideas about developing your own mind, today's culture will cure them quickly. TV sometimes shows you a character with serious aspirations, who cares about something higher than production and consumption, immediately followed by a laugh track. A never-ending stream of ridicule, derision and contempt pours out of the TV for anything that has even the slightest scent of intellectual and emotional development, flourishing, self-restraint, self-control.

Flourishing minds are content with friendship of other flourishing minds, with books available in public libraries. Flourishing minds are not good consumers. We know we don't need stuff greed mongers are selling. Flourishing minds aren't good producers. We ask too many questions about why we produce useless things and harmful things. Flourishing minds are ruled by virtue and wisdom, not by money. So the greedy vipers who own and control the means of cultural production have, high on their agenda, the important task of undermining all aspirations to intellectual and emotional flourishing in the populace they control with their cultural products.

The first step on your path to intellectual and emotional flourishing will be your declaration of independence from the culture that tries to undermine your confidence in the importance of your mind, the culture that tries to infantilize you so you can't even imagine any other possible mental state than worshipping celebrities and commodities.

Today's culture is at war with your mind. Today's culture tries to subjugate, subdue and control your mind. The first step in improving your mind will be to separate from the influences that are hostile to your mind, that want to undermine your progress, false influences that abhor intellectual progress and want only adoration and obeisance, not independence, flourishing and growth.

Cultural products of the past were also used to control people. But they weren't as scientifically refined as they are today. We're not completely immersed in cultural products of the past like we are in cultural products of today. Controlling elements of cultures from other times and places are easier to resist.

When you open a book from another culture, another time, another place, you aren't just exchanging one controlling influence for another. Today's culture has a pervasive, powerful and effective influence on you. Today's culture manipulates and controls you in so many ways, it would take a lifetime to fathom and understand.

The book may be trying to control you too. Or it may be trying to liberate you. It's hard to decide in advance. But no matter what the outcome of the experiment with this particular book, the mind is developed by the effort to understand something different, foreign, alien, unfamiliar. This alone is often enough to get distance from today's culture and see it for what it is.

Defenders of the present age will dismiss my characterization of today's culture as too general, "painting with broad brushstrokes." These assholes can fuck themselves. I will give you my message in finger painting. The culture of today is trying to get you to worship celebrities and commodities. Whenever there is an exception, the exception becomes a celebrity and commodity too. Dissenters are assimilated into the cultural machine of conformity, control, obedience. The sage who liberates us from commodity life become another commodity.

If you rely on celebrities to represent you, you will never represent yourself.

If you rely on celebrities to live your life for you, your life will never be lived.

Vacuous slaves of the present age declare their opposition to the idea of studying cultures of other times and places. Mindless automatons scoff at the possibility that words could have a liberating effect on the mind. Conformists rant about how words are used for nothing but to control people. Then, at 9 AM the next day, the vacuous automatons report to their jobs and allow money to control them. They don't see the culture that controls and subjugates them -- just as the fish doesn't see water. Mindless automatons confidently shrug off cultures from other times and places as irrelevant. This gives them a good excuse to shirk the intellectual effort of understanding something new. Sadly it is precisely this effort that would liberate the automatons from the culture that controls them.

My claim is not that you should completely and permanently isolate yourself from today's culture. My claim is that you should try the experiment. Seclude yourself from present-age culture for a few months. Read about a culture from another time and place, preferably one you know nothing whatsoever about. Observe the effects on your mind.

Your mind is important. Don't waste time and energy worshipping celebrities. Concentrate your effort and energy on improving your mind. Improve your ability to express yourself by saying what you think. Improve your ability to understand the present age by reading about other times and places. Please, don't be seduced and captured by the culture that tries to destroy your mind. Don't be lured by the culture that has openly declared its enmity to your intellectual development. Don't let your mind be demoted from thinker and philosopher to producer and consumer. Don't let your mind be distracted from developing its capacities to the fullest. Say no to the false culture that tries to get you to bow down and worship celebrities rather than improving yourself.

The Intellectually and Morally Disciplined Part of Life

If the aim of the intellectually and morally disciplined part of my life is to make money, then I have conceded at the outset that the disciplined part of my life will be used in serving those who have money and ignoring those who don't. I mean, eventually I will have money of my own. But in the process of getting my own money I will be serving those who already have money. When I sign up to getting rich, I sign up to making investors richer too. I sign up for providing products to customers with money and ignoring homeless and helpless people with no money.

Who exactly are these people, who have the money? Are they really more worthy of our disciplined work than those who lack money? Why, exactly, should our disciplined work be used to cook gourmet meals for people with money while allowing homeless people with no money to starve?

Our whole society operates on consent to the principle that the intellectually and morally disciplined part of our lives should be organized in service to money, rather than virtue, wisdom, kindness, awareness, enlightenment, devotion, mercy, love.

"Virtue, wisdom, kindness, devotion, mercy, love — these are just words," we say. "Show me the money."

Of course money too is just a word. You're supposed to forget that, though.

In the middle ages it was considered very offensive to refuse to bow down before the God of Rome. Today it is considered offensive to refuse to bow down before the god of money. The money religion is the state sanctioned religion. Those who refuse to worship at the altar of money are heretics, and will be tortured or allowed to starve. This is our martyrdom for our heretical refusal to bow down to the money god.

Here I come and say, "I don't want money. I want to do work that helps my neighbor." At first people laugh. They think I'm joking. Then they see I'm serious and they get very upset. Why? I have insulted their god! They are busy devoting the intellectually and morally serious part of their lives to the money god. The idea that something other than money — virtue, kindness, mercy, wisdom — should be a barometer for guiding the serious part of life — this is heresy, sacrilege.

Yes, when you suggest that money may not be the correct barometer for allocating the intellectually and morally disciplined part of our lives, people who have allocated the intellectually and morally disciplined part of their lives on the basis of money get very upset. Money is their god. And when you say money is not your god, you are insulting their god.

This is why it is so radical for the idealist to stand up and say, "I don't want your fucking money, rich assholes. I am not going to serve your corrupt money system. I am going to do some fucking good deeds in the world."

"Heresy! Heresy!" scream the rich. The idea that money is the correct barometer for allocating the intellectually and morally disciplined part of life is what keeps the rich in power. Saying no to their money god topples their whole house of cards.

• Despising money is like toppling a king off his throne.

• Nicolas Chamfort

So, yes, when I declare my heresy, wanting no part of the money making life, a battle of religions can't help but ensue. Why? Because mammon worship is the state-sponsored, state-mandated religion.

"Dollar" is the god term of our society. If you question the legitimacy of this god, or propose the idea that this money god might not be worthy of five of seven days of our lives, this is apostasy. If you question the premise that the intellectually and morally disciplined part of life should be devoted to the money god, this is heresy.

So, yeah, people get very upset.

One example: People ask, "What do you do?" By "What do you do?" they don't intend to ask about what I do to show my devotion to my god-terms like virtue, wisdom, mercy, kindness and love. They're asking about my relation to the single solitary sanctioned god-term of our society.

"What you do you?" doesn't mean "Where does your inspiration come from?"

"What you do you?" means "Where does your money come from."

So when people ask, "What do you do?" I tell them "I am kind. I am merciful. I am not greedy. I refuse to serve those who have money and deny service to those who lack money. I refuse allegiance to your god of greed."

Then they say, "I mean, how do you get your money?"

And I tell them again, "Money is not my god term. I refuse to bow down and worship your money god."

When the nun says money is not her god term, there is certainly some hypocrisy in this. The caretaker of the monastery handles money so the nun doesn't have to. The nun still has a relationship to the money system.

Some convents cynically turn away young women who want to be nuns but lack money to support the nunnery. Such monasteries may be ascetic in spirit. But can this erase the decidedly non-ascetic basis of admission?

A monastery in Kentucky supports itself with a carpentry business, making mahogany coffins to bury the rich. Is carpentry not part of the morally and intellectually disciplined part of these monastic lives? Why is this discipline serving the money god?

You will find a lot of cynics in monasteries. The idea that monasteries are full of idealists is false.

On the other hand, you will find idealists everywhere.

It's a battle of religions. The rich want us to keep using money as our god term because they have a lot of it. If we start using virtue, wisdom, kindness, mercy and love as our god terms, we will be building shelters for the homeless instead of mansions for the rich.

Rich people become irate when they meet us idealists because the rich know idealism and idealists are a real threat to their power. We suggest the possibility that perhaps the money god is unworthy of the morally and intellectually disciplined part of our lives.

Learning proceeds until death. Only then does it stop.

If I learn something false, it's not the end of the world. I keep on learning. Eventually I learn the truth.

But unfortunately it's not so simple. There are exceptions. If I learn to be satisfied with the first thing I learn — if I learn to see learning as a chore to be avoided rather than as intellectual flourishing and growth — if I learn education is merely instrumental or ornamental — if I learn education is humiliation for kids far beneath the dignity of adults — if I learn these particular false things (I did!), the next step in my education is to unlearn them. And this is unlikely to happen. Why? Because these false lessons have arrested the process of learning.

Once I have learned the false lesson that learning is instrumental, tedious, something for kids — then sadly I won't continue learning. I will never learn alternative views about learning. I will never learn that learning is exhilarating, nourishing, flourishing of the human mind.

The false lessons kill the desire of the human mind to learn and grow and flourish. If you learned these false lessons (I did!), the only hope for a flourishing intellectual life is to unlearn them. But how?

At the back of your mind, there is an unanswered question, a long-suppressed curiosity, a wounded hope for a flourishing intellectual life. What if you were to give permission to suppressed questions and curiosities and hopes to revive? Yes, I know, you were taught, these childish questions and vain curiosities and futile hopes should be suppressed. A moment of rebellion is called for. A moment of rebellion is the only hope for a flourishing intellectual life. Unlearn the false lessons. A flourishing intellectual life should never be given up.

• Learning proceeds until death. Only then does it stop.

• Xunzi

The Bright Side of Life

People like to focus on the bright side of life, but really it's not all that bright if the light doesn't illuminate the truth. I propose to set aside the positivity bullshit and confront the noble truth of suffering. When I'm honest about suffering, I can get the cure for suffering. But first I have to stop pretending suffering doesn't exist. I can't cure the disease if I'm in denial that I'm ill.

So fuck all the positivity bullshit. Let's talk about what a calamity it is to be born. If you look under a microscope, you'll see lots of organisms with mouths of all shapes and sizes. Insects devour one another. Human beings apply a veneer of piety to conceal our rapacious greed. But we too are rapacious mouths, rapacious genitals craving more offspring, more possessions, more food. There's never enough. The craving for more and more knows no limit.

Craving, lust, an insatiable desire for more. There's a way out from this. There's a way to stop the senseless cycle of calamity. But first one must recognize the calamity and stop pretending. Peel off the veneer of civility from "civilization" and see that underneath the veneer, "civilized" human beings represent the pinnacle of barbarity, inventing machines of mechanized murder to maintain privileges in war.

The veneer of kindness conceals universal greed. The veneer of peace conceals universal war. Rapacious mouths and genitals can never be satiated. This is the world I was born into, a world of universal war, greed, lust, craving, insatiable desire for more and more, indifferent to suffering.

I will tell you how much it sucks to be born with reference to myself. I think most of what I say will apply more generally.

My mother is not a nun. My father is not a monk. These are people who did not renounce craving, who have not seen the danger in craving, who have not understood the foolishness of trying to satiate insatiable desires, who close their eyes and refuse to see the massive wake of suffering arising from their vain and foolish attempts to satiate insatiable desires. These are people who refuse to see the noble truth of suffering, who are in denial about the noble truth of suffering.

If my mother was a nun and my father was a monk, the tragedy of my birth might have been avoided. We can avoid the tragedy of future births by becoming monks and nuns.

If you want to celebrate life, start with organisms under the microscope. All mouths and teeth, these beings represent what life is truly about: greed. Transcending biological nature, monks and nuns succeed in becoming something other than rapacious mouths and genitals.

Monks and nuns fill our hearts with loving kindness and empty our hearts of selfishness and greed. Seeing things from the point of view of evolutionary biology (the rapacious greedfest of teeth and genitals), it's an incredibly foolish decision. The monk makes one choice, and the rapacious genitalia who remain in the world make another. Which will it be? Kindness or greed? Love or hate? Peace or war? Truth or deception?

Parents love their children preferentially, more than others, not for an altruistic reason, but merely because of the vanity of preference for more closely related genomes, the foundation of all racism. If a mother were objective, she would not have any preference for her own offspring over other human beings. We are all born into a world where these racist values of preference for more closely related beings are accepted as common sense. This is another reason it sucks to be born.

It sucks to be born into the mass of stupidity and senseless suffering. It sucks to be born into a chattering cacophony of foolish beings trying to satiate insatiable desires. But fortunately there is an escape. The cycle of birth can be stopped. The cycle of suffering can be ended. The cycle of senseless rapacious greed can be extinguished. There is an escape.

So let's talk about the way out, the escape from suffering.

From the point of view of evolutionary biology, any mental capacity in excess of what is needed to serve the teeth and genitals is disadvantageous. Any excess mental capacity that might lead the mind to question whether mental capacity has some dignity in itself, some value in itself apart from dutiful service to teeth and genitals -- this excess mental capacity is, from the point of view of evolutionary biology, maladaptive.

Most minds are absorbed in the greedfest of genitalia and teeth and have not even seen how senseless it is, trying to satiate the insatiable.

But some minds see the foolishness and stupidity of the life they were born into, and seek an escape.

Obviously, escape requires, first of all, seclusion: separate yourself from the world you want to escape from. Physical separation is not required. You just have to stop listening to lying mouths that put a veneer of piety on their greed. You just have to stop listening to deceivers who try to deceive themselves about the nature of the world and forget about suffering.

So that is one important thing, seclusion. But it's harder than that. You have been living in a world ruled by the values of teeth and genitals for your entire life. Now that you are secluded from any further influence from that world, you still have to contend with the residue in your own mind from decades of living in the world ruled by teeth and genitals.

This also requires seclusion, in this case seclusion from old self, ego, memory, attachments of the past. My new nun or monk self can objectively look at the body it happened to inhabit at the time of its departure from the values that created this body, and see it as a piece of flesh, destined to die and decay.

This body has no more value than any microorganism, except insofar as the body gives rise to a liberated mind. This is why it is so sad that most people then turn around and put the mind in service to the teeth and genitals, and lower themselves back down to the level of an amoeba!

The secluded monk or nun mind is objective. Not attached to this body any more than any other body, the secluded mind can see the body for what it is, a mass of suffering, destined to die and decay, the source of endless senseless whims and desires. Seeing the body objectively, the mind has taken the upper hand and is now in control. Teeth and genitals have been vanquished by mindful awareness. This is the escape.

The escape from suffering is not so difficult. What is difficult is overcoming the culture that refuses to recognize the reality of suffering. The suffering produced by craving is like the suffering of an abusive relationship. Sometimes the difficult part is recognizing the need to escape. Once the decision is made, the escape is often easier than it seemed.

"Don't you find all the repetition in Buddhist texts tedious?"

"Don't you find all the repetition in Buddhist texts tedious?"

When I look back on my life before I began studying Buddhism, I see a life that was extremely tedious. The details were different in each case, but the pattern was always exactly the same.

Seek thrill. Find thrill.

Seek pleasure. Enjoy pleasure.

Thrills and pleasures were diverse. But the pattern was always the same. It's not as if the mind was making progress toward some goal. My life was merely on a treadmill, chasing after one pleasure, only to be sated and seek another.

Now, as you notice, I read repetitive texts. But the words repeated are not just any words. These are the words that have set me free from the senseless, pointless, futile and harmful life of seeking pleasure and thrills.

The blessed one's words taught me how to live in a flourishing way. Whereas before I went in cycles (desire, desire-fulfillment, wish, wish-fulfillment), now I am off the treadmill. Now I am making progress on a path. Now I grow in wisdom and kindness with each passing moment.

In fact, it must be a very lethargic mind that grows bored with repetition. An active mind is perfectly capable of adding its own embellishments to each repetition of a verse. A vibrant mind is perfectly capable of thinking about the consequences of the verse in a different way each time it is repeated. Repetition produces boredom only in minds that were lazy to begin with.

What do indolent minds need to hear? "Snap out of your sloth! Wake up! Be mindful!" Some formula like this should be repeated in the mind until the mind snaps out of its sloth and begins to actively seek wholesome states of awareness, kindness and wisdom.

The mind that perpetually seeks new thrills will miss out on plain, simple, unembellished but very important truths. Life is suffering. Suffering has a cause. The cause can be eliminated. There is a path to the end of suffering. The path is very effective. The results are effective immediately. Something true is worth repeating. There is a path to the end of suffering. The practice is effective. Results are immediate.

"Do not seek equanimity in diversity. Seek equanimity in unity." These are the blessed one's words. Since the world is full of salespeople trying to sell you their diverse pleasures, you probably have lived a life full of diverse pleasures. I know I did. Salespeople present their pleasures to you as harmless. In some cases it may be true. But the cumulative effect of seeking a diversity of pleasures is by no means harmless. Why? Because you end at the same place you began, seeking a new pleasure, a new thrill. There's no progress toward something greater, something beyond pleasure and thrill.

What's beyond pleasure and thrill? The realm where the mind is in control of itself, where the mind produces its own motions under its own guidance and control rather than seeking something outside to move, guide and control it.

What kind of lazy mind needs some outside apparatus to deliver pleasure and thrills? An active mind loves the pleasure of progress in wisdom. A vibrant mind loves the thrill of mastering itself.

The practice of meditation collects mind into a unity, masters mind, improves and develops mind. This is contrasted with the practice of thrill-seeking, which scatters mind in a thousand directions at once (in what direction is no pleasure to be found?).

Pleasure seeking leaves the mind under control of whatever pleasurable sight or sound should happen to arrive. The mind loses its autonomy.

The latest pleasure or thrill may be more subtle and sophisticated than the last. But where does that path lead? With the pleasure born of seclusion, progress is made toward wisdom continuously, without limit. Clearly, if the pleasure seeker follows her own principle of seeking ever subtler and more refined pleasures, she will land in the same place as the one who has transcended pleasure-seeking entirely. The most sublime pleasure is nirvana, the extinction of clinging and attachment. What could be more sublime than this? It's senseless to waste time and energy on any pleasure cruder than this.

I'm not saying, of course, there are no downsides or dangers to repetition. It's far too easy to get attached to specific words and lose sight of the meaning. It's far too easy to get attached to beautiful language and completely miss the demands that it makes on me in choosing my actions and thoughts.

There is a grave danger that I will rehearse holy phrases as a substitute for living a holy life. Holy words can inspire me to live a more holy life. That is the positive side. But holy words can also function as a kind of catharsis, a purging of aspirations to higher values so I can get back to my mindless life of vanity and pleasure seeking. Instead of a call to action, words can function as a substitute for action. So this is a danger.

If your mind is in a state of heightened awareness, ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, full of loving kindness for all beings, then there's no need for words or concepts. You have attained what needs to be attained. All that remains to be done is to abide in your blessed state of loving kindness and enjoy the state of boundless joy that loving kindness can produce.

The words are intended to be a raft. Only a fool carries a raft across the land after crossing the river. There are at least two sensible choices: (1) march on without the raft, or (2) stay with the raft and help others cross. But carrying the raft on the land is senseless.

When there are so many people suffering, so many people who need the dharma raft to cross to the shore of boundless love, it is hard for me to imagine myself far from the river. I mean occasionally I explore the byways of complete seclusion and solitude. But I always return to help others.

Helping others certainly demands a lot of creativity. But it also demands a lot of repetition. The world is in denial about the noble truth of suffering. A big part of waking people up is just repeating over and over until they understand.

You are suffering.

You are suffering.

Beings you love are suffering. The world is full of suffering. And there is an antidote to all this suffering, clearly articulated, effective immediately, waiting to be put into practice. How could one who knows this be anything but an incessant repeater of the noble truths that can save us all?

• All wholesome states can be included in the Four Noble Truths. In what four? In the noble truth of suffering, in the noble truth of the origin of suffering, in the noble truth of the cessation of suffering, and in the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering."
  • Majjhima Nikaya

You can only make money from people who have money.

You can only make money from people who have money. As soon as you have decided the purpose of the intellectually and morally disciplined part of your life is to make money, you have conceded that your discipline will be used to help the tiny minority of the human population with money and ignore the vast majority who have none. It is an unconscionable decision, an utterly corrupt moral philosophy, to help only human beings with money and ignore those who lack money. But this is what you're signing up for as soon as you walk in the door of the corporation, whose sole purpose is to make money for shareholders. If it weren't for the vast propaganda apparatus presenting working for money as normal and ordinary, the unconscionable decision to help only people with money and ignore desperate and helpless people would appear barbaric, cruel, horrible and morally unacceptable.

Soldier and Nun

"Forget questions of conscience. That's part of growing up. Only children insist on having things their way. Adults accommodate. Adults cooperate."

"A very compelling argument. The problem is, it proves too much."

"What do you mean? Too much of what?"

"Your argument can be applied in cases where it produces a result that is clearly wrong."

"What cases?"

"Accommodating and cooperating is part of growing up. This can be used to justify obedience to any regime, no matter how racist or genocidal. Erasure of conscience inevitably leads to unconscionable acts. Your idea of an adult is a drone who sacrifices conscience on the altar of cooperation. But is this the correct definition of an adult? I would say you have infantilized yourself by refusing to recognize the true nature of the economic and political system you cooperate with. Transportation infrastructure is based on ecocidal fuel. Industrial infrastructure is imbrecated with war. The adult who insists that authority must be obeyed is in fact behaving like a child, seeing authority as the parent. You have it precisely backward. By acquiescing and cooperating, you become the child in this situation."

"An adult takes responsibility for feeding his family. This means he must work for a living. This idea that you should refuse to work for the system because it doesn't meet your moral standards is childish. Grow up. This is the system we have. This is reality. You have to live in reality."

"Cooperating with any regime--no matter how racist, genocidal, ecocidal, mericless and murderous--can be rationalized with your logic. At some point, a mature soul looks at the world for what it really is, I mean, not from the point of view of my own selfish desire to survive, but from the point of view of trying to understand the world for what it really is. There is wickedness in high places. It is not a foregone conclusion that a regime, no matter how corrupt, must always be obeyed for the sake of survival. This is a very narrow, selfish point of view. An adult sees the world objectively, seeking the good of humanity and not just survival for herself."

"If you don't like things, you can vote."

"Yes, I can vote. But that is not the only choice I have. I can also choose whether or not to acquiesce and become complicit with atrocities of the regime in power. If the regime is genocidal, do you suggest I excuse my complicity by saying the majority decided to be genocidal?"

"If you don't like the regime, you can leave or you can vote. That is all the power you have. This is reality. You just have to grow up and accept it."

"No, I also have the power to choose whether or not I will cooperate. You keep saying I am childish. But you refuse to recognize the real moral choice right in front of your eyes. This is what is truly childish. When will you grow up and take responsibility for your choices? You have a choice. Will you cooperate with a genocidal, ecocidal war machine? You have a choice. Moral infaltilization keeps you from seeing this."

"You keep saying I have a choice. But I must work to feed my family. There is no choice."

"No matter how genocidal and murderous the regime is, your argument always works. Your argument can justify anything. Soldiers willing to die in genocidal wars are lauded for their courage. Martyrs who die for refusing to cooperate with genocidal regimes are derided for their stubborn refusal. But the martyr dies as an adult, making a free choice based on a decision she made for herself using her own conscience. The soldier dies a child, obeying an authority he does not and will never understand."

"I would say someone who martyrs himself and leaves his kids to starve is a real asshole."

"Are your children more important than children being bombed?"

"To me they are more important. Of course they are. Yes."

"I would much rather have a saint for a father than a father who provided plenty by bombing helpless peasants. You are assuming your children want you to behave a certain way on their behalf. Maybe they do. But what happens when the kids grow up and see things maturely from an objective point of view, a point of view that does not ignore the suffering of victims of genocide and war? What will they think then? I keep coming back to it -- your acquiescence to authority treats authority like a father figure, and leaves you infantilized. All your arguments follow the same pattern. You try to rationalize an infantile sycophancy to authority that, from an adult point of view, is really inexcusable. Based on your view of what is childish and what is adult, you will have to say that prophets, saints, martyrs, sages, and all human beings whose actions are guided by conscience rather than expediency are children, and every fool who marches off to kill innocents under command of corrupt authority is an adult. This assessment is entirely backward. Saints and martyrs are the true adults. We grow up when we become like them, when we take moral responsibility for our actions and omissions rather than appealing to authority."

"With all due respect, sister, you are full of shit. All the time you appeal to authority of saints, sages, bibles and prophets. You are not the anti-authoritarian you make yourself out to be."

"Yes, exactly. This is exactly the question. Who are the saints? Do we accept the false hagiography of saints of greed, who lead us on a path to glittering calamity by profiting from ecocide and war? Or do we recognize true saints are teachers of love and peace, who would rather suffer death than become complicit in the merciless tyranny of war and greed."

• When what is ordered by an authority is opposed to the object for which that authority was constituted (for example, some sinful action is commanded or one which is contrary to virtue, when it is precisely for the protection and fostering of virtue that authority is instituted). In such a case, not only is there no obligation to obey the authority, but one is obliged to disobey it, as did the holy martyrs who suffered death rather than obey the impious commands of tyrants.

• Saint Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard

Comrade, turn off the television.

Eyes and ears are seduced by images and sounds. Film lures you in to its glimmering world. You allow your emotions to be manipulated for an hour or two.

Think about it. How much trust are you putting in the producers of this medium when you allow them to freely toy with your emotions, as you surrender your intellectual autonomy to theatrical illusions?

The advantage of plain text is that you are on equal grounds with the text.

Passages you like you can memorize. You own the words. You can speak them yourself.

Passages you don't like you can refute with text of your own.

If you think about it, you will certainly see the same is not the case for moving pictures.

Films place celebrities on a pedestal and create a one way communication channel from owner brain to peasant brain, all under control of owner brain. No wonder you are so content being a peasant and never dream of equality.

Film and television are created by the bourgeois class and reflect their class agenda, their class interests.

Films with rebellious characters give you the impression that you hear both sides of the story. Then you're seduced into trusting the medium and its producers even more.

Every celebrity is quickly knighted and joins the ranks of the bourgeoisie. No matter what class origins the celebrity began with, the money coming from producers of propaganda erases all that and makes them bourgeois.

When you worship celebrities you worship the bourgeois class. Sitting in front of the film, what are you doing, if not participating in a ceremony of celebrity worship? The story of the film is an afterthought. The medium exists to teach celebrity worship, to teach the peasant class to accept a one-way communication channel from owner brain into peasant brain.

Leave the propaganda apparatus on 24/7, allow the communication channel from your owner master manipulators to toy with your emotions 24/7, what do you imagine the result will be? A free and independent and flourishing mind?

A mind inevitably accepts certain views as axiomatic when it is incessantly exposed to them. Film incessantly exposes you to the idea that bourgeois celebrities playing the role of peasants for your entertainment are more worthy of attention than real life peasants.

If you really believe all human souls have equal dignity and worth, comrade, why do you sit in front the the television putting celebrities (and the bourgeois class) on a pedestal and keeping your eyes on them?

Film is a ceremony of celebrity worship, and therefore of bourgeois worship.

The techniques of emotional manipulation are legion. And part of the ceremony is to relax the mind and submit to the illusions.

Oh, foolish comrade, you have just allowed the danger of dangers to take control of your soul for an hour. Do you really imagine you will come out free of the celebrity worship (bourgeois worship) that is the premise of the entire production and consumption process of film?

It is impossible not to be seduced. Why? Because you have already consented to be seduced by allowing the medium access to your mind.

A one way message from the bourgeois class and their celebrity accomplices. Your poor peasant mind lacks capital and can therefore never produce a film. Why do you accept a medium that inherently puts you in the position of silence and puts the bourgeois class in the position of control?

Text is not like this. If you like text, you own and memorize it. If you don't like it, you refute it with words of your own. Text does not reduce you to silence. Text gives you a voice.

I obviously don't intend to say that text isn't also used to manipulate and control people. The advantage of text is that you can read books about how text is used to control people. These books liberate your mind from control.

Here's an example of a liberating book you can find in your library: Philosophy of African American Studies: Nothing Left of Blackness, by Stephen Ferguson.

Ferguson shows in meticulous detail how money from the Ford Foundation was used to shape the agenda of African American studies programs. The approach was to fund certain intellectuals and not fund others, and thereby promote a certain agenda. The agenda was to turn study away from revolutionary Marxism, and toward cultural Marxism.

For a little while in the sixties there was a blossoming of Black revolutionary Marxist thought. As you know the establishment killed a lot of the great leaders. Those they didn't kill they reduced to irrelevance by funding an entire army of intellectuals who promoted the capitalist line.

Comrade, you do not need all the glamour and glitter of the moving images. Your eyes can be content with simple letters on a page. Words can teach you to free your mind from the tentacles of capital. But you are going to stick your brain right back in and allow the tentacles back into your mind?

People like to say that religion is used to control people. It is very true. But then they imagine that because they are so wise and knowing about religion and haven't fallen into this trap, they are good to go. They don't need to worry about being controlled by anything else.

So the bourgeoisie have a foolproof two pronged approach. Those who can be seduced by piety, they seduce by piety. Those who can be seduced by pleasure and thrills, they seduce by pleasure and thrills.

Clearly, there is a way out. We can refuse to be manipulated by the bourgeoisie in any of their guises. But this requires more intellectual effort, and comrades are lazy.

To refuse to be manipulated by the bourgeoisie requires a kind of self-care. It means not going to the abuser bourgeois class to be abused. It means a vow to oneself, to stay away from the abusers.

"I will not allow myself to be manipulated and deceived by the abuser class that compels me to make myself a commodity and sell myself to them to survive."

Stop going back to the abuser class for more abuse. The abuser class own your body and mind while you are working in the factory. Don't allow them to own your mind in your leisure time.

Cultivate your minds, comrades!

Propaganda is constantly blaring in your ears, endless reasons bourgeois privilege is legitimate.

Let's set the record straight.

1. Bourgeois privilege in the United States is based upon wealth passed down from the era of slavery and Jim Crow. Indigenous people and kidnapped African slaves were intended to BE property, not HAVE property. Titles passed down from Jim Crow (only 60 years ago) remain valid on the books. Those books are not valid. You can't be a capitalist without being a racist (Malcolm X).

2. Bourgeois privilege does not represent compensation for contributions to society. The working class contributes to society. The bourgeoisie collects dividends and interest.

3. Bourgeois privilege does not represent merit.

Number three is the biggest fraud of all. Bourgeois families can afford to send their brats to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford. The brats come back speaking eloquently. Now they can make the case for bourgeois privilege in the most beautiful intonation. They deliver eloquent sermons on the meritocratic values of society.

Now it's true that the bourgeoisie have merit in the sense in which they define merit. How do they define merit? Usefulness to the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeois university exists to propagate the system of privilege. In the university merit means potential to become a competent professor to instill privilege in the next generation of brats.

Merit is defined as sycophancy to the bourgeoisie. Merit is defined as ignoring voices of the homeless and helpless and anyone else with no capital.

So yes, on their own definition of merit, the bourgeois class have plenty of merit. But ignoring the poor and homeless and helpless and orphans and widows and refugees and the planet we all live on -- that's not merit. That's the same cunning, callous mercenary mentality that gave us slavery.

If bourgeois universities were producing genuine intellectuals, we would have halls full of revolutionaries. But the point is to get a job serving the privileged elite and become an honorary member of the elite, not to maintain intellectual integrity.

Do you remember charges of corruption levied against churches in the reformation?

1. Indulgences. If you pay, your sins are forgiven. In today's university indulgences are called "capital gifts." When the bourgeoisie donate enough money to build a new economics department, you can be sure they are going to get a really good rationalization for bourgeois privilege, and why the homeless and helpless don't matter.

2. Simony. If you pay, you can become a priest, no matter how immoral you are. Same thing. Today, the bribe is called tuition.

Universities are not immune to bribes. There is no meritocracy.

So back to the propaganda. Hollywood is a nonstop propaganda apparatus working to mold your mind into a compliant, obedient sycophant of the privileged capitalist class. Genuine working class solidarity is replaced by a film story in which capital and labor unite to make capital richer and ask no questions. Get this stuff out of your head. Get the propaganda apparatus out of your mind. You may imagine you are merely a cultural anthropologist studying the products of late capitalist decadence, but you are forgetting something important. Madison Avenue hired Freud's top students. These sellout traitors to the Hippocratic Oath put all their knowledge of human psychology in service to Madison Avenue, to Hollywood, to the Central Intelligence Agency, to capital, to anyone with money, with the intent to psychologically manipulate the populace into accepting bourgeois privilege as legitimate, to obey rather than rebel, to acquiesce and conform rather than resist and refuse.

Of course there are a lot of likeable rebels and antiestablishment characters in the propaganda films. They are there for a reason. They give you a cathartic release of all your revolutionary energy so you never seek out your comrades in real life.

Critics will say "Your rants are also just catharsis. What's the difference?"

I think there is a huge difference. Bourgeois privilege is not legitimate. Comrades, we must turn our backs on these privileged pricks, stop serving them food, stop healing them, stop consuming their propaganda culture.

Comrades create our own culture. We don't need the packaged version Hollywood is selling.

Every comrade creates her own philosophy of revolution. As C. L. R. James says, "Every cook can govern." Every comrade develops and refines revolutionary consciousness by reading and writing revolutionary rants. You don't need what the bourgeois propaganda hawkers are selling you.

Cultivate your minds, comrades!

On Integrity

Titles carry forward from the era of slavery and Jim Crow.

No one with a shred of integrity can accept the private property system is legitimate.

In circles where sycophancy (licking boots) is a matter of course, part of the initiation rite of adulthood is acquiescing to the unconscionable.

You can't acquiesce to what is obviously false without destroying your intellectual integrity.

This is why this world is so vacuous. Worldlings have sacrificed their intellectual integrity on the altar of sycophancy. The sycophantic nonentities acquiesce to injustice because injustice is in power. Their psalm, which they recite every day to justify their unconscionable lives, runs "Might makes right. Who can fight against it?"

I was raised with this "might makes right" philosophy. Any talk of ideals was always met with laughter and derision. I experienced for myself the same derision, ridicule neglect and abuse faced daily by minds with integrity at all times in places in human history.

Integrity is rare. Therefore, the probability is very high that a mind with integrity is going to come into the world in a time and place surrounded by slovenly minds in awe of glitter and glamour, cowardly minds reduced to silence by awe of power, gawking fools too dazed by their idols to form a coherent sentence of their own.

Nonentities have decided in advance that they are nonentities. As soon as the mind bows to an idol (power, wealth, celebrity, glamour), it negates itself. By bowing to the idol, the mind says to itself, "This mind is nothing. The idol is everything." Idolatry is the negation and destruction of intellectual life.

Bootlicker sycophant idolaters make themselves into nonentities. Why? Because they accept the idea that spectacles should be allowed to reduce the mind to awe and silence. The idolater bootlickers accept that there is a class of idols (celebrities) superior to their own minds, that make their own minds negligible.

Celebrities are worthy of attention. My own mind? That's negligible. That's nothing. This is how they reason. This is how they become nonentities. They accept the philosophy that makes them nonentities, and thereby become nonentities.

Idolater bootlicker sycophant nonentities accept what is false (injustice). Therefore it is impossible that their minds will ever make progress toward truth.

These negaters of their own minds accept from the beginning that what is obviously unjust (arbitrary privilege) is legitimate. This is like sticking a knife in the mind, destroying the mind.

If the mind accepts something because of awe, because of sycophancy, because of propaganda, because of fear, because of an incessant pressure to worship the same idols as the herd -- if a mind succumbs to this assault on its integrity, what is left? A soup of random ideas, unconnected, contradictory, full of corruption, unchecked, unchallenged, unexamined.

In a mind with integrity, concepts work together in an integral fashion in the mind to produce a flourishing intellectual life. Without integrity, the mind is full of contradictory and warring concepts. Without integrity, the mind can't form a unified whole.

A flourishing intellectual life becomes impossible as soon as concepts that are obviously unconscionable, corrupt and false (arbitrary inequality, property from era of Jim Crow) are accepted by the mind.

Integrity is very precious and rare. When those who lack integrity see integrity, they get very angry and they want to destroy it. They do this with ridicule and contempt.

For sycophant idolaters, what matters is power. Those who have no power (homeless, refugees, orphans, widows) are irrelevant to them. There is no reason to listen to the words of a homeless person. That person has no power and is therefore a nonentity. This is how they think. This is how they reason.

These sycophant bootlicker idolaters have prestigious titles and degrees. But they are nonentities, devoid of integrity, incapable of forming a thought of their own.

Knife in mind. Self-inflicted wound. Destruction of autonomy. Sacrificing flourishing. Conflicting ideas held together by nothing but awe of powerful forces that put knife in mind that destroyed prospect of flourishing intellectual life.

It's never too late. Take the knife out of your mind. Get yourself out of the clutches of mindless idolaters. Surround yourself with integrity. Find people of integrity where you can. Find books with integrity where you can.

Flee from corrupt idolater bootlicker minds that accept the private property system is legitimate. Their "might makes right" philosophy is false. Their influence is destructive. Their contempt for your integrity is disastrous. Unless you flee far and stay far away from the idolater bootlickers, there is no prospect of a flourishing intellectual life.

The "might makes right" philosophy is an abdication of intellectual integrity, a surrender of personal responsibility, a destruction of everything noble and good in the mind. Stay far, far away from the worldlings who reproduce this philosophy. They will destroy you. They are numerous.

It's never too late. It is possible to completely eradicate the influence of the idolater bootlickers in your mind. I'll provide some instructions here. They are phrased as imperatives, but really they are suggestions, a proposed experiment for you to try when you have free time.

Seclude yourself from the destructive, harmful influence of the world and those who accept its false premises and false values.

Then, secluded from what is false, develop what is true.

Sort through the contents of your mind. Ask, about each thing you find, "How did it get here? Is it helpful? Is it harmful? Is it true?" Throw away whatever is harmful, whatever is false, whatever was inserted in your mind by powerful forces seeking to control you.

Once you are secluded, you can develop your own autonomous, flourishing intellectual life. Your mind will not be full of false ideas inserted by advertisers and con artists trying to deceive and manipulate you. It will be purified, cleaned.

Why would your mind consent to have any interaction with media whose declared aim is not to help the mind achieve a flourishing intellectual life, media that have no respect for the integrity of your mind, media that do not recognize the importance of your mind, media that do not recognize any responsibility to help you improve your mind -- why would your mind have anything to do with these destructive influences, when there are teachers waiting for you, teachers whose sole declared aim is to help you improve your mind, free your mind, help you to achieve a flourishing intellectual life? Why would you surround your mind with advertisers and con artists and enemies to a flourishing intellectual life, when there are so many Buddhas, bodhisattvas, saints, sages, and friends with integrity and good will?

"Might makes right"

The "might makes right" philosophy often takes the following forms:

"I know that in the past there has been a lot of injustice. But things are better now."

or

"I know there's a lot of injustice, but what can I do? No reason to get upset about it if there's nothing I can do."

or

"All regimes have injustice. This one is no worse than any other."

or

"Some system is necessary to organize production. It will always be somewhat arbitrary. There will always be injustice. But some system is necessary. Why go against what is inevitable and necessary?"

or

"It will get better in the next election."

or

"What difference does it make what you and I think about the regime? This is what's in power. We have to adapt to survive."

In the last statement, there is some truth. Even though the world is full of injustice, we must, to some extent, adapt to survive. This is true. But the error comes when we try to make a virtue of necessity by pretending that the regime we must obey to survive is somehow exceptional (free from the laws of history), exceptionally just, exceptionally efficient, etc.

In fact this regime is a continuation of the regime that gave us slavery, racism, napalm and Jim Crow. The injustice is glaring, blatant, obvious, barbaric and morally unacceptable. It is perfectly possible to say this and then report to work for the system tomorrow because I must, to survive.

The "might makes right" philosophy means accepting that the regime is what it it says it is (efficient, democratic) and not investigating what it actually is (ruthless tyranny of a predominantly white property-holding class enslaving the poor and destroying the planet to create privileges for a tiny rich elite).

Other regimes have propaganda. This regime speaks truth.

This is how worldlings reason under the power of their "might makes right" philosophy.

Beware. The "might makes right philosophy" sneaks in by presenting itself as integrity. My mind must accept the legitimacy of the private property system because the whole world runs on this system. I need a job working for this system to survive. I have to accept the premises of the system in order to function at work. (For example: I can't serve homeless people and ignore paying customers or I will get fired.) So the "might makes right" philosophy comes along and says, "You should have integrity. What you must accept to function in your job, you should accept in your entire mind. That's what it means to have integrity: to keep a uniform, consistent philosophy. Since you must accept that the private property system is legitimate in order to function at work, you should accept it also in your entire mind. This way the mind will be unified, at one with itself, whole, free of contractions."

But I'm sure you can see that this kind of integrity is a false integrity. The fact that you must accept something to function at work in order to survive does not imply that it is true. It is perfectly possible to maintain a realm of genuine intellectual integrity, secluded from the false views necessary to function in a corrupt world.

The false pseudo-integrity that accepts as axiomatically true whatever is necessary to function and survive finds itself weaving all kinds of rationalizations as to why the specific regime I must obey to survive is different from other regimes in other times and places.

"This particular regime is not only mighty, but also right!"

Oh, what a wonderful coincidence! In all the regimes of all times and places, I am so fortunate to abide under a regime in which might and right coincide!

By ignoring, setting aside, not thinking about, minimizing and rationalizing injustices of this particular regime to which I am enslaved, I can persuade myself that it is right.

The regime on behalf of which I bend over backwards and make all kinds of mental contortions to exculpate, excuse and defend is not the government of ancient Babylon or Assyria. It is the regime that has power over me. The mighty regime gets me to make all kinds of rationalizations and prevarications to prove that it is also right.

In this case what we have is the "might make right" philosophy encoded into the method of inquiry. "Inquire in directions that make the regime look good." "Don't inquire about injustice, war, environmental calamity, or any other things that might make the regime look bad."

Since the "might makes right" philosophy will inevitably be affirmed, as determined in advance by my method of inquiry, there's no need to talk about philosophy explicitly, which is good, because I don't want to admit that I live by a "might makes right" philosophy. I want lots of good rationalizations to make me feel like my motives are better than what they really are.

The tendency to rationalize away the injustices of the regime in power is just another way of asserting the "might makes right" principle.

In psychology they call it "Stockholm Syndrome." A prisoner who is completely at the mercy of guards will love, adore and admire the guards that control his fate, no matter how abusive and tyrannical the guards are. A slave will admire the master that controls his fate. This is what happens when I try to create a false integrity by equating "what I must accept to survive" with truth.

Voltaire famously ridiculed the foolish tendency to believe "Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds." This foolishness is what comes from the mouth of all those who try to rationalize and defend what is really irrational and indefensible.

An honest soul studies history and sees that all regimes inflict calamities everywhere they invade, all for the benefit of the elite that controls the levers of power of the regime.

Every empire claims that it exercises power for the benefit of the governed. The noble force for good in the world does not "invade." It spreads civilization, prosperity and democracy. And despite the glaring evidence of history, the "might makes right" philosophy persists. People buy the lie that this particular regime is different, that might and right really do coincide in this one wonderful, exceptional moment in history.

This is one reason why people are so oblivious to what's happening in the world around them. The facts would demand that they discard the false premises that make it easy to function in a corrupt world.

Look at what's really going on. Legislators accept bribes from oil and coal companies, from profitable private prison companies, from manufacturers of tanks and missiles. Then legislators sell you this highly destructive and polluting fossil fuel infrastructure and a blossoming military infrastructure that invades new places every few years in search of more oil and coal. The world is addicted to oil and coal. Alternatives are coming too late. Alternatives are being built using the oil and coal infrastructure. Alternatives rely on mining, a lesser evil, not a cure. Polluters are running out of ecosystems to destroy. Empire is running out of places to invade. What then? What will be left?

But to ask these kinds of questions, I first have to create a secluded part of the mind that does not share false assumptions I must adopt to function at work -- a realm of integrity where truth matters.

Optimism about political power -- the idea that the regime in power can be reformed or improved -- this kind of political optimism also represents "might makes right" thinking.

The logic is this: Some regimes are reformable. Since this regime is the one in power, it must be reformable. The regime is mighty, and, for psychological reasons, I must maintain an absurd optimism, so I must believe what is obviously false.

I'm not saying there are no grounds for optimism. There is no limit to the improvement and development possible for your own mind. That is a sensible kind of optimism, because it leads you to cultivate and improve your mind right up to the moment of death, because it inspires you to pass the torch of intellectual and moral excellence to others at the point when your light is going out.

But optimism in regard to political regimes, the idea that it's possible for a regime to be both mighty and right, the idea that (coincidentally, miraculously), the regime I'm enslaved to happens to be one of these exceptional regimes -- this is self-deception, destruction of intellectual integrity, smashing intellectual conscience for the sake of convenience, and, really, just plain stupid.

The Free Market

While Adam Smith sung the praises of free trade, slave trade was in full swing. While Hayek and Friedman sung the praises of free trade, trade in ecocidal fuels was entrenched and consolidated. Specialization, division of labor, equalizing supply and demand, all these benefits would be great if they were built on a solid foundation. But they never are. Beautiful models created by economists omit the foundations of trade in ecocide and war.

The Money God

Kindness leads to love for homeless neighbors and a desire to see them fed and warm. But construction companies don't build homeless shelters. They build bigger mansions for the rich.

Reporting to work for the money system means reporting to a church where people gather to worship cruelty. The saints of the church of cruelty are rich people who build mansions while ignoring the needs of homeless neighbors.

Any heart that is not completely frozen would see, cruelty is not something you worship. But worship of cruel tyrants is the state mandated religion. Television blares nonstop sermons on the virtues of cruelty. Cruelty is efficient. A hard heart is virtue. Libtards, bleeding hearts, snowflakes, and anyone else who fails to worship at the church of cruelty are branded as domestic enemies. Kindness is fake news.

This is the world we live in. There is no escape. If I don't report to the church of cruelty for my 9 AM prayer to the money god, I will starve.

The money god is the god our society recognizes as real. If you mention old-fashioned god-terms like kindness, mercy and love, people will nod. But when it comes to deciding who will be housed and who will be on the street or in a cage, who will be fed and who will starve -- now these old fashioned god-terms are irrelevant. When you go to a restaurant, will they feed you? Only if you provide a proper invocation of the money god. If you invoke any other god you will starve. This is the world we live in.

Working for the money system is unkind. It is something that should not be done. But I have to do it. And every day my heart breaks. I am forced to bow down to a false god.

Who is responsible?

Who is responsible for making sure the economic system does not destroy all life on the planet in an unsustainable frenzy of greed?

Elected officials, perhaps? But it seems elected officials are all under control of the same economic system. They too want to be rich. To get their handout they will do what the rich want. No, elected officials don't direct the economic system. They are directed by the economic system.

Who then?

Who is responsible for making sure the economic system does not destroy all life on the planet in an unsustainable frenzy of greed?

Who, if not you?

Repentance

"What difference does it make to understand corruption in the world if there's nothing you can do to stop it?"

"It makes a huge difference. If I recognize corruption, if I refuse to sanctify, justify or ignore corruption, then I can keep my soul from being corrupted. Souls try to justify their complicity with corrupt ruling powers by telling themselves ruling powers are not corrupt. It's a huge mistake. The worst thing we do in life is not our own petty vices. The worst thing we do is to acquiesce and comply and aid and abet the ruling powers as they commit crimes on a colossal scale. The worst sin most of us will ever commit is acquiescence to the ruling evil. If we are not repentant for that, there is no hope for us. How can we repent for our complicity with the ruling evil so long as we go on denying it is evil?"

Companions on The Narrow Way

"You can't demand that other people think a certain way or behave a certain way. Everyone is different. You have to respect people's differences."

"A rich young ruler comes to Jesus and asks him what good deeds he can do. Jesus gives him two options. The rich young ruler can keep the commandments, which he was doing already. Or, if he wants to be perfect, he can sell all he has, give to the poor, and follow Jesus. Does Jesus demand that the rich young ruler think or behave in a certain way? Not exactly. He allows the young man to walk away. But in another sense Jesus does make a demand. He tells the rich young ruler he faces a choice. He can go back to his old life and keep the commandments. Or he can sell his possessions and follow Jesus to a new life of joy and love. So if the rich young ruler says he wants to do both, to keep hanging out with Jesus and at the same time behave the way he was behaving before, Jesus doesn't allow this. There's a choice. 'If we're going to keep hanging out,' Jesus says, 'you can't keep thinking and acting like a rich young ruler.'"

"Interesting. But what does this have to do with respecting people's differences?"

"Of course I respect differences. But there's a limit. The suffering of orphans, widows, refugees, homeless and prisoners really does matter. These are human beings. So if someone comes to me and says refugees are not human, that prisoners deserve to be treated cruelly, that their suffering is irrelevant, my response will be, I can't compel you to think a certain way, but if the suffering of other beings is irrelevant in your way of thinking, I don't want any part of that way of thinking. I would say, we don't have enough in common to have any kind of discussion. So I send you on your way to the dark place you are going. If we don't agree on at least some fundamental premises that underlie actions and dispositions, then it is senseless to continue the discussion. The reason Jesus sent the rich young ruler away is because the rich young ruler had accepted as a premise of his life that the purpose of life was to accumulate wealth. We live in a world where orphans and widows and refugees and homeless and prisoners are suffering. The suffering of the poor matters as much as my own. A human being with the right premises would sell all his possession and give to the poor. So the rich young man faces a choice. Keep his (false) premise that suffering of others matters less than his own. Or learn the (true) way of thinking: suffering of all beings matters as much as our own. When you meet new people, the best policy is the one adopted by Jesus. If they are good hearts that care about the suffering of others as much as their own, then keep them at your side. As for the hard hearts indifferent to suffering, there's no reason to continue the association. Send the hard hearts on their way to the place where hard hearts go to be melted. Keep looking for good souls."

"What about learning from others?"

"I have much to learn from kind souls that care. But what do I have to learn from hard hearts indifferent to suffering? I suppose there are some things I could learn from hard-hearted people. But in the process of associating with them, I would also learn their way of being, their way of thinking. It's best not to associate with hard hearts. Just send them on their way and keep looking for good souls."

"What about family?"

"Soon after Jesus begins his ministry, his mother and brothers come to stage an intervention, to stop him from hanging out with prostitutes and preaching crazy shit about love. They want to restore his sanity and bring him back to family business. Jesus tells his disciples to send his mother and brothers away. His true family, he says is good souls who set aside their own will and unharden their hearts. If you happen to be related to any rich young rulers, they are not your true family. The true family of a good soul is other good souls. Rich young rulers are going to another place to have their hard hearts melted. A gilded, cold life will be followed by a tormenting death. You don't want to follow them there."

"That's so harsh. What about family ties?"

"In the case of family, you are even more vulnerable to their influence. Keep away from the rich young rulers in your family. If they won't repent and unharden their hearts, send them on their way. Keep searching for good souls. Good souls are your true family."

On confronting those who refuse to share

"Why aren't you using your resources to help your neighbors?"

"I am."

"Then why are you still rich?"

"I do what I can."

"Your balance sheet tells a different story. If you use your resources to help those in need, why are you still rich?"

"Do you have some better system to propose?"

"I'm not talking about a system. I'm talking about you. Why aren't you using your resources to help your neighbors?"

"I am."

"You still have far more wealth than you need to survive. Children are still starving. Why aren't you helping your neighbors?"

"Could you please do something constructive instead of harassing me like this?"

"I am doing something constructive by confronting you. You are hoarding resources your neighbors need to survive. Why? Are yachts and mansions more important to you than your starving neighbors?"

"Perhaps you should concentrate on your own faults and stop criticizing others. Doesn't your religion teach you to look for the plank in your own eye rather than the splinter in your neighbor's eye?"

"Refusing to help your neighbors is not a splinter. You know what Peter says to Ananias and Sapphira when they refuse to share. He says the Devil has filled their hearts. They lied to the Holy Spirit and kept some of their money for themselves. You are not doing everything you can. That is why you are still rich. Blessed are the poor. Woe to you who are rich. You have had your comfort. Woe to those who deprive the poor of their rights. Why aren't you helping your neighbors?"

"You need to do something constructive rather than harassing me."

"Confronting you is constructive. You have resources that might save your starving neighbors. Why aren't you helping your neighbors?"

"I could ask you the same thing. Why aren't you doing something constructive to help your neighbors instead of harassing me? Do something constructive. Earn some money. Then use that money to help your neighbors. This is far better than harassing other people. You are free to give your money. My money is not your money. You have no say over how it will be used. Now you need to stop harassing me."

"The amount of money I could earn in my lifetime is a tiny fraction of what you possess. I am helping my neighbors by confronting you. So long as I have a voice, I will continue to ask, why aren't you helping your neighbors? The idea that you are doing all you can is ludicrous. You have far more wealth than you need to survive. Why aren't you helping your neighbors? Why are you squandering resources on yachts and mansions while your neighbors starve? Does the thrill you get from parading your wealth make a bigger impression in your mind than the cries of starving children? How is that possible? Is your heart really so hard? Why aren't you helping your neighbors?"

A Better Way, A Better Life

“You know,” said the teacher, “no matter who is elected, they will be compelled to capitulate to banks, oil and coal companies, plutocrats, the military industrial complex, and all the other corrupt powers that rule this world.”

“Why do you have to be so cynical?” I said. “Why can’t you have some faith?”

“It is not a question of lack of faith,” the teacher explained. “It’s a question of putting faith in the wrong things. There’s a huge propaganda machine that works hard twenty four hours a day to get you to put your faith in the rulers of this world, their institutions, their processes, their currency, their leaders. All this propaganda works hard to drown out the faint voice of your own conscience. It’s a very strange thing, if you think about it. Ruling institutions succeed in getting almost the entire population to devote our lives to serving a system created by centralized authority structures and centralized currency. It’s not as if in today’s world individual human beings see ourselves as faced with a choice of what we will do with our intellectual discipline. It’s a given that our intellectual discipline will be used to serve power structures based on centralized authority and currency. In the past, this was not such a foregone conclusion. In the past, many human beings recognized that centralized authority was based on violence rather than virtue, and sought to set themselves apart from the state and the market and live a life based on virtue. You don’t see it today because of all the propaganda, but it should be obvious to everyone: the government and its currency are based on violence, not virtue. These violent systems are not worthy of your devotion. The entire economic and political system is ruled by police, military, prisons, and other forms of violence. Any mind with even a tiny remnant of conscience would balk at the idea of submitting to this violent system. In the past, this is precisely what happened. In the past there were many human beings who refused to put faith in centralized authority structures based on violence. These human beings created texts that make the violent nature of centralized authority very clear. There is no reason to put faith in any violent authority. Power corrupts. Violent authorities are always corrupt. Why do you have a conscience? So you can conscientiously perform work for an economic system that has no conscience, a system that builds more and more bombs, burns more and more coal, locks up refugees, ignores homeless people, builds bigger and bigger mansions for corrupt tyrants? No. Your conscience doesn’t just tell you how to perform your work well. Your conscience tells you that the system of violent authority is unworthy of your allegiance, your faith, your obedience. In the past, many human beings recognized this. Today we call these human beings buddhas and saints, but we ignore their teaching. The foremost thing they teach is to ask a question no one asks today: What will I put my faith and trust in? The buddhas and saints answer very clearly: if you put your faith and trust in authority structures based on violence, you are making a huge mistake.

• They worship the beast, saying, “Who can fight against it?”

• John of Patmos

“John of Patmos ridicules fools who put their trust in the authority of the violent Roman empire. You are making a huge mistake, putting your faith and trust in institutions that exist on the basis of violence. You have a conscience. You have a mind. You have your own capacity to see what's good and right. Putting faith and trust in institutions that exist on the basis of violence, institutions like economic and political structures, is a huge mistake. It's not a question of lack of faith. It's a question of misdirected faith, faith usurped by violent institutions unworthy of faith. The propaganda tries to get you to set aside the obvious fact that centralized authority is based on violence. The propaganda machine points to the fact that you a get to vote every few years. But centralized institutions have a power of their own, independent of the figurehead you get to select. You make a huge mistake when you put your faith in this underlying violent power. The election is a red herring. It gets you to look at the figureheads, rather than at the violent infrastructure that remains in place no matter what figure is at the head. Why is a violent infrastructure based on military, police and prisons — why is this worthy of your faith? Why do you put your faith in violence? Because you get to choose a figurehead to try to put a human face on the violence? It is profoundly wrong, a huge mistake, to put your faith and trust in institutions based on violence. You have a conscience. Why not put your faith in your own conscience?”

“I hadn’t thought of it this way before,” I conceded. “But don’t human beings need a centralized authority to coordinate our actions?”

“The propaganda goes so deep in our minds, it persuades us to believe that the violent authority is a benefit to us. The Romans presented themselves as saviors of places they invaded. They called themselves bringers of peace. Another problem is that there are philosophers, otherwise quite intelligent, who buy into the propaganda. Your statement that human beings need a centralized authority to coordinate our actions, this comes from English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who taught that without a central authority, human existence would be a war of all against all. No matter how corrupt the central authority is, says Hobbes, it is better than a war of all against all.”

“Yes, exactly,” I interjected. “This is a good argument.”

“It seems to us like a good argument,” explained the teacher. “because it provides a rationalization for what the propaganda machine has been teaching us. Hobbes gives an intellectual rationalization for something we believe for non-intellectual reasons. But let’s stop for a moment and analyze the question intellectually. The central authority allegedly prevents the war of all against all. But what we see is that the central authority locks up human beings in prisons where they are compelled to work under threat of punishment — a modern form of slavery. And should we forget that during the time when Hobbes was circulating his theory, the central authorities of European powers were setting up plantations where slaves were worked to death? The central authority does not prevent the war of all against all. The central authority makes war against all who dissent from its inhumane policies. The central authority wages war against human beings that refuse to submit to work in slave like conditions. For the war of all against all, Hobbes substitutes the war of the central authority against all. Police, military, prisons — budgets for the violent enforcement apparatus of the state grow larger and larger each year. More and more people are locked up. The rationalization for acquiescence to a violent authority is so welcome to us, not because it's true or intellectually persuasive, but because it confirms what we believe anyway because we have been brainwashed by propaganda to acquiesce to violent authority — not just to acquiesce out of fear, but to see the violence as legitimate, beneficial, in our interest. The Hobbesian argument is just another iteration of the same logic John of Patmos ridicules. ‘They worship the beast, saying, “Who can fight against it?”’ When you put your faith in the state, the government, the authorities, the cops, the military, you're not putting your faith in the greater good. You are putting your faith in the greater violence. Of course the propaganda teaches you that the perpetrators of violence are the agents of good. The Roman Empire spreads peace and prosperity. The United States empire spreads democracy, peace and prosperity. Of course it’s convenient to believe the propaganda. But is it true? How many more species must go extinct, how many ecosystems must be destroyed, how many helpless nations must be bombed, how many glaciers must melt, how many degrees must the planet warm, how many feet must oceans rise, before people will see that the authorities are based on violence, death and destruction.”

“This is so depressing,” I said.

“It is only depressing because you have been putting your faith in the wrong things,” the teacher explained. “But if you put your faith in things worthy of your faith, this is a source of tremendous joy. The problem is that the right things, the things that produce true joy, the problem is that the propaganda apparatus is working overtime to portray the inspirations of true faith as outdated, old-fashioned, unscientific. The violent authorities of today have persuaded everyone that violence is a force of progress. Even as life on the planet dies, as the war budget grows and grows, as more and more people are bombed and locked up, we still believe this is progress. No, violence is not progress. What is worthy of our faith is not authorities based on violence and greed. What is worthy of our faith are old fashioned values — kindness, mercy, love, wisdom, virtue, simplicity, contemplation, silence. But of course the propaganda apparatus portrays these as outdated values. Show us the money. Show us the power. Money and power are the only values the propaganda system wants us to recognize as real. Why? Because violent authorities control money and power. So they can easily control us if we seek money and power. If human beings begin to put our faith in kindness, mercy and love, we will no longer be under control of unkind, merciless, violent authorities. Think about what this means. If you put your faith in kindness, mercy and love, you will experience a new freedom, a new excitement. This is the exact opposite of depressing. It is exhilarating. You are depressed because you have bought into the propaganda and accepted a false faith and a false life. The propaganda gets you to celebrate cruelty and violence. Of course there are going to be some thrills in this life. But they are cheap thrills. They are cruel, heartless thrills. If you set all this aside, unharden your heart, and put your trust in kindness, mercy and love — now a new life opens up to you, a life free from the propaganda of authority, a life of flourishing — what could be more exhilarating than this?”

“I does sound exhilarating,” I conceded. “But you are asking me to give up the life I have now.”

The teacher nodded. “A life based on acquiescence to violent authority is a profoundly miserable life. Giving up this life is essential to your happiness, to your flourishing as a human being. Propaganda shows you pictures of smiling cops and soldiers. But it doesn’t show you their hearts. Their hearts are hardened. Cops and soldiers feel no mercy for the people they’re bombing and locking up. Propaganda shows you smiling faces in mansions. But it doesn’t show you the hearts behind the faces. Mansion dwellers feel no mercy for homeless neighbors freezing in the cold. Their hearts are hardened. Life with a hard heart can never be a happy life. Why? Because true happiness is in the heart. How can a heart that is hard be happy? When we show no mercy to the poor and helpless, when we harden our hearts, we sabotage ourselves, we harden the part of ourselves that wants to be happy. Our hard hearts prevent us from being happy. You can’t be merciless to the poor and helpless and merciful to your own heart. It’s not possible. The life of submission to violent authorities is not a happy life. The propaganda shows you smiling faces. But look into the hearts of these people who buy into the propaganda and devote their lives to violent authority. Their hearts are hard. They feel nothing, no mercy and no happiness. That is not the life you want. There’s a better way. There’s a better life. You can unharden your heart. You can forsake violent authorities and reserve yourself for service to kindness, mercy and love.”

“I want this better life,” I said. “Show me how.”

Gross Deception Product

The modern work ethic: "Try to make as much money as possible, and this will guarantee that you are as productive as possible."

This work ethic assumes that money accurately measures productivity. Is this true? Slave traders made a lot of money. The economic system is ruled by human laws, not a divine invisible hand. Its measurements are only as accurate as human law can make them. Today the economic system excludes all environmental damage as "externality." Extinct species don't appear on balance sheets. War and child labor are not included.

No, the idea that making as much money as possible means being as productive as possible is completely and entirely false. This false work ethic is what permitted an entire economic system to be built on the foundation of slavery. This work ethic is what permits an entire economic system to be built on war and environmental devastation.

When will people see that just because you are offered money to do something does not make it a productive thing to do?

Unharden Your Heart

Reminder to Buddhists: the Buddha admonishes those who can to provide food, shelter and medicine to all who are restrained in body, speech and thought, satisfied with the minimum of food and clothing, and content in solitude. This means not just monks comfortably ensconced in ornate monasteries. It means homeless monks struggling for alms.

Reminder to Christians: the founder of Christianity teaches that the way we treat the least and lowest is the way we treat him.

Reminder to Jews: the prophets berate the rich who deprive the poor of their rights, who reduce wages, who refuse to have mercy on orphans and widows and migrants. Woe to those who deprive the poor of their rights, who make widows their prey.

Reminder to secularists: we all enter and exit this world desperate and helpless. If we treat desperate and helpless people with contempt, we are not just cruel to them. We are cruel to ourselves. The way we treat others is the way we treat ourselves.

Reminder to everyone: life with a hard, closed heart is a very unhappy life. An open heart makes us happy. Unharden your heart. Open your heart. The suffering of others really does matter.

Reminder to those without resources to help desperate people: desperate people are fighting all the time for their rights. Your time, your energy, your solidarity, your allegiance, your alliance, your commitment, your love, your voice — these are resources you can supply to desperate people even if you are desperate too.

If we make our love conditional on beauty, talent, power, wealth, then we don't really love anyone. We only love beauty, talent, power and wealth. This is such a foolish way to love. Why? Because we will never love anyone, not even ourselves. I mean we may feel pride for our own talent. We may feel admiration for beauty, power and wealth in others. But pride and admiration are not the same thing as love!

With so much suffering in the world, an unhardened heart could never hold on to wealth. The rich have hard hearts. And the rich have so much power over what your eyes see and what your ears hear. The rich are the ones who fund production of films, television, videogames, billboards. So you are going to be constantly bombarded with the message "A hard heart is good. Look at us rich people. We are the pinnacle of civilization. Look at our beautiful houses and beautiful cars."

Yeah, the houses and cars are dope. But have you looked at their hearts? I think their hearts are pretty hard, pretty closed to the suffering of orphans and widows. Otherwise, they would no longer be rich.

The rich are always there on the television, seeking your loyalty, your alliance, your devotion, your love. But the poor and homeless and desperate and helpless are there too. Which one is it better to give your love to? Some people say celebrities and successful entrepreneurs are more worthy of love because they are better people — more talented, more competent, more rational, more civilized. I don't think this is true. And even if the rich and powerful were somehow better than the poor and helpless, this would not justify giving them a bigger share of your allegiance, your alliance, your love. When you give a baby your love, do you demand talent, competence and rationality as a condition for your love? When you love a frail old woman, do you demand vitality as a condition for your love? No, of course not. Why does it have to be different for those in between? If helpless people are worthy of love at the beginning of life and at the end of life, why not throughout life?

So many people give away their allegiance and their voice to the rich and powerful. What a foolish thing to do! The rich and powerful have more than they deserve. Why not give your love, your allegiance and your voice to the poor and desperate? They have less than they deserve.

As an experiment, try to break your alliance with the rich and powerful and ally yourself with the poor and desperate. I predict you will feel much happier. You will feel much better about yourself. Why? Because when you recognize humanity in others and give them love, you are recognizing the humanity in yourself and giving yourself love.

The rich and powerful have a big budget to send you lots of messages, to market themselves to you, to get you to love them and ally yourself with them. The poor and desperate have only a few brave souls who speak on their behalf. You can be one of these few brave souls. Try it as an experiment. I predict you will be much happier!

Of course we have to attach conditions to gifts of material resources. Those who deserve gifts of material resources are those who are restrained in body, speech and thought, satisfied with the minimum of food and clothing and content in solitude. Those who want to live in a mansion, those who are trying to satiate the insatiable desire for pleasure, charity will not help them because they don't understand their own needs. But that doesn't mean we should not love them. We should never hesitate to love those who are most desperate for love.

A reminder for everyone: Try an experiment. Unharden your heart. See, hear and feel the suffering of other beings. Give your kindness, your allegiance, your alliance, your voice and your love to beings who suffer. I predict you will find your face with a smile that feels better than any smile you have ever had.

Your unique mind transcends history.

Your unique mind is far more valuable and important than all the machinations of history happening around you.

False education teaches my mind to see the time and place it happens to come into history as an exceptional time and place. True education teaches my mind that it might have come into history at any time and place, and my mind has no reason to be bound to the particular time and place in which it coincidentally happened to emerge. False education teaches my mind to see the ruling powers of this particular time and place as exceptional, somehow not subject to historical laws applying to other ruling powers in other times and places. All ruling powers desire to be seen as permanent, efficient, powerful, democratic, just. True education teaches the true nature of ruling powers. All are impermanent, subject to deterioration, decay, and death.

When you have wasted decades of your life learning false lessons, it's difficult to remove the false lessons from your mind. Think about this: In all times and places, ruling powers persuade subjects to devote physical and intellectual energy to serving ruling powers. To persuade subjects to devote their lives to serving ruling powers, ruling powers create systems of propaganda. Propaganda teaches that ruling powers are worthy of devotion. The lesson is always false.

Your mind got dropped into this world in a particular place at a particular time in history, but really it is a place like any other place and a time like any other time. What is precious, unique and irreplaceable is not this time and place. It is you. It is your mind. The fact that your unique mind arrived at this particular place and this particular time doesn't mean your mind is destined to consume itself with concern for this particular place and this particular time. Your unique mind is far more valuable and important than all the machinations of history happening around you. Why waste intellectual energy on systems that have their origin in the blind, senseless machinations of history, rather than reserving your intellectual energy for something undefiled and sincere, individual and separate?

When I was growing up, I was taught the propaganda too. The United States wasn't just another place. The ruling system wasn't just another ruling system. I learned that this particular place and this particular ruling system were exceptional. The propaganda persuaded me that it would be worthwhile to devote my intellectual energy to the particular concerns that arise in this particular time and place. It was hard for me to unlearn this false lesson. Why? Because to unlearn the false lesson, I had to come to terms with the humiliating fact that I had been deceived by propaganda, just as so many have been before me. I had to come to terms with the humiliating fact that I wasted forty years of my life serving a system that is no different from any other, a system that is impermanent, destined to decay.

What is worthy of your attention is what transcends particular times and places: Timeless truths. Profound thoughts from near and far. Most importantly, your own mind, which, in its freedom, transcends all particularity. Do not allow your free mind, the most valuable thing you possess, to be recruited into servitude to a ruling system. Ruling systems differ in their degree of permanence, efficiency, mercy and justice. But all are impermanent. Their efficiency is short term efficiency. No ruling system treats the powerless justly. No ruling system is merciful to those who defy it. No ruling system is worthy of enslaving your free mind to its ways of thinking, its methods and its tasks.

Does history have criminals and victims?

Victors of wars and intrigue call the regimes they create legitimate. Slavery was called legitimate. When the slaves were freed, the property regime in which profiteers of slavery kept their profits and slaves were freed with nothing but the skin on their backs — this was (and still is) called legitimate. Titles to land stolen from indigenous people were (and still are) called legitimate.

From the point of view of the universe, all the wars and intrigues on this little planet are insignificant. From the point of view of eternity, there are no criminals. There are no victims. But when the victors of war establish political regimes, the first thing they do is to set up a moral regime in which their victory is designated morally legitimate. Dissenters from the regime are called criminals. When imperial soldiers attack indigenous people, indigenous people defending their land and lives become criminals. Invading soldiers become heroes. If invaders are injured, they are the victims. Now, from a human point of view, one might think that indigenous people under attack by empire are victims. One might think the empire invading and stealing land is criminal. But this is not the way we're supposed to see things. Why? Because the victors of war set the meaning of the terms "criminal" and "victim."

From the point of view of eternity, there are no criminals. There are no victims. But once a regime takes power and starts disseminating a discourse that uses the words "criminal" and "victim," we then have to ask, who are the real criminals? And who are the real victims? These days we hear a lot of talk about how unattractive it is to claim victim status. According to this talk, people on the losing side of history must always accept the meaning of terms assigned by the victors. History is written by the victors. The victors of war and intrigue are never criminals. The vanquished are never victims. Survivors left homeless and destitute by war are never victims. Why? Because the terms of debate are decided by the victors.

So you can see what's at stake in this talk about how unattractive it is to claim victim status. When the victors of war and intrigue, the people who hold power today, deprive the poor of their rights, lock up dissenters, destroy ecosystem after ecosystem, you and I might be tempted to call these powerful people criminals. People who are bombed, driven from their homelands by rising oceans and dying deserts — you and I might be tempted to call these people victims. But then here come the enforcers of correct language. In the correct language — the language of imperialists, colonizers, victors of war — what the empire is doing is spreading democracy, making the world safe by dropping bombs. The people on whom bombs are falling, to the naive mind they may seem like victims. But they are actually criminals. So it goes with the language police, who make sure the words "criminal" and "victim" are applied in the correct way. Empire becomes a victim whenever anyone anywhere in the world tries to defend herself from empire. The person trying to defend herself is a criminal.

In my way of seeing the world, my heart always goes out to those on the losing end of history. I am on the side of the people being bombed, not the people dropping bombs. It takes a very hard heart to take the side of people dropping bombs. But you can see how people's hearts are hardened. The ruling class keeps repeating in your ears over and over that people being bombed are criminals, barbarians, animals. And the people dropping bombs are portrayed as heroes, defenders of civilization and peace. So the heart gets confused. The heart hardens. And since everyone else is hearing the same propaganda, their hearts are hard too. So the hard heart, the heart indifferent to the suffering of desperate people, begins to seem like a normal heart. Cruelty doesn't seem so cruel when everyone is cruel.

But what about me? My heart still goes out to the victims. I still take the side of the people being bombed. I keep insisting desperate migrants are victims, not criminals. Now me and my unhardened heart will be labeled as criminal too. Why? We commit the crime of telling you that the rulers of this world are lying. The rulers of this world are teaching us that we should harden our hearts. When the rulers of this world tell us we should see helpless people as criminals rather than as victims of empire's rapacious greed, I say, "No! The rulers of this world are deceiving us. They are trying to make good into evil and evil into good. Why? So they can carry out their evil plans and deceive us into thinking their evil plans are good." But when I say this, I become a criminal.

I'm going to go out on a limb now and say, we are all victims. We are all victims because the rulers of this world are lying to us. They are trying to make good seem evil and evil seem good. They are trying to make us see the victims of their rapacious greed as animals rather than human beings. They are trying to make us see animals as fit for slaughter rather than love. The rulers of this world are trying to deceive us, manipulate us. Now, isn't a person who is subject to a routine pattern of manipulation and deception a victim? Yes, absolutely. They sometimes call it "gaslighting."

What about the people who are doing the gaslighting? What about the people dropping bombs? Of course in a sense they are criminals. But what if they are deceived too? Then they are both criminals and victims. I suppose we can't rule out the possibility that there is a core of merciless deceivers, but for the most part, yes, everyone is a victim.

So, if you believe like I do that pretty much everyone is a victim, then how do we respond to this talk about how unattractive it is to claim victim status? I think we have to identify this talk as part of the system of lies the rulers of this world are telling us to get us to consent to their rapacious greed. If you want to carry out crime with impunity, it's very helpful to persuade everyone that the victims of your crimes don't matter. It is even more helpful if you can persuade people that there are no victims. Everything the rulers of this world do is just and right. There can be no victims, because actions taken by rulers are always just and right. This is the function of all this talk about how unattractive it is to claim victim status.

On God

Faith in the market, the state and the holy dollar seem to be as tenacious as faith in the father, the son and the holy spirit.

The destruction of religion is good insofar as religion demands blind, uncritical belief. But ... if dead religion is replaced by blind, uncritical belief in the market and the state, then we have not really destroyed false religion. We have only replaced one false religion with another. What we need is a genuine atheism that refuses to believe in all dogmas, including the sanctity of the market and the state.

The ironic thing is that some of the antidotes to blind, uncritical belief are being dismissed because they are expressed in language that sounds (superficially) similar to religious language. One example would be Tolstoy, who smashes the idols of market and state and tears down the false Constantinian Christianity that makes the church a prop for the state.

One problem with a simple-minded attitude of contempt for all religion is that there are some things that really are worthy of reverence: kindness, mercy, unconditional love for all beings, integrity, honesty. If the campaign against religion crushes reverence for these "noble nouns" in its campaign to crush false gods, then what is left? People end up worshipping money, power, property, prestige, and other very dubious objects after well-intentioned but misguided crusaders eliminate all ideas that can't be measured and quantified.

Philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach offers an anthropological definition of the true meaning of god:

God is ... the commonplace book where a human being registers her highest feelings and thoughts, the genealogical album into which she enters the names of the things most dear and sacred to her.

When we rightly and wisely discard the Old Testament creator/ruler god, do we really have to also throw out all aspirations and hopes and feelings that are not conducive to the aims of the market and the state? It seems to me this kind of unthinking atheism isn't really atheistic at all. It is just making the market and the state into new gods.

I think many people keep their faith in the economic system despite all the obvious corruption, war and destruction because they have nothing else to put their faith in. Faith in the market, the state and the holy dollar seem to be as tenacious as faith in the father, the son and the holy spirit. People really got brainwashed into putting faith in this system, and they won't let go.

I can let go of my faith in the system because I still have a deep faith in a very naive and childlike discourse that refuses adult fictions like "state," "money" and an abstract "god" and puts faith in naive ideas like kindness, mercy, love, sincerity, integrity and honesty. In the face of rampant corruption, some people keep faith in the corrupt system. This I can't understand. You can see with your own eyes how corrupt the world is. The solution is not to close your eyes. The solution is to return to a state of childlike simplicity, and refuse to put any faith in the "adult" world of money, power, prestige and pomp.

It's very convenient to bow down and worship power and wealth. Circumstances compel us to obey powerful and wealthy people. Worshipping people we have to obey anyway makes obedience seem more natural.

It is very inconvenient to stand upright and worship integrity, goodness, love and kindness. Good people are crucified, locked up, tortured, ridiculed, ignored. If we worship goodness, we have to recognize that the economic and political systems we are compelled to work for are totally corrupt. It gets harder and harder to justify the routine of obedience. The cross looks more and more attractive.

The way we treat the least and lowest is the way we treat our own hearts.

The way we treat the least and lowest is the way we treat our own hearts. If we ignore the suffering of others, we are breaking our own hearts. A hard heart doesn't just abuse the weak and helpless with its indifference. A hard heart abuses itself with its indifference. To crush and maim all sympathy for other human beings injures self as well as others. Selfishness destroys the higher part of the self in the interest of preserving the self.

"Might makes right" is the foundational moral principle of the world. People who accept this principle are part of the world. Let us call them "worldlings."

Worldlings are one hundred percent certain that the "Justice Department" enforces justice. Show them evidence of racism, bribery and corruption, and they shrug. This system is the system in power. It must be right. What's the point of criticizing? Who can fight against it?

The hearts and minds of worldlings are completely hardened. Why? Because they have decided in advance, before thinking and feeling can even begin, that might makes right. When worldlings see suffering of refugees and homeless and orphans and widows and prisoners, they shrug their shoulders. Why? Because suffering people are not mighty. Therefore they are not right. There is no need to listen to their complaints. Some suffering people claim they are treated unjustly. But worldlings know in advance that voices of suffering beings are irrelevant. Why? Because power speaks truth. Because might makes right. Therefore only the voices of the mighty and powerful are worthy of attention. This is the philosophy of the hardened mind that accompanies the hardened heart of worldlings.

The way we treat the least and lowest is the way we treat our own hearts. If we ignore the suffering of others, we are breaking our own hearts. A hard heart doesn't just abuse the weak and helpless with its indifference. A hard heart abuses itself with its indifference. To crush and maim all sympathy for other human beings injures self as well as others. Selfishness destroys the higher part of the self in the interest of preserving the self.

What is the alternative? The alternative is to unharden your heart, to undo the heart-hardening abuse the "might makes right" culture has inflicted on you. The alternative to the "might makes right" culture is a "love makes right" culture. When worldlings talk about love, they think of love for family: exclusive love. A heart that softens only for its own and hardens for orphans and widows is not loving. Unhardening your heart means allowing your heart to feel love for all beings. It means allowing your heart to feel sympathy for all beings who suffer.

It is a very horrible thing, being raised in a culture that teaches you that a hard heart is virtue, that sympathy is vice, that selfishness is merit, that kindness is a joke. This is the culture of the world. Those who accept it are worldlings. But you don't have to accept this culture. There is an alternative.

Dhamma vs. Denial

"Why can't you just relax?"

"Where does the food that fuels my body during this period of relaxation come from?"

"From farms, I guess. What's your point?"

"How is food delivered to me?"

"On trucks, I suppose. I still don't see your point."

"Where does fuel for trucks come from?"

"From the refinery. Is there point to these questions?"

"Imagine you're sitting on a chair with four legs made of daggers. Now imagine this chair is positioned such that each of the four daggers pierces the heart of a starving child. Could you relax in that chair?"

"Why do you put that disturbing image in my head? And why don't you get to the point?"

"Are laborers who harvest my food treated humanely?"

"Laborers are glad to have jobs."

"Why are they glad to have jobs?"

"Everyone needs a job."

"Why does everyone need a job?"

"Because everyone needs money."

"Why does everyone need money?"

"To survive, I suppose. Are we playing the endless question game, or do you have a point?"

"The world is full of suffering."

"Okay, but how does that prevent you from relaxing?"

"Relaxing, at least as it is understood in this culture, means denial of the truth of suffering."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean this culture excludes awareness of suffering from consciousness, and finds relaxation in this state of false consciousness."

"The world isn't just suffering. There's also joy."

"Joy is impermanent."

"Okay, joy is fleeting. But why is this suffering?"

"Because we know it can't last, and we suffer from this knowledge."

"Okay, I think I'm getting your point. You're saying this culture tries to avoid knowledge of suffering because we want to experience joy untainted by suffering."

"Yes, that's correct. And there's no such thing as joy untainted by suffering. The legs of the chair on which I repose are daggers piercing the flesh of starving children."

"Constant tension is not good, not for the body, not for the mind. You need some downtime."

"Show me where there is a chair that does not have legs piercing the flesh of starving children, and I will repose on that."

"Why do you keep bringing up this inept dagger chair metaphor? You aren't harming anyone by relaxing. Relaxation doesn't cause suffering. In fact, it prevents it. Relaxing allows you to recover energy to help other human beings who are suffering. Relaxing helps you take care of your body so you won't burden doctors and hospitals."

"Are laborers who grow the food that fuels my body during the period of relaxation treated humanely?"

"I think we covered that already. Laborers are glad to have jobs because they need money."

"I could give them money directly without demanding food."

"Both leisure and labor are part of any truly human life. Human beings need to labor for part of the day and relax for part of the day. Why is it unreasonable to ask people to harvest food for you in exchange for money? Honest work for an honest wage. What's wrong with that?"

"Laborers often lose their fingers in farm equipment. Laborers often get cancer from farm chemicals. Laborers are overworked, underpaid, exploited and abused."

"I see. You're saying there's no food without suffering."

"Yes. We don't see the suffering that goes into our food, but it's there."

"Even the farmhand mourning lost digits still relaxes. Why can't you permit this luxury to yourself?"

"Can you relax on a chair whose legs are daggers piercing the flesh of starving children?"

"You can't be so tense all the time. It's not healthy."

"The form of relaxation practiced by this culture is tainted by denial of suffering. Can denying truth be relaxing? Doesn't pretending something false is true, or something true is false, produce, in fact, anxiety?"

"Perpetually thinking about something false can also produce anxiety. I'm telling you, your chair with dagger legs metaphor is false. Relaxing restores your energy so you can help your neighbors. Relaxation is part of a balanced life of work and play. This balanced life benefits both you and your neighbors."

"What if I told you work drives the daggers in even deeper?"

"What do you mean?"

"The entire economic system relies on polluting energy infrastructure, transportation infrastructure covering the planet in a blanket of carbon dioxide, government infrastructure building weapons, walls and prisons. Every job in the economic system depends of this warlike infrastructure that drives the daggers deeper into the world's most vulnerable people."

"I see. You're saying the office chair has daggers too."

"Yes, exactly. The need to relax in a way that denies the truth of suffering is the flip side of the need to work for an economic system that denies the truth of suffering. Thus the economic system includes a fourth kind of infrastructure I forgot to mention, mind-numbing relaxation that persuades people to forget the truth of suffering."

"What alternative do you propose? Do I have to be tense and uptight all the time?"

"The alternative is to maintain awareness of the truth of suffering. This requires a kind of discipline. Discipline is like maintaining the tension of a lyre or a bow. But the state of intense awareness of suffering does not produce suffering. In fact it's just the opposite. Keeping the mind in a state of continuous awareness of suffering is in fact the first step to freeing the mind from suffering. Why should anyone settle for superficial relaxation when there is a path to the end of suffering?"

On the Noble Truth of Suffering

The student bowed and greeted the teacher. After their cordial conversation was concluded, the student sat to one side.

The teacher began by asking a question.

“Would you pay more attention to someone if you find them impressive?” asked the teacher.

The student thought for a moment. “Yes,” he replied. “I would pay more attention to someone if I find them impressive.”

“Would you love someone more if you find them impressive?” asked the teacher.

The student thought for a moment. “Yes,” he replied, “I would love someone more if I find them impressive.”

“No matter what I teach, it will be a false lesson.”

The student looked disheartened. “What do you mean, teacher?” he asked.

“If my words impress you, they will teach you a false lesson. If my words fail to impress you, they will teach you a false lesson. There is no way to teach the truth to a student that seeks an impressive lesson.”

The student did not understand. “Why?” he asked.

“Because there is a false view incompatible with understanding the four noble truths. What false view? The view that what is impressive is more worthy of love and attention than what is unimpressive. If my teaching today is impressive, it will confirm this false view. If my teaching today is unimpressive, it will confirm this false view. No matter what teaching you hear, it will add fuel to the false view that what is impressive is more deserving of love and attention than what is unimpressive.”

“What must I do to learn the right lesson, teacher?”

“First, you must place your mind into a state of loving kindness. Second, you must extend your loving kindness to all beings, both impressive beings and unimpressive beings. Third, you must give your full and undivided attention to all beings to whom you have extended your kindness and love, both impressive and unimpressive beings. If you are distracted, if you do not give your full, undivided, loving attention to what is unimpressive, if you are distracted by an impressive sight, by an impressive sound, by an impressive dhamma teaching, then your loving kindness is not loving. Your loving kindness is not kind.”

The student understood. He sat silently, clearly comprehending, endeavoring to place his mind in a state of loving kindness.

The teacher continued her discourse. “A student gives his attention to impressive athletic displays, and learns a false lesson. What false lesson? The false lesson that something impressive is necessary to secure his attention. On his way home from the athletic display, the student steps over a homeless man. Why? Because the homeless man is not impressive. Another student hurries to the university seeking an impressive dhamma teaching. On his way he walks right past the teacher who might have taught him the most valuable lesson.”

The student did not understand. “What do you mean, teacher?” he asked, “What lesson?”

“The noble truth of suffering.”

“Who can teach me this noble truth, teacher?”

“One who suffers is your teacher. One who suffers can teach you the noble truth of suffering. Today you walked right past this teacher on your way to the university. You were looking for a more impressive teacher. How do you know what is impressive is more worthy of your attention than what is unimpressive?”

“I never thought about it,” confessed the student.

“But you are quite certain what is impressive is more worthy of your attention than what is unimpressive.”

“Yes, I am. I mean, I was, until today, at least, I was.”

“How do you know?”

“I never thought about it, teacher. I don't know how I know.”

“What lesson do athletic spectacles teach their audience?”

The student understood. “Athletic spectacles teach their audience the lesson that impressive athletic feats are worthy of attention.”

“What would happen if you gave your love and attention to the suffering homeless man you stepped over on your way to the university today, what lesson might you have learned?”

The student understood. “I might have learned that suffering is worthy of my attention.”

“And what is this lesson called?”

“This lesson is called the noble truth of suffering.”

The student bowed to the teacher.

The teacher continued her discourse. “You came here to the university to learn the noble truth of suffering. But without altering your views you could not learn it. Why? Because you held a false view, a view that can never be harmonized with the noble truth of suffering. What false view? The false view that what is impressive is more worthy of attention than what is unimpressive.”

The student understood and bowed to the teacher. “A bhikkhu or bhikkhuni always looking for what is impressive will never see suffering,” he said. “Suffering will never be impressive enough.”

The teacher then concluded her discourse. “Now you understand why, no matter what I teach, it will be a false lesson. If my words are impressive, they feed fuel to false view. What false view? The false view that what is impressive is more worthy of attention than what is unimpressive. If my words are unimpressive, they feed fuel to false view. What false view? The false view that what is impressive is more worthy of attention than what is unimpressive. A bhikkhu or bhikkhuni with this false view will never find suffering impressive enough.”

The student understood.

He bowed to the teacher.

“I understand,” he said.

“Good. And what must you now do?”

“I must seek the homeless man I stepped over in hurrying to the university to hear you speak, teacher. I must retrace my steps to him and give him my love and attention.”

• In the past the elder bhikkhus were forest dwellers and spoke in praise of forest dwelling; they were almsfood eaters and spoke in praise of eating almsfood; they were rag-robe wearers and spoke in praise of wearing rag-robes; they were triple-robe users and spoke in praise of using the triple robe; they were of few wishes and spoke in praise of fewness of wishes; they were content and spoke in praise of contentment; they were secluded and spoke in praise of solitude; they were aloof from society and spoke in praise of aloofness from society. Then, when a bhikkhu was a forest dweller and spoke in praise of forest dwelling … the elder bhikkhus would invite him to a seat, saying: ‘Come, bhikkhu. What is this bhikkhu’s name? This is an excellent bhikkhu. This bhikkhu is keen on training. Come, bhikkhu, here’s a seat, sit down.’ Then it would occur to the newly ordained bhikkhus: ‘It seems that when a bhikkhu is a forest dweller and speaks in praise of forest dwelling … when he is energetic and speaks in praise of arousing energy, the elder bhikkhus invite him to a seat.’ They would practice accordingly, and that would lead to their welfare and happiness for a long time.

But now, Kassapa, the elder bhikkhus are no longer forest dwellers and do not speak in praise of forest dwelling … they are no longer energetic and do not speak in praise of arousing energy. Now it is the bhikkhu who is well known and famous, one who gains robes, almsfood, lodgings, and medicinal requisites, that the elder bhikkhus invite to a seat, saying: ‘Come, bhikkhu. What is this bhikkhu’s name? This is an excellent bhikkhu. This bhikkhu is keen on the company of his brothers in the holy life. Come, bhikkhu, here’s a seat, sit down.’ Then it occurs to the newly ordained bhikkhus: ‘It seems that when a bhikkhu is well known and famous, one who gains robes, almsfood, lodgings, and medicinal requisites, the elder bhikkhus invite him to a seat.’ ... They practice accordingly, and that leads to their harm and suffering for a long time.

• Samyutta Nikaya, Book II, Sutta 16, Verse 8, as translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi (2000), p. 670

The modern work ethic

The modern work ethic: "Try to make as much money as possible, and this will guarantee that you are as productive as possible."

This work ethic assumes that money accurately measures productivity. Is this true? Slave traders made a lot of money. The economic system is ruled by human laws, not a divine invisible hand. Its measurements are only as accurate as human law can make them. Today the economic system excludes all environmental damage as "externality." Extinct species don't appear on balance sheets. War and child labor are not included.

No, the idea that making as much money as possible means being as productive as possible is completely and entirely false. This false work ethic is what permitted an entire economic system to be built on the foundation of slavery. This work ethic is what permits an entire economic system to be built on war and environmental devastation.

When will people see that just because you are offered money to do something does not make it a productive thing to do?

The Beast

The most powerful beast
That's the one.
People want to shelter
under its wing.
No matter how corrupt,
no matter how evil,
no matter how conspicuous
it becomes
everyone takes bribes.
They worship the beast.
Who can fight against it?
Everyone wants to be
on the winning side.

Glittering Calamity

Passing tipping point
Of runaway climate
Planet dying
Culture proceeds
Full speed ahead
Smiles and enthusiasm
Everywhere you look
Few woke souls
Depressed and alone
They have pills for that
Denial pills
To make you cozy
With unsustainable glittering calamity
Built to last with concrete.

The Charnel Ground of Industry

Meditate on impermanence.
All aggregates are impermanent.
Industrial civilization is impermanent.
Eventually empire runs out of places to invade.
Eventually machines use up all oil and minerals.
What then? What will be left?

Kind Eyes

Kind eyes
See suffering.
Unkind eyes
Demand beauty.
Kind hands
Give.
Unkind hands
Grasp.
Be kind.

Is it possible to escape the present age and live in eternity?

• The rulers wanted to fool people, since they saw that people have a kinship with what is truly good. They took the names of the good and assigned them to what is not good, to fool people with names and link the names to what is not good. So, as if they were doing people a favor, they took names from what is not good and transferred them to the good, in their own way of thinking. For they wished to take free people and enslave them forever.

• The Gospel of Philip, as translated by M. Meyer, in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (2007), p. 163

The rulers of this world conspire to keep us ignorant of true goodness. Why? So they can keep us busy pursuing the false goodness they prescribe: efficiently serving their corrupt and destructive system. Any knowledge of true goodness will allow us to see the corruption of the ruling system, how it works to fulfill evil wishes (bombs, yachts, mansions) and ignores good wishes (food for starving, shelter for homeless).

The rulers of this world want to keep us ignorant. Why? So we remain blind. So we have no way to see that serving the rulers of this world and their economic system is a complete and utter waste of time, of energy, of discipline, of life.

Here are some of the techniques the rulers of this world use to dumb down the people:

1. Teach that ancient wisdom is false, superstitious, flaky.

2. Teach that the latest and greatest thought (fully impregnated with the assumption that rulers and their ruling system provide the true and correct definition of value) represents scientific discipline, rigor, precision.

3. Teach that knowledge used to serve the rulers of this world has greater dignity than wisdom that directs the mind to higher things.

4. Teach the people to scoff and laugh contemptuously at the slightest mention of any higher value (kindness, goodness) in order to enervate and demoralize any mind that even begins to seek virtue and wisdom.

Number 4 is probably the most tragic, particularly when we see it applied to the young. When the young express their yearning for goodness and wisdom, parents and teachers scoff and laugh at them, as they were taught to do. Adults are traitors to youth. They destroy the buds of the tender plant of a genuine human being seeking for the good, and put in its place a useful gear in the machine, with standardized desires, standardized beliefs, useful to rulers, sold completely on the premise that what rulers demand is by definition good, lacking the vocabulary to even begin to ask questions about the meaning of the good, all intellectual conscience utterly destroyed, thought replaced by servitude, integrity displaced by compliance, unable to even imagine any other use for the mind than to mindlessly serve the rulers of this world and their corrupt economic system.

The rulers of this world work very hard to get you to be contemptuous of all forms of goodness. Why? So you will see their power as the only goodness. So you will worship them and bow to them and serve them and ask no questions.

Their propaganda takes various forms. In their films, for example, any character that talks about any form of goodness other than success in serving rulers and their systems will be greeted with a laugh track. How can anyone fail to see what this truly is: an effort to enervate the conscience, to ridicule any glimmer of desire to even begin to think about goodness.

The rulers of this world and their economic system are teaching you to be contemptuous of everything and anyone that even suggests the possibility that there is any principle, any feeling, any idea worthy of attention besides what they tell you is worthy of attention. The rulers of this world want you to be absolutely certain that their glittering evils are the only things worthy of attention.

Come out from this culture that works so hard to ensnare and enslave you! Flee this culture that tries to destroy your capacity for thought and make you into a consuming, producing machine! Seek the true culture. Read texts motivated entirely by ardent love for wisdom and goodness, not screeds penned by ambitious worldlings in love with wealth and fame.

Work hard and you will succeed.

"Work hard and you will succeed."

This is the mantra we hear all the time. Is it true?

The entire world is poised on the brink of war, a single error in diplomacy away from global thermonuclear destruction. Will hard work save us from this?

Carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere already is enough to make the planet at least five degrees Fahrenheit hotter. Meanwhile, banks build new oil pipelines, signing us up for at least five degrees more. Will hard work save us from this?

Legislators accept campaign contributions and speaking fees (bribes) from weapons manufacturers, oil and coal profiteers, and profitable private prisons. These same legislators pass legislation to escalate wars, accelerate environmental calamity, and lock up all who dare to dissent.

Sometimes I think, "Global thermonuclear war and climate change and corruption are not under my control. I might as well work hard, since that is the thing that is under my control."

On the other hand, sometimes I think, "If I keep working for this out of control system, it will continue to get more and more out of control. I should exercise the control I do have, withdraw my complicity and consent, stop aiding and abetting the out of control system with my work, and persuade others to do the same."

Which is the right answer? I really don't know. But when the system we work for gets more and more corrupt, at some point we will have to concede that hard work is destructive rather than productive. Have we already reached that point? It's hard to say.

Even aside from pragmatic considerations, there is the consideration of the soul. Dragging the soul into the mire of greed to enslave it to a corrupt, destructive system of bribery and fraud no longer seems to be worth the rewards offered. What reward is sufficient to compensate me for making my soul complicit in corruption and greed?

I have heard that the reality doesn't correspond to the ideal, but I still think often of the ideal of monastic life. Monastic life means, first of all, to renounce the futile attempt to satiate insatiable desires. And second, monastic life means refusing to work for economic institutions that are engaged in the futile attempt to satiate insatiable desires. Monastic life means being content with what is sufficient to sustain life, and not craving more than this. It means encouraging others to be content with what is sufficient to sustain life, and not crave more than this.

Now ideally I could do both: live a monastic life and work to support myself too. But it seems impossible. The economic system is based to its core on the false premise that it is good to stoke the fires of greed. Glossy advertisements try to seduce vulnerable minds to seek pleasure from things that are harmful (alcohol) and destructive (using fuel on tropical vacations on a dying planet) and immoral (building mansions while neighbors starve and freeze).

The premise of monastic life is that desire should be tamed. The premise of the economic system is that desire should be inflamed. (It's easier to make profits on inflamed desires than on tamed desires.) There is no way to work for this economic system without accepting its false premise that desire should be increased rather than tamed. There is no way to work for this economic system without being complicit in spreading its falsehoods. By working for a system based on the premise "Greed is good," I give my consent to this premise.

Sometimes people laugh at the idea of monastic life. The economic system has its tentacles so deep in the brains of the population, it becomes impossible to question the axiom that greed is good. The idea that happiness consists in toys and mansions and tropical vacations and trying to satiate insatiable desires is so firmly implanted in people's minds by the system of greed, it's hard to imagine an alternative. But there is an alternative.

The economic system increases its tyranny over the human mind year after year. It perfects the art of cultivating greed and inflaming desire. But there is still a part of your mind that remains unconquered by the tyranny. There is still a part of your mind that can see the futility of trying to satiate insatiable desire. This part of your mind, this glimmer of hope in your mind, is what can lead you on a path away from the tyranny of greed.

Hard work is pointless when we work for an economic system that wages endless war and destroys ecosystem after ecosystem in a futile attempt to satiate insatiable desires. An economic system that has elevated greed into a virtue, a system that makes callous, hard-hearted indifference to the suffering of the poor and helpless into a second-nature axiom in all economic calculations, this depraved system is not worthy of your work. This depraved system of greed is not worthy of your work.

Sometimes when I make my pitch for monasticism, people object, "If everyone had the monk's scrupulous attitude about work, society could not function." This objection is false. I mean it's true that if we all had a scrupulous attitude about work, we would refuse to build mansions. We would build homeless shelters instead. We would refuse to serve gourmet meals to corrupt thieves, and serve bread to the homeless instead. We would refuse to build bombs for an oppressive regime to terrorize the world. The world would be a far better place if everyone became monks and nuns.

The world tries to make you numb and mindless. Why? So you will mindlessly obey a mindless economic system as it mindlessly destroys ecosystems, creates monuments to vain narcissism and ignores the homeless and helpless. The economic system aims to fulfill demand, without ever asking whether demands are wise, humane, merciful or kind. This is the wrong attitude. This is the wrong system. The only thing a kind, merciful human being can do is to refuse to participate in an unkind, merciless economic system, and try to define a life outside it.

What kind of life do monks and nuns live? While the world indulges desire and fans the flames of desire, monks and nuns restrain our desires. There is no sense in fulfilling a desire that will leave you no better off afterward than when you began. You can spend your whole life cranking the crank of sensual desire and end up exactly where you started. This is a pointless life. The life devoted to intellectual improvement, to learning, to seeking wisdom and virtue, this life is a life worth living. Learning proceeds until death, only then does it stop. A life of intellectual improvement is worth living. A life of chasing pleasure is pointless. Pleasures will always disappoint you. Why? Because they don't last. Because they never satisfy you. Because they do not improve your mind. They leave you right where you began, cranking the pleasure mill again and again in a futile attempt to satiate insatiable desire.

What kind of life do monks and nuns live? While the world obeys tyrants, we stand aloof. We do not run errands for kings and ministers, or their modern equivalents. While the world seeks entertainment, we seek enlightenment. While the world seeks glitz and glamour and honor and wealth and praise, we seek simplicity and contentment and love and kindness and mercy.

The world tries to seduce you into chasing pleasure and wealth. Why? Because people chasing pleasure and wealth are easy to control. People who have a mind and use it to think, people who have a conscience and use it to evaluate whether what we're told to do is good, people like us are not so easily controlled. So the world does not like us. The world has never liked monks and nuns. We tell the world that what the world is doing is pointless, trying to satiate insatiable desires, and destructive, waging war and environmental calamity for the sake of vanity.

Might makes right.

It would be an odd coincidence if the regime in power were also a regime of justice. If we automatically assume power and justice coincide, we are guilty of "might makes right" thinking. Might makes right thinking is the foundation of the world. No one in commerce asks questions like, "Is the distribution of ownership enforced by the state just?" People will laugh if you bring up this question in your nine AM meeting. In commerce, it is just assumed that whatever system is in power is the right system. Our job is to put our knowledge in service to the aims dictated by this system, not to question the aims of the system. Even when the system is destroying the planet.

Thinking critically about the history and effects of the system is out of the scope of the thinking required in work for the system. Now the work of a sociologist or philosopher might include a little bit of critical thinking. But in commerce the scope of thinking is confined to thinking about "How do we carry out the aims dictated by this system?" Questions about whether the aims dictated by the system (building mansions while neighbors starve, increasing fossil fuel consumption) have positive effects in the world are out of bounds, irrelevant, a waste of time.

Within the commercial world, the "might makes right" philosophy is just assumed. To question it is a joke, a waste of time, a non-sequitur. Now of course people have rationalizations for why might makes right. "The empire is both mighty AND spreading democracy." Oh, what a convenient coincidence that might and right coincide in this one point in history. This is silly. These kinds of statements do not withstand even a moment of scrutiny. But they get no scrutiny. The purpose of statements like this is to shut down critical thinking, not to begin a critical dialog. Their true meaning is, "Shut up and focus on carrying out the tasks that the mighty archon demands."

[Editor's note: Archon is the Greek word for "ruler" and the root of the word "monarch."]

For the purpose of silencing critical thinking, any flimsy rationalization will do. All it needs is an air of finality. If, for example, you work on the factory floor of a manufacturer of weapons, you will hear "The military is keeping freedom safe." This is not intended to begin a conversation about the question, "Is the military really keeping freedom safe, or is it attacking vulnerable societies that are not falling in line with the agenda of imperialism?" No. The purpose of statements like this is just to translate "might makes right" into another language. The language of acquiescence is not a language of critical thought. It speaks to silence thought, not to begin a line of investigation. No second step in the dialog is wanted. What is wanted is acquiescence.

Whatever language you hear on the factory floor, it always reduces to this message: "Everyone else here accepts that might makes right. That's what we signed up for in being born in a culture of acquiescence. Now shut up with your critical thinking bullshit, Peter, and just acquiesce like everyone else. You are just wasting time. Might makes right. What we are doing is right because we are serving the system in power, which must, therefore, based on the logic of acquiescence, be the right system. Might makes right. Stop criticizing and complaining and get back to work. We must acquiesce to survive." Keep destroying the planet.

Now, I admit that we must acquiesce to survive. But the kind of acquiescence we need to survive is only superficial acquiescence. Our hearts we don't need to join the chorus of "might makes right."

I know everyone hates it when I talk about religion, but religion has the perfect way of describing the "might makes right" philosophy. It is BEAST WORSHIP. The famous thirteenth chapter of John's Apocalypse, the last book of the New Testament, "They worship the BEAST, saying, who can fight against it?"

In artistic depictions, the BEAST is shown wielding the scepter of power. The beast is sovereign, state, king, archon, ruler, legislator, magistrate, court, prince, system, plutocrat, dollar, law, corporation, line manager, whatever or whoever is in power. We bow down and worship the power we acquiesce to. We say, "Worship the beast. Who can fight against it? Might makes right."

The flesh must acquiesce. There's really no escaping that. But the mind does not have to acquiesce. That is a different matter entirely. And those people who do acquiesce in the mind, and not just in the flesh, those people take their acquiescence too far.

There is a better way. The flesh must acquiesce to survive. The mind does not have to acquiesce to survive. The existence of writings that refuse to uphold the "might makes right" philosophy is proof that the mind can be free.

In a regime with superficially persuasive democratic procedures, "might makes right" is translated as, "If you don't like it, you can vote." Then the next logical question is, "Can my vote change the things I care about?" The answer of course is no. Both parties accept campaign contributions (bribes) from the oil and coal companies and weapons manufacturers and profitable private prisons. Your vote will not change anything. "If you don't like it, you can vote." is just another way of saying "Might makes right." The oligarchs give you a choice between two pretty faces to explain their decisions to you. That's the system in power. It must be right. To ask the question, does the system claim to be democratic because it intends to be democratic? Or does the system claim to be democratic to get us to acquiesce? To ask if the system is democratic in fact and not merely in its official dispatches, or any form of questioning or critical thinking, is just a waste of time. Get back to work. Obey. Might makes right.

Now, the archon does not like the idea that there is a part of the mind that does not acqueisce to him and his system, that wants something more than to select among two or three choices he has approved for you in advance. So the archon will make sure you laugh at these kinds of writings that criticize him and his system instead of acquiescing.

The statement "We live in a democracy" is not intended as an assertion of fact. It is merely a testament that might makes right. The statement refers to two things: (1) the regime in power and (2) democracy. It would be an odd coincidence if these two things coincided, if the regime in power was what its propaganda claimed it was. If the socialist regime was genuinely socialist, if the democratic regime was genuinely democratic—it would be an odd coincidence if might makes right. Every time we acquiesce to the propaganda of the sovereign, we acquiesce that might makes right.

The archon doesn't like the idea that there is a part of the mind that does not acquiesce to him and his system. That part of the mind is wasting mental energy that might have been directed to serving him and his system. The archon doesn't like for you to question that might is right, that power is just, that the state is democratic. The archon wants you to obey and ask no questions. So the archon gives you a whole panoply of conversation stoppers to shut down any critical thinking. "This regime is a democracy. You get a chance to vote." This is not intended to begin a discussion of whether the candidates accept bribes, and whether that bribery might impair the truth of the claim that we live in a democracy. The claim doesn't derive its motivation from empirical evidence. It is an ideological claim, a propagandum of the archon. Might makes right. Whoever is in control of wealth deserves this control. Whoever has power merits power. Might makes right.

Those who question the idea that "might makes right" always do so from a standpoint discredited beforehand by our refusal to acquiesce. The refusal to acquiesce marks a mind as recalcitrant. When the system thrives on acquiescence, critical thinking is a hindrance. The ant wanders away from the ant colony and begins to question whether the role assigned to him by history and biology is right. The mighty forces of history put me in my place. Who am I to question whether those mighty forces are right?

Those who acquiesce to the forces of history are mindless automatons, ants in the colony, silencing critical thought, chanting in unison, "Might makes right."

On Threads

I was walking down Market Street on Sunday when I encountered a man sitting on the sidewalk. He had a styrofoam cup in front of him with a few coins in it. As I passed by, the man smiled and looked me in the eye. I put a dollar in his cup, wished him good morning and asked him his name.

"My name is Peter," he told me.

"That's funny," I said, "My name is Peter too."

The homeless Peter looked me right in the Eye. "Peter," he said, "you might use your wealth to rescue the poor and sick and homeless and helpless. But you choose to use your wealth on fancy threads. Your fancy threads not only show that you are a murderer, but are a symbol for your alignment with the class who murders on an even larger scale."

I was taken aback by this unexpected criticism. "I'm sure you have some desultory habits of your own," I stammered in reply.

"Yes, I have vices of weakness, but I am not an authority figure. I don't claim to be teaching moral philosophy while simultaneously showing myself to support the regime of oppression, using apparel as a marker of alliance with wealth."

"What makes you think I'm a teacher of moral philosophy?" I asked, surprised.

"I see everything," the homeless Peter said. "I see the books you have in your briefcase. I also see you don't follow what they teach. Your behavior doesn't match the lofty ideals in your books."

"I see," I said. "But let me ask you something. By calling out my vices, aren't you making yourself an authority?"

"Hell no. And that's exactly why you professors are so misguided. No authority is going to get you one step closer to being a good person. I'm not an authority. I'm a cattle prod. I'm a pain in the ass, sent here to make you uncomfortable with your vanity. What authority figure is going to teach you not to be vain? That would be impossible, because sycophancy to authority is already a form of vanity. What will get you to stop being vain is the cattle prod, the pain in the ass that calls you out on your vanity from a position of no authority."

"I see what you're saying, Peter. But I think it's more complicated. People of the book canonize pains in the ass who call out their vanity and corruption in their Bible, and treat them as prophets."

"Bullshit. People who treat the prophets as authorities have drained them of their function, which is to speak from a position of no authority, to chastise and ridicule authority. Some of the most pompous hypocrites in the world recognize the authority of the prophets. This does nothing for them. They remain as pompous as ever. Why? Because they treat the prophets as authorities while they ignore the homeless man who performs the prophetic function the only way it can rightly be performed, from a position of no authority. Your fancy threads represent a squandering of resources that might have saved your starving neighbors. And your vain narcissism sets an example for others, multiplying the damage."

I stood in silence, surprised and awed by the man's words. "I think you are right," I conceded. "But everyone expects professors to dress up. It shows respect for our students."

"Bullshit," the homeless Peter insisted. "When students admire your fancy threads, they are getting sucked into the world of vanity. If you get up to the podium dressed in rags and teach them about morality, now your threads are also teaching them a lesson: that the vain people of the world are not authority figures."

"I don't know," I said, "It seems like asceticism can also be a form of vanity."

"Of course, man. But if you get your outfit at goodwill for five dollars, that leaves six hundred dollars to help your neighbors. Knowing you, you'll be vain about that too. When you walk down this road again, I'll call you out on that. One step at a time. There's a thrift shop on Seventh. Now go donate your threads there and buy some rags."

An Interview with Satchitanandathera

August 20, 2019

Interviewer: Have you found any hindrance that is particularly common in your students?

Satchitanandathera: I find that students are very attached to the state of unawareness. They have lived their lives in a state of unawareness. They are attached to false views and false selves which they have developed in life before their encounter with Buddhism. Because of attachment to false views and false selves, students hesitate to progress to a state of awareness of the noble truth of suffering.

Interviewer: Interesting. Can you explain what you mean?

Satchitanandathera: I find there is a special challenge today not faced by earlier teachers. Why? Because the secular culture of today, the television, the newspapers and so forth, have taken on a particular emotional tone. I do not watch television. But my students do, and I see its effects on them. Ask yourself, what was the original purpose of television? I mean, originally. When it was invented. What was its purpose?

Interviewer: To provide improved communication, I would say. That's one reason.

Satchitanandathera: That's a good answer. There are several possible answers. To communicate. To inform. To entertain. Television can be a benefit for these reasons. But it also presents hindrances for these same reasons. The mind gets sucked into a mode of receiving information and entertainment. The mind loses awareness of itself. But we have not yet listed the most important reason why television was invented and produced.

Interviewer: What reason?

Satchitanandathera: How do television broadcasters get their money?

Interviewer. They get their money from advertisers.

Satchitanandathera: And what is the purpose of advertising?

Interviewer: To inform customers about products and enable them to make informed choices.

Satchitanandathera: That is one reason. Is there another?

Interviewer: When television first came out, advertisements were more informative. Today's advertising seems to be less about providing information and more about seducing the senses.

Satchitanandathera: What is the purpose of sex and glamour in advertising?

Interviewer: To get people to buy things.

Satchitanandathera: Yes. And to get people to buy things, advertisers must first get people to desire things.

Interviewer: I see, Satchitanandathera. You are saying that advertisers deliberately stoke the fire of desire.

Satchitanandathera: Correct. Now we must review the four noble truths of the Buddha. The first noble truth is that all beings suffer. The second noble truth is that the cause of suffering lies in craving and attachment. The third noble truth is that suffering is ended by extinguishing craving and attachment. The fourth noble truth is that there is a path by which craving and attachment can be extinguished and the end of suffering can be attained. Now, I ask you, please, to imagine something with me. A child is placed in front of the television. The child is very vulnerable. What is the television attempting to do to the child's mind?

Interviewer: To entertain the child.

Satchitanandathera: Yes, and anything else?

Interviewer: I would say the television is also trying to manipulate the child's mind, to produce craving for toys and thrills.

Satchitanandathera: Yes, exactly. Now imagine going through life before your encounter with the Buddha exposed to a machine whose purpose is to manipulate your mind to excite and sustain craving. Suppose a whole culture is built around this machine and its aim to manipulate your mind to excite and sustain craving. Suppose you had lived your whole life in this culture. Now, you come to my class. The first thing I teach you is, sorry, my friends, what the TV has been teaching you for decades is wrong. The path to the end of suffering is to extinguish craving. Now think about this. You have spent your whole life in a culture that was built around trying to excite and sustain craving. What is going to happen when this dude with the shaved head starts talking about extinguishing craving?

Interviewer (laughing): We are witnessing a clash of cultures.

Satchitanandathera: Yes. A contradiction. The Buddha teaches that the path to the end of suffering lies in extinguishing craving and attachment. This machine you have in your living room is trying to amplify craving. TV is anti-Buddha. It teaches precisely the opposite of what the Buddha teaches. Television preaches "Crave! Crave! Want! Desire!" The Buddha teaches the opposite. You must stop craving and wanting and desiring if you want to stop suffering.

Interviewer: Anti-Buddha in every living room. I like that. Thank you.

Satchitanandathera: You are welcome. Now, I will come back to your question. You asked me, what is the greatest hindrance I see in my students. My answer is, students are attached to a state of unawareness. Then you asked me to explain. I'm afraid that instead of explaining I asked you questions. But now I will come to my explanation. Students are attached to a state of unawareness because they are attached to the idea that their lives before their encounter with Buddhism have been wholesome. Students are not willing to consider the possibility that they have been living their lives in a culture that is at war with their Buddha nature.

Interviewers: Can you explain what you mean? What culture is at war with Buddha nature?

Satchitanandathera: Buddhists like peace. But when war is all around us, we do not pretend there is peace. A desire for peace doesn't mean refusing to see war and suffering. Awareness means seeing war and seeing suffering. A desire for peace means praying for war to stop, not pretending war is not happening. Now the Disney universe seems very peaceful. It is hard to imagine it is a war. The Disney universe seems very peaceful. But in fact Madison Avenue and Hollywood are waging war on your Buddha nature. Why? Because Buddha is not a consumer. Advertisers don't want Buddhas. They want consumers. So what do they do? They use the most scientific methods to inflame greed and craving and desire in your mind. You were born with Buddha nature. Every mind desires wisdom and virtue along with food and sex. But the culture you live in does not nurture Buddha nature. Buddha nature is dying. Students have not yet realized what a miracle it is to find the Buddha's teaching and learn how to revive Buddha nature while there is still life left.

Interviewer: So, Satchitanandathera, are you saying you find your students are attached to a state of unawareness because they are clinging to the Disney illusion of a life without suffering?

Satchitanandathera: Yes, that's exactly correct. When students are attached to the ignoble falsehood of nonsuffering, happily ever after, Disney nonsense, they can't possibly learn the noble truth of suffering, the impermanence of composite beings, the inevitability of suffering, decay and death. What you say is exactly right. And I would add something more. Students are attached to the state of unawareness also because they want to see their lives before their encounter with Buddhism as wholesome. But I tell students the life they were leading before their encounter with Buddhism was not wholesome. Why? Because the students were immersed in a culture that was at war with their Buddha nature. This culture pretended to be peaceful. So my students wanted to cling to the illusion of a peaceful childhood. Now I come here and tell them, No, No, a thousand times No, your childhood was not peaceful. Rogue psychology students were working overtime in Madison Avenue to transform your mind from a Buddha into a scathing hole of narcissistic consumer desire. That was a war. The television was waging war to destroy your Buddha nature and build consumer nature in its place. Your living room was a war zone. Now I tell this to students, and how do they react? They want to cling to this illusion of a peaceful childhood.

Interviewer: Students cling to this shattered illusion.

Satchitanandathera: When you understand the four noble truths taught by the Buddha, the first thing you will see is that the culture you lived in prior to your encounter with Buddhism is a false culture, a culture at war with your Buddha nature.

Interviewer: And there is the question of filial piety as well.

Satchitanandathera: What do you mean?

Interviewer: I mean if I was raised in a culture at war with my Buddha nature, then I would say my family neglected me by leaving my Buddha nature vulnerable to attack. My progenitors believed in the good-old Texas values of craving and greed. They still believe in it. If I put any faith in the Buddha, I will have to see that my family exposed me to a false culture of craving and greed and injured my Buddha nature.

Satchitanandathera: The feeling you express is what I find is the greatest hindrance in my students. They are attached to the image of a wholesome childhood before their encounter with the Buddha. The Buddhist path is not the same as the Disney path. Disney means denial of suffering. The Disney image of pristine childhood is a myth. Even when you were a child, Madison Avenue was dropping psychological bombs on your mind, trying to destroy your Buddha nature to build consumer nature in its place.

Interviewer: Thank you, Satchitanandathera. Now another question. Your teaching places a great deal of emphasis on suffering. You teach us, understanding the fact that we suffer is essential for the path to the end of suffering. Now this seems to be at odds with what I call "greeting card Buddhism" which is all smiles and laughs and joy and enlightenment, but not much about suffering.

Satchitanandathera (laughing): I'm sorry to disappoint the greeting card company, but suffering is the correct teaching. The first noble truth is that we suffer. The first step on the path to the end of suffering is right view about suffering. This means stop with the Disneyfied reality. Stop with the denial of suffering. Allow the noble truth of suffering into your mind. It doesn't matter if it won't sell greeting cards. The noble truth of suffering is the first step to the end of suffering

Interviewer: For the record, what do you mean by "Disneyfied reality?"

Satchitanandathera: The Disney universe has been teaching you a false view, ever since you were a child, seducing you with the illusion of a world free of suffering. Students are so attached to this illusion of a pristine childhood, a pristine life before their encounter with the Buddha. In reality samsara was making war on your Buddha nature, for your whole life, and it is a miracle you emerged and found the Buddha when you did. It is a miracle that you had a real and genuine encounter with the Buddha. Before this miracle was only samsara cranking the wheel of suffering. After this miracle there is a path to the end of suffering. Part of the miracle is clear insight into the fact that life before the miracle was based on false views, denial of suffering, and life after the miracle must be based on true views, the truth of suffering, the path to the end of suffering.

Interviewer: We have talked about a kind of "ignorance is bliss" attitude when it comes to my own suffering. I mean the attitude, "If I don't think about suffering I won't suffer." But another element of the "ignorance is bliss" attitude of today's society is the consumerist side. I mean consumers don't like to meditate on the suffering in mines and sweatshops that lies behind the glamour and convenience of the high-tech world.

Satchitanandathera: You are right, my friend. There are at least two different ways to deny the noble truth of suffering. One is to deny that I suffer. Another to deny that other beings suffer. This is good teaching. Well stated, true and pleasing to the ear.

Interviewer: Thank you, Satchitanandathera. You said earlier that students are hindered by their attachment to the illusion that there is no suffering in their future. Do you think students are also attached to the illusion that there is no suffering in the world?

Satchitanandathera: The Buddha experimented with extreme asceticism, and found that it weakened his body but did not provide any benefit. The Buddha teaches contentment with what is enough to maintain the body. Seeking pleasure and thrills only leads to suffering. The person seeking pleasure and thrills suffers. Why? Because pleasure and thrills are impermanent. The wheel of pleasure and thrills can never satisfy the mind. Resources used to produce pleasure and thrills might have been used to feed the poor and house the homeless. But instead resources are used up in a futile attempt to satiate insatiable sensory desire. The pursuit of pleasure and thrills is senseless and leads only to suffering, to my own suffering and to the suffering of beings who might have been helped with the time and energy that went into creating pleasure and thrills. Pleasure and thrills are never really satisfactory. No matter how much I crank the crank of pleasure, it is never really satisfactory. Why? Because I know this pleasure mill is impermanent. Now the Dhamma mill, that is also impermanent, but there is a difference. The Dhamma mill understands that it is impermanent, and with this knowledge comes a path to the end of suffering. You know Pascal says, all Beings are impermanent and all beings suffer, but it is the dignity of the human mind, that at least it knows that it suffers.

Interviewer: What is beyond suffering, Satchitanandathera?

Satchitanandathera: Beyond suffering is boundless love and joy, then beyond that is a state that transcends both joy and sorrow in its boundless love.

Interviewers: Thank you, Satchitanandathera. Your teaching is beneficial to the mind and pleasing to the ear. We are very grateful for this opportunity to speak with you.

The War on the Human Conscience

There is no conceivable way to imagine the ruling powers and their system are legitimate. Legislators accept campaign contributions and speaking fees (bribes) from weapons manufacturers and oil and coal profiteers and polluters and private prison companies. These same legislators pass laws that make it legal to sell weapons to the highest bidder, to destroy the planet, to lock up immigrants and dissenters.

There are lots of flimsy rationalizations. "Our leaders are democratically elected." Ha! We get a choice of candidates both financed by the same corporations. Corporations are waging a nonstop propaganda campaign to make you think you live in a democracy, while in fact they control every detail of our lives.

There are lots of flimsy rationalizations. But the true reason why people accept the idea that the ruling powers and their system are legitimate is that we believe, deep in our hearts, that might makes right. We worship power, wealth, glitz and glamor, and shrug indifferently when confronted with the suffering of the poor and helpless.

People don't mind hearing lies. Why? Because we have no intellectual conscience. Why? Because we believe in our hearts that might makes right. Why do we believe this? Because corporations and their owners have been waging a nonstop war on the human conscience.

A deep and profound reverence for mercy, kindness, love and justice is inconvenient for corporations who want to increase their profits by being merciless, cruel and unjust. So what do corporations do? They wage a nonstop propaganda campaign against any and all principles of morality. How do they do this? By including scenes in films and shows where any mention of a moral principle is immediately followed by a laugh track. By bribing pundits and professors to teach the deluded populace that the sole moral principle is "Obey." By holding up sell-outs and con artists as moral exemplars.

Corporations and their owners have been waging a nonstop war on the human conscience. Why? So they can perform profitable unconscionable acts with no opposition. Human beings with a conscience would not lock up immigrants in cages. Human beings with a conscience would not wage war on helpless people. Human beings with a conscience would not manufacture weapons for sale to tyrants. But these things are profitable things for corporations to do. So corporations work overtime to destroy the human conscience. Sadly, it is working all too well.

I'm not saying there's a specific plan or conspiracy. It's even worse than that. A conspiracy would take account of the effect of the actions it conspired to carry out. The reality is worse than that. Corporations act on the basis of the principle, "Maximize profit and shareholder value." This means they are indifferent to everything other than profit and shareholder value. If locking up innocent people is profitable, it should be done. If selling weapons to the highest bidder is profitable, it should be done. If destroying the planet is profitable, it should be done.

And, of course executives who operate on the basis of this principle of maximizing profit at whatever cost in human suffering want to believe this principle is a moral principle. So they preach what they practice. They teach the principle to others. They fund university professors to preach that maximizing profit is the pinnacle of virtue. They teach us that warlords and profiteers of pollution are our most exemplary citizens.

Sadly, it's working. It's working very well. The populace gapes in awe and admiration at the very people who oppress and exploit them. Anyone who talks about any principle other than maximizing profit gets dismissed as lunatic, conspiracy theorist, idealist, bleeding heart, snowflake.

The war on the human conscience is working. Conscience is decimated. It's last remnants hide in trenches, running from the bombs. Since the mind is trained to see conscience as the enemy, the mind even wages war on itself, killing off whatever traces of conscience remain, hardening the heart, melting the snowflake.

As the planet cooks in its own fumes and warlords build more and more weapons of doom, no trace of conscience remains to complain. All hearts are hardened. Obedience is the sole moral principle.

"Obey," say the warlords. "Do not feel or think or exhibit any sympathy for suffering." If you begin to develop a conscience, you will no longer be able to function in a society where conscience is outlawed. You will be labeled sick, depressed, diseased. You will be medicated and sedated. The treatment is scientifically refined.

"Resistance is futile. Defeat is inevitable," say the profiteers of doom. "You too will enlist in the battle against conscience. You will make war on the last remaining vestiges of sympathy and love in your own heart. You will get back to work for the system of death and destruction, full of eagerness to obey."

Aphorisms

Stockholm syndrome: Prisoners love guards. Slaves admire masters. Wage slaves sing the praises of capitalism.

• The material need of my neighbor is my spiritual need. My spirit feels the suffering of all beings. But sadly when I hear people talking about "spirituality" I find what they mean is luxury retreats amid starving peasants, indifference to the material needs of anyone but themselves.

• Neoliberal rationalizations for inequality rely on a kind of "scientific classism" reminiscent of the "scientific racism" of Jim Crow, and just as fraudulent.

• “I must change.” This is the inevitable conclusion of all sincere intellectual inquiry. For the complacent, self-satisfied egotist, sincere intellectual inquiry is therefore impossible.

• Victors of war always write history to make themselves out to be in the right. The rich are the victors in the war for resources. They write economic history to make it out as if their wealth came from free trade, obscuring the true history of slavery, racism, theft of native lands, invasions, bribes, imprisonment of dissenters. Victors in the war for resources are not the rightful owners of the resources they possess. Might does not make right.

• Private property is a purely imaginary institution (e.g. titles to land stolen from natives). Suffering of starving children is real. It is immoral to allow purely imaginary institutions to enter into moral reasoning. When we see resources that could save our starving neighbors, we must seize these resources and give them to our starving neighbors, no matter who claims to own them. Private property is an delusion, a deception. Don't be deluded and deceived. Seize the resources you need to help your starving neighbors.

• Evil empire has all kinds of propaganda to make you believe it is good, to make you believe acquiescing to its authority is right. We are inclined to believe the propaganda. Why? Because we are compelled by the overwhelming violence of evil empire to acquiesce. We might as well pretend evil empire is good so our consciences can rest at ease. Evil empire talks the good talk about justice, property rights, democracy and rule of law. But we all know that's just propaganda. Legislators take bribes. The powerful steal from the powerless. What is the true principle of evil empire? What is the sole principle evil empire recognizes? Might makes right.

• The propaganda system works night and day to make sure you idolize people who oppress, exploit, manipulate and deceive you.

• The most successful and rapacious empire in world history invaded every corner of the globe in search of oil and minerals. The most successful and rapacious empire in world history heated up the planet by ten degrees. It turned the oceans into toxic acid. All empires are impermanent. But in order to find out this truth, rather than reading the philosophers who teach impermanence, the empire tried to sustain itself, and destroyed itself and the planet in the process.

• No matter how good I am at taking responsibility for my job, this doesn't make me responsible. Why? Because the economic system takes no responsibility for what it does to the poor and the planet. Taking responsibility means teaching critical thinking about the ruling powers, not obeying them.

• To devote the intellectually and morally disciplined part of life to a corrupt economic system is intellectual and moral suicide.

• Working for this economic system is not helping our neighbors. It only makes the rich richer and destroys our planet.

• People who talk about "love" but do not seize the means from the rich to help the poor do not love the poor. They are full of shit.

• The state is an evil war machine.
  Commerce is an evil greed machine.
  What are you doing, devoting your life to evil?
  Good lies only in revolt.

• The industrial system is perpetually at war, invading new places to steal oil and minerals. The industrial system pollutes our air and water and smothers our planet in a blanket of carbon dioxide. Industry calls its activities "production." Don't be deceived. This is not production. This is a calamity of death and destruction. There is no productive job in a destructive system. There is no sustainable life in a system eternally at war. Don't be deceived by the propaganda. Industrial civilization is not sustainable. The longer we try to sustain the unsustainable, the more damage will be done. To build unsustainable machines, the system wipes out the old-fashioned, antiquated sustainable system we once called life. Soon all natural life will be killed off by this insane experiment in replacing life with unsustainable death machines. The last remaining sustainable societies in the rainforest are being invaded to steal the minerals needed to keep the unsustainable fossil bubble civilization going for another decade. Soon industrial civilization will run out of places to invade. Then what? What will be left? Don't be deceived by the propaganda. Industrial civilization is not sustainable. We are doomed.

• When ruled by a system of evil, crime is virtue.

• Obeying the system is a far worse crime than any crime you or I could devise.

• Lysistrata, today, would also refuse her husband's demands until the patriarchy stops warring and destroying the planet.

• Priests, plutocrats and politicians all conspire to get you to acquiesce to authority and surrender your conscience. Politicians interpose themselves between you and your neighbors, so instead of talking about what is good you choose which politician will tell you what is good. Plutocrats interpose themselves between you and your work, so instead of thinking about what work will help your neighbors, you think about what work will help plutocrats get richer. Priests, most nefarious of all, interpose themselves between you and your own conscience, so instead of thinking about what is true and good and right, you recite a litany and ask no questions.

• Evil requires no thought, and can therefore be very swift, organized and efficient. Goodness requires contemplation, patience and thought, and therefore will always be less efficient than evil. The most efficient army is an army of soldiers with no conscience ruled by generals with no conscience. I have no choice whether I will be ruled by evil or goodness. That is not under my control. We are destined to always be ruled by evil. Why? Because evil is more efficient than good and will always triumph in war. Ruling powers will always be evil. That is their nature. The choice I have is not to be ruled by evil or goodness. The choice I have is this: Do I acquiesce, serve ruling powers, and make evil stronger? Or do I refuse to serve evil, resist its allure of efficiency, call ruling systems by their true name, and, by my refusal and resistance and witness, bring a tiny glimmer of goodness into an evil world?

• A system that compels me to do what I know is wrong, that is tyranny. It is wrong to destroy all life on the planet so oil and coal companies can make record profits. It is wrong to sell weapons to the highest bidder so weapons manufacturers can make record profits. It is wrong to build mansions for the rich while the poor starve and freeze in the cold. The system that compels people to do these things poses as democracy, but it is not democracy. People want to do work that actually helps our neighbors. The system compels us to do what we know is wrong. It is tyranny.

• Locking up immigrants in profitable prisons is wrong. Selling weapons to the highest bidder is wrong. Who does these things? The legitimate authority. What does it mean when the legitimate authority does immoral things? It means authority is not legitimate. It means we must not be complicit in its crimes. To comply is to be complicit. We must resist and rebel.

• Systems of authority treat people far more cruelly than any human being ever would. Why? Because systems of authority have no conscience. That is why I must always use my own conscience, and never surrender my moral autonomy to any authority.

• Television is at war with your Buddha nature, trying to replace it with a seething hole of narcissistic consumer desire.

• Hollywood persuades you narcissism is normal.
  Turn off the television.
  Suffering beings need your attention.

• When legislators eat bribes, obeying the law is illegal.

• Privileged people devise their premises and arguments by reasoning backward from a foreordained conclusion: my privilege is justified. Sell-outs devise their premises and arguments by reasoning backward from a foreordained conclusion: selling out is justified. When groups of privileged aristocrats and spineless sycophants congregate together, the chorus of convenient falsehoods reaches a deafening pitch. Intellectual integrity is nowhere to be found.

• The state tells you it is democratic to get you to acquiesce, not because it intends to be democratic.

• If you are not despised and execrated by the rich and powerful, you are their accomplice.

• Apocalypticism often comes in the language of prophecy or fiction, but in fact it is entirely logical and scientific. The whole world is at war for oil and minerals. It is inevitable that evil empire will eventually run out of places to invade. It is inevitable that evil empire will eventually run out of oil and minerals. This entire civilization is based on an unsustainable infrastructure of war and environmental devastation. Empire can't last. Doom is inevitable. All empires fall. Repent for collaboration with evil empire. Do not share in its iniquities.

• A tyrant who compels me to express criticism in clear and concise terms is actually a liberator from tyranny. The discipline of critical thought frees me from forms of authority I had accepted because I couldn't find the words to criticize them.

• "To each his own" licenses the owner class to use their wealth on mansions and caviar while ignoring the pleas of starving neighbors. No. Those who possess wealth possess it as stewards, to be used for the benefit of society. If they misuse their wealth in idle displays of vanity, their moral right to their wealth is gone. The people must seize their wealth and prevent this misuse of resources.

• Why do people not recognize the moral demand to rescue the poor and oppressed? Why are people so busy seeking entertainment, amusement and pleasure that they fail to consult with their own conscience?

• Feeding a starving child is more important than building a mansion. It's time to stop pretending egotistical sociopaths who live in luxury while neighbors starve are decent human beings.

• You can see why people idolize the oppressor-tyrant-owner class and pretend the world is just. It makes things so much easier. Feelings of rage and righteous indignation at injustice give way to feelings of admiration and fawning respect for the perpetrators.

• United States empire robs resources from entire world to sustain unsustainable way of life for tiny rich elite, destroying planet and enslaving poor so rich can have mansions and tropical vacations.

• Stockholm syndrome: Prisoners love guards. Slaves admire masters. Wage slaves sing the praises of capitalism.

• Nothing is more absurd than pride in money made by honest work. Corrupt crooks acquire thousands of times more money than anyone could earn in a lifetime of honest work with their shady deals, bribing legislators, selling weapons to tyrants, deceiving the vulnerable, oppressing the powerless. Money is corruption. When we traded our honest work for money, it became dishonest. We should be ashamed, not proud.

• All of our comforts and conveniences come from robbing vulnerable people of their land and minerals, and robbing the next generation of a habitable planet. What we call advanced civilization is really systematic barbarism.

• Reminder: If you spend your life chasing wealth, the most you can hope for is to have at the end of life what others have at the beginning through no effort of their own. In the meantime your life will be gone. No one has virtue without effort. No one has wisdom without effort. These are the things worth pursuing.

• When you learn that your rulers are destroying the planet, bombing dissenters, enslaving children, so that a rich elite can have mansions and tropical vacations, you will do everything in your power to stop them. There is no going back to the life of contentment and obedience.

• Obedience is a conscienceless act. Rulers have no conscience. Their sole aim is to vie for power. At no point in an act of obedience does conscience enter into the calculation. And we are surprised that a world where we encourage one another to obey is as corrupt, destructive and inhumane as it is?

• An education that turns a human being into a commodity is not an education at all. It is a mutilation. A mind by nature inquisitive, critical, vibrant, full of questions and eager to do right, transformed into a tool, eager to serve power, accepting all commands and compromises no matter how cruel.

• Capital-intensive forms of communication will always deliver messages approved by capital. Open air preaching is democratic. Churches are not. Memes are democratic. Movies are not. If your eyes demand a beautifully choreographed image, you will see only what capital wants you to see.

• It's never too late to revive the soul the world betrayed.

• Capital will use any means necessary to destroy its opponents. We are its opponents.

• Industrial civilizations do not evolve into spacefaring civilizations. They evolve into toxic waste heaps, poison water and air, refugee crises and global thermonuclear war. Star Trek is propaganda for the oil companies, to sell us an unsustainable way of life. "Reach for the stars," they chant, as they destroy the planet.

• When we talk about economic progress, we would be well advised to remember the etymology of the word "economy." οἶκος means home. The earth is our home. Destroying our home is not progress.

• The desire to possess, if it is redirected—from a desire to possess power, people and things—to a desire to possess wisdom, virtue, awareness, insight, kindness and love—will bless the one who has it.

• The distribution of material resources in the world is due almost entirely to chance. Lawyers acknowledge this when they say, "Possession is nine-tenths of the law." Why do we allow the goals of our work, the intellectually disciplined part of our lives, to be determined by a system which lacks intellectual discipline, which combines rational and irrational demand, which enforces rational and irrational claims to ownership? Why do we allow our reason to be confined to finding means to ends, and never assess the rationality of ends?

• It's not by virtue of some special feature, some talent, some virtue, some honor, that your neighbor deserves your love. Neighbor love doesn't demand any special characteristic. It loves for the sake of loving.

• So long as we continue to respect human beings who live in luxury while their neighbors suffer, who use their resources to impress others rather than to help others, we will never create a society based on love and care rather than strife and hate. A good society requires an aesthetic appreciation of goodness, which is entirely incompatible with admiration of opulence and grandeur. The monk is a hero. The mansion dweller is a villain. Our American aesthetic has tragically inverted the proper judgment, and vaunted a glittering evil into the spotlight.

• When the flow of discourse is unidirectional, we invariably begin to idolize the source. Disrupt the hierarchical flow of discourse—from masters to servants—from entertainers to entertained. Climb up on the stage. Say what needs to be said. All human beings deserve to be heard.

• I see far too many students sacrifice their individual intellectual development to advance collective knowledge of the species. The academic world shouldn't ask us to make this sacrifice. We shouldn't comply when they do.

• As psychology is increasingly brought under the tyranny of capital, it must necessarily lose its capacity for revealing and analyzing internalized oppression.

• It is, perhaps, not accidental that the center of a tyrannical empire celebrates superficiality, ignorance and frivolity. Knowledge leads to thought. Thought leads to questioning. Questioning undermines the willingness of subjects to accept tyranny.

• Climate scientists keep clamoring that a fossil-fuel based civilization is unsustainable. Petroleum engineers ignore them and keep drilling. The left brain doesn’t understand what the right brain is doing. Remember the Tower of Babel? The tasks for building the tower were so varied that everyone started speaking different languages. No one could understand anyone anymore. The tower fell.

• Work is the intellectually disciplined part of our lives. To devote the intellectually disciplined part of our lives to a task assigned to us, rather than a task that arises autonomously within us, represents a spiritual death. This is even more true today, when we can all see that the system that assigns tasks to us is spiritually and morally bankrupt, corrupt, destructive, and probably irredeemable.

• Using time, energy and resources seeking pleasure and thrills, rather than seeking with all my heart and all my strength to help all sentient beings achieve peace and enlightenment, from an ethical point of view, is slovenly.

• Rationality is defined by whoever has the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them. We must be rational enough to yield to them. This sentiment is what defines the mindset of the bourgeois. No matter how absurdly irrational the distribution of property gets, the bourgeois will accept it, and call this cowardly acceptance rational.

• A history of racism makes the institution of inheritance, which carries the past into the future, inherently racist. Even if all racism were to end tomorrow, so long as the institution of inheritance persists, the racism of the past will still be with us.

• The working class allows the hereditary elite to pass on trillions of wealth in each generation. Why? The working class created all that wealth. It belongs to us. We outnumber them one hundred to one. We can seize our share as soon as we wake up and stop being deluded by their propaganda system.

• All human beings are equal in dignity and worth. As soon as you repent for your cowardly, servile sycophancy to the rich, powerful and distinguished, and recognize the homeless man on the corner is as important as the president of the university, you have made yourself the equal of the saints and sages. The cowardly sycophancy to the rich, powerful and distinguished of your former self will seem silly and foolish. You can be distinguished if and only if you recognize the equality of all human beings. The understanding of this equality is the only distinction you can ever need, and the only one you can ever respect.

• Fellow working class peons, are you willing to work your entire life to earn a tiny fraction of what heirs and heiresses have at birth through no effort of their own? Why do you accept this injustice without fighting back? Are you really such cowards? You can be the vanguard, fighting for justice. That is heroic. Being a wage slave is cowardly and pathetic. Drop your tools and take up your position in the battle against inequality.

• The culture of superficiality is kleptocrats dumbing us down so we are too illiterate to explain kleptocracy.

• It is a sad truth that in the world good intentions count for nothing. What counts is power, money, status, reputation, and the bad intention of acquiring these things.

• The first noble truth is the truth of suffering. When we discover this truth, the first reaction is to flee to comforting amusements. This should be resisted. Meditate upon the dark side you have uncovered. Don't continue to conceal suffering behind amusement. Hiding the first noble truth behind a smokescreen of amusement is the American way. There is a better way. Meditation offers a path to the end of suffering. Amusement does not.

• Capitalist regimes treat the spoils of war as valid property rights. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law." Libertarian free trade utopia has no correspondence whatsoever with real world capitalism.

• All human beings are equal in dignity and worth. The existence of aristocrats is an affront to this equality.

• Human beings are dying because tyrants who control society's resources use them on luxury and vanity instead of helping their neighbors. Tyrants did not acquire these resources justly. They do not use them humanely. There is a moral imperative to free prisoners locked up by tyrants, to stop tyrants from bombing and assassinating dissenters, and to return ownership of the world to the people from whom tyrants have stolen it. Acquiescence to tyranny, injustice and cruelty makes us accomplices of tyrants.

• Once upon a time there was a form of tyranny that posed as liberty and was very efficient at getting things done. This form of tyranny assured its subjects, alternatives were inefficient. Some alternatives were sustainable, but they were inefficient. Some alternatives provided more leisure, more justice, or even more kindness and mercy. But they were inefficient. They were destroyed. There was no alternative.

• Capitalism creates an alternate reality. In the alternate reality balance sheets show record profits. In reality the planet is dying.

• The capitalist brand of genocide doesn't seem shocking to us because we are used to it, but in reality it is among the worst. Human beings starve so rich can have mansions and tropical vacations.

• If you spend all day navigating the world of capitalism, you will inevitably come to share its assumptions. Better to spend the days that remain before ecological collapse in the woods.

• Inequalities in ownership of resources are not the product of fate, as rich would have us believe. Inequalities are the product of poor people acquiescing to injustice. This acquiescence is a product of free will, and can change at any moment. Now is a good time.

• Think about this: Working class peasants are compelled to do elaborate monkey tricks to entertain owner class or else lead a miserable existence. Owner class, on the other hand, will have an opulent existence no matter what they do. Their privilege comes from owning, not doing or being.

• The rich bribe legislators and repeal all taxes on themselves. They hoard resources that might save millions from starvation. They squander resources on yachts and mansions and tropical vacations that might save millions more.

• The rich bribe both parties. They stack the courts. They bust unions. They install fascist dictatorships. They have their power wrapped up pretty good. Except ...

• The origin of wealth is plunder. Land was stolen from Native Americans who were never compensated. Labor was stolen from chattel slaves who were never compensated. At what point did property rights based on a history of theft, slavery, racism, genocide, war, exploitation, invasion, deception and destruction suddenly become so legitimate that we can now use them to decide when wealth is being created?

• If you avoid politics, you sanction unconscionable atrocities that might have been prevented by political activism. Not just elections, but every interaction with another human being is political. For example: If I am in the presence of a wealthy woman wearing jewels, the non-political thing to do is to mind my own business. The political thing to do is to scream in her face that resources she squanders on jewels might save thousands of starving children. Elections are the sanctioned form of politics because they are tame. Political assumptions that permit inequality to persist in everyday life must also be challenged.

• The ruling class would like you to imagine property rights are a fact of nature rather than a product of political decisions.

• If we could rouse the rabble to take the side of the least and lowest we would be holy rabble rousers.

• There is no place to hide from class war. Every hour, every minute, every second, the owner class wages war on the working class. Every second that you stand aside and do nothing, you are complicit with oppressors.

• Arms dealers bribe politicians. Politicians start wars. Arms dealers make handsome profits. Nevermind all the death and destruction. That's not on the balance sheet.

• All human beings are equal in dignity and worth. Refuse to be a part of the system that puts aristocrats and celebrities on a pedestal.

• The working class is busy working, and lacks the leisure and access to cultural capital to learn the words to express its plight. Meantime, the owner class abounds in leisure and access to education. The case for continued exploitation and disenfranchisement of the laboring classes is made with beautiful rhetoric while the working class can do no more than stammer, "Something is not right."

• A system of checks and balances ensures that the wage slaves will never seize control of the state, which has defended the interest of the owner class from George Washington to today. The sham of elections is what disempowers us, leading us to accept an oppressive regime in the guise of democracy.

• If you allow the world to decide for you who is virtuous, you will look at people giving away large sums of money as models of virtue. Your esteem thus becomes a commodity, for sale to the highest bidder.

• The alleged meritocracy fails to see the equality of human souls, and therefore lacks merit.

• I know all of you have at some time felt repentant and contrite. You all have recognized the vanity of the world and sought to set yourself apart and be simple and honest. You all have recognized the mad, frenetic covetousness of the world and sought to set yourself apart and be content with what you have. But then, you turn on the television, you let down your guard, and the world regains control of your soul. The world fills you with vanity and covetousness, and your simple, honest contentment is nowhere to be found.

• If the rich were human beings, they would recognize a bond of common humanity with the poor, and not build mansions and take tropical vacations while they allow their fellow human beings to starve. A five minute conversation with a rich person will reveal to you they are inhuman. They have no conscience. If they had a heart in their chests, they would have already given away all their wealth. They would no longer be rich.

• If you think the wealth of the rich is morally legitimate, then either (1) you believe justice is the the rule of the stronger, or (2) you have not studied history. The origin of the wealth of the rich is theft of native land, colonialism, slavery, racism, unconscionably low wages, bribing legislators, defrauding customers, and myriad other morally illegitimate schemes. The rich don't really own what they claim to own. It's time to take our world back from the thieves who stole it from us. The working class created all the world's wealth. It belongs to us.

• The horror of cruelty is unbearable. The horror of horrors is that the world unanimously admires the perpetrators. Bombs fall on helpless refugees as patriots wave their flags. Peasants die of overwork as corporate sycophants pay homage to callous capitalists. In the pit of my stomach the nausea intensifies. Applause for exploiters blares from the amplifier, scolding my weak soul for its sympathy for suffering.

• Hollywood teaches us that a tiny minority of the population who have attained "celebrity" status should own our attention. This lesson prepares us to accept that a tiny minority of the population who have attained "oligarch" status should own the means of production. The moviegoer steps over the homeless man, who is unworthy of her attention, to arrive on time for the film where she can see celebrities worthy of her attention. The shopper walks right past the homeless on her way to the mall. The values we have learned are profoundly wrong. Our attention should go to those who need it most.

• Even a cursory examination of history will show that the origin of present inequalities in ownership of the means of production are a consequence of centuries of slavery, racism, bribery and fraud. Anyone who accepts these inequalities and makes them the basis of a lifelong commitment to “business as usual” acts not on the basis of reasoned persuasion or moral conviction, but only on the basis of cowardly acquiescence to the overwhelming force that enforces injustice. In each generation, the integrity of every new soul that comes into the world must be overcome by the cunning deceptions of the propaganda system, which gets every young soul to acquiesce to manifest injustice, and worship the perpetrators of the inhumane system instead of attacking them. Each generation unwittingly does a con job on the next, persuading the young to accept falsehood enforced at the point of a gun as unassailable truth. Saddest of all are the so-called “libertarians” who claim to be skeptical about arbitrary claims of authority, and yet unquestioningly accept the legitimacy of titles enforced by the very same authority they say is illegitimate. This ideology of acquiescence to authority is marketed to vulnerable young minds as if it were a form of resistance. Only because circumstances accidentally brought me in contact with scientific studies of sociology and history did I learn the truth our propagandists work so hard to conceal. Present inequalities in ownership of the means of production are a consequence of centuries of slavery, racism, bribery and fraud. You accept them not because of reasoned persuasion, but only because you have been defrauded and deceived.

• Anyone with a shred of character can see that villains who hoard wealth while neighbors starve are repulsive. The bourgeoisie are decadent, narcissistic, soulless beings. The decadent culture we live in holds these repulsive beings up to us as role models. It is hard for me to imagine that I will ever forgive this perverse culture for teaching me these backward values.

• Perhaps it is not accidental that evil empires cultivate cultures of reckless hedonism. Reckless hedonists do whatever empire demands in exchange for pleasure, no matter how evil. If people cared about kindness and virtue, they would not aid and abet evil empire in its rapacious invasions.

• Having a conscience doesn't just mean not doing things that hurt others. It also means standing up for others who are being hurt. United States imperialism installs fascist puppet dictators all over the globe to facilitate cheap and efficient resource extraction. United States imperialism drops bombs all over the planet on any and every regime that dares to resist its rapacious greed. If you have a conscience, you will oppose this beast in any and every way you can. Evil empire has no conscience. It invades wherever and whenever it is profitable. Fabricated causes are always concocted. But the true cause of war is merciless, rapacious greed. If you have a conscience, you will confront the bully, not wave flags and cheer.

• Reminder: United States imperialism props up fascist regimes all over the globe. If you're a patriot, you're a fascist.

Stop forging your own fetters!

• Unless the gods deceive my mind, that man is forging fetters for himself.

• Theognis of Megara

If you're using your intellectual energy to carry out projects for the tyrants and their economic system, you are sealing your own doom, forging your own fetters, shooting yourself in the face. The more work you do for the tyrants and their economic system, the stronger the tyrants become. The propaganda tries to get you to think that this economic system is sustainable. The reality is, the system is running out of ecosystems to destroy. The propaganda tries to make you think the economic system works for you. The reality is that the economic system is rigged to provide wealth and goods and services to a tiny rich elite while impoverishing and exploiting everyone else. The propaganda system tries to get you to think you are creating a good future for your family by working for the tyrants and their economic system. The reality is, you are only making the tyrants stronger by working for their destructive system. By making the tyrants stronger, you are only sealing your own doom, forging your own fetters, shooting yourself in the face.

With all the propaganda trying to persuade people that working for the economic system is a good thing, one way to use your intellectual energy is to try to educate people about the nature of propaganda, to teach people how to spot the lies of propaganda and the techniques propaganda uses to manipulate you. The more people you can wake up, the more of a chance there might be for a future for you and your family. If you keep working for the tyrants, the tyrants will of course praise your accomplishments, but in reality working for the tyrants will accomplish nothing. The tyrants' plan is to make themselves richer and richer. They are indifferent to the fate of this planet and the human beings on it (except themselves). The tyrants and their economic system don't care about you. Why should you care about them? Why should you devote your intellectual energy to serving tyrants? Use what intellectual energy you have left to learn and teach. Help people wake up from the illusion of freedom and see the tyranny. Help wake people up from the false propaganda that gets them to serve the system that enslaves them and destroys their future.

Whenever I talk about kindness, people laugh.

• They worshipped the beast, saying, 'Who can fight against it?'

• John of Patmos

• You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards.

So now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod.

• Solon of Athens

Whenever I talk about kindness, people laugh. The world does not operate on the basis of kindness. The world operates on the basis of power. Might makes right. When I suggest perhaps it might be a good idea to build more homeless shelters and fewer walls and weapons, people laugh. In fact, whenever, I talk about anything other than the most efficient means to carry out the aims of power, people laugh. "You're just wasting time. Stop being an idiot. The whole system is premised on acquiescence to power. Who can fight against it? Just shut up already. Just bow down and work for the system like everyone else. Who can fight against it?"

Don't do it. The system is destroying all life on the planet in a frenzy of unsustainable profits for oil and coal profiteers and weapons dealers. Don't keep working for the system of death and destruction. Just say no. The system is totally corrupt. Your competent work only accelerates the death and destruction inflicted by the system. Stop obeying. Start thinking. Refuse. Resist. Rebel. Just say no to the system destroying our future.

Angry Buddha

• The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.

• C. L. R. James

Anger arises when I see how prisoners are treated, how the homeless are treated. Some teachers call anger an ugly mental state. Perhaps they are right. But they conclude anger must be avoided to avoid this ugliness. Here they are entirely wrong. Anger is the just response to injustice. Am I to avoid this just response because it is ugly? For an aesthetic reason? To keep my own mental state pristine and beautiful? That seems to me like selfish narcissism.

Revolutionary violence is wholesome if it leads to overthrow of reactionary forces that keep the poor and working class in subjection to systematic violence. Revolutionary violence is temporary violence to prevent permanent systematic violence against the poor. Revolutionary consciousness is a wholesome mental state in a world where revolution is essential for survival of the planet and the poor. If anger is channeled into revolutionary consciousness, it is wholesome.

To see our neighbors locked up in camps and prisons, bombs dropped on the helpless, bulldozing camps of the homeless, to see all this and not get angry, this is not enlightened—it is just inhuman.

Loving kindness toward the people locked up in camps and prisons must imply anger at the system that locks them up. Avoidance of anger is inhuman.

An enlightened being told me the other day, "I am getting angry. I'm trying to make others angry too. Why? So people will do something. I have no combat training. But I have a tongue and I use it to express my anger."

Some teachers claim anger is what causes injustice in the first place. This is precisely backward. It is because people refuse to get angry about injustice, this is what allows injustice to continue.

Preaching nonviolence and acquiescence to authority allows the violence perpetrated against prisoners and Palestinians and people being bombed to continue unabated. We can raise revolutionary consciousness by stirring up anger. Placid acquiescence might lead to beautiful mental states, but they are immoral mental states if they do not properly account for the violence inflicted on the homeless and helpless. Anger is the only mental state that does justice to people being treated unjustly.

Was it wrong of slaves in Haiti to rebel and free themselves from slavery? Did they not have a right to use temporary violence to free themselves from the permanent violence of slavery? Was it wrong of Touissant Louverture to teach the slaves to be angry rather than placidly accepting their bondage? How can I feel loving kindness for prisoners without sharing their feeling of anger at their jailers? If I'm not angry at oppressors, my loving kindness for the oppressed feels to me like a fraud.

I just cannot sit here and accept that innocent people are being locked up and bombed. I just cannot sit here and accept the massive injustices in the world and pretend everything is legit. I can't accept that the planet is being destroyed. We have to do something to stop the system that does these things. We can't let it continue. We have to do something.

I feel the temptation to withdraw into my sanctuary of being-awareness-bliss, but it's just not right to withdraw. Innocent people are being locked up. People are dying from lack of food and medicine because of a tyrannical system that denies them resources. We have to do something.

Getting people angry at these injustices is the way to make people aware of them. There is no way to be aware of injustice without being angry about it. And there is certainly no way of spreading awareness of injustice without spreading anger. When people wake up to the reality of injustice, they are angry. People get militant when they understand. That is inevitable. So should we avoid spreading awareness about injustice, so that we can avoid spreading anger and militancy?

Anger is ugly. So what? The reality that people are being locked up in prisons and camps and being bombed into smithereens is ugly too. It's an ugly world. It's wrong to retreat into some pristine state of serenity to escape from the reality that our neighbors are being treated violently.

People should be angry. People should be cultivating anger, not suppressing it. People should be trying to make everyone else angry too.

Get angry.

Be angry.

Teach anger.

The rulers of this world are coming to nothing. Don't be like them.

Scientists keep warning us, we're passing an irreversible tipping point. The ecosystem will soon enter a deadly episode of runaway climate change. Meanwhile, legislators take bribes from oil and coal companies. Banks invest in new pipelines.

Are you putting your trust in the system that produced the disaster to reform itself and fix the disaster? Even the Buddha called people deluded!

The world really is ending. Optimism is stupid. This doesn't mean there's no hope. It means you're putting your hope in the wrong place. Your hope is not in elections, demonstrations. The same people bribe both parties. The deep state infiltrates all opposition. Your true hope lies in the part of your mind that has nothing to do with the system, the part of your mind not corrupted by the system, not commoditized or fetishized, a core of integrity, a center of eagerness to do good, an unbounded well of love for your suffering neighbors, an eternal spring of sympathy. That's where your true hope lies. That's where your true faith lies: individual conscience, core of integrity, unhardened heart, unvanquished courage, honest sincerity, real you.

Say no to the system. Embrace reality. This ruling system based on war and greed cannot last. The system will run out of places to invade. The system will run out of ecosystems to destroy. Don't put your faith and trust in the ruling system and its representatives. The rulers of this world are coming to nothing. Don't be like them.

Looking for a Human Being

Where are the human beings?

When Diogenes went around Athens with a lantern saying, "I am looking for a human being," what did he mean? I imagine something like this:

I am looking for human beings who have the courage to use their own understanding without the guidance of any external authority. I see Athenians judge everyone by connections, titles, rank, reputation, position and authority. Where are the human beings who use their own minds, and will judge for themselves? Where are the human beings who will listen to my questions and answer them honestly, rather than replying with stock phrases they have picked up secondhand?

Did Diogenes ever find any human beings? Or was the whole world composed entirely of sycophantic spewers of second-hand adulation? The texts don't say. I imagine he had a hard time. The world is full of people who refuse to think for themselves, who decide how to respond to a statement entirely on the basis of the title and rank of the person speaking, without ever listening to what is said and asking if it is reasonable and just. We live in a society of sycophants of power. Where are the human beings?

Why Isn't Everyone Alarmed?

There's no way to come to terms with planetary calamity without recognizing that putting trust in corrupt ruling powers has always been and continues to be a disaster.

"While species are going extinct at a rate of more than five thousand per year, the ruling powers of this world proceed with business as usual. Banks invest in new pipelines. Oil companies drill new wells. Coal companies open new mines. People are in a state of complete denial. Why does no one see? Digging oil and coal from the ground and burning it is not sustainable. Eventually you run out of stuff to burn. In the meantime, the planet will be destroyed."

"What you're saying can't be true."

"Why?"

"Because only flaky hippies are saying it. If it were true, powerful people would be saying it."

"Interesting logic."

"Seriously, how do you expect people to share your alarm that there's this huge environmental calamity when it's only a few flaky hippies whining about planetary doom. If there were a big calamity, people in the halls of power would be tearing their hair out like you are."

"Perhaps there might be alternative explanations."

"Like what?"

"Like, what if people in the halls of power get into the halls of power by putting criticisms of power out of their minds, and signing up to repeat lies power tells to get us to assent to its calamities?"

"You're asking people to believe there's a big conspiracy and everyone but a few flaky hippies is oblivious. It's just so implausible. If the situation is really as dire as you say, why aren't more people alarmed?"

"I see what you're saying. But the conspiracy is hardly secret. The ruling powers openly confess their hostility to science. It's not just a few flaky hippies who are alarmed. There are many of us, from many different backgrounds and many walks of life."

"It just seems so implausible, what you're saying, Peter."

"Maybe it would help to think about an analogy. While slavery was in full swing in the U. S., many people thought antislavery activists (flaky hippies of the nineteenth century) were making a big deal out of nothing, criticizing a system that was working just fine. The magnitude of the crime of slavery was just too much for people to face. So they didn't face it. I think this is what we see happening today with the planet. The magnitude of the planetary calamity is too great for people to face without getting profoundly disturbed and upset. People exercise self-care by just not thinking about it. It's not a secret conspiracy. Most people will tell you they just don't want to think about it. It's just too depressing."

"Well they're right about that."

"Exactly. The calamity is hard to face, not just because we get sad about the planet when we think about it, but because thinking about the calamity compels us to recognize that the ruling powers have betrayed our trust in a profound and fundamental way."

"What do you mean?"

"I'll go back to my analogy. Recognizing the atrocity of slavery demands not just sympathy with victims who had their lives stolen. Recognizing the atrocity of slavery means recognizing ruling powers are capable of an atrocity on such a massive scale. The normal disposition of business as usual is to put trust in ruling powers. Recognizing that ruling powers have committed and continue to commit atrocities makes it difficult to maintain the mental closure we need to function in the business world. Accountants in the north, to do their jobs properly, had to take account of human chattel on balance sheets of southern business. The ruling powers betrayed us in a profound and fundamental way by recording deeds to human chattel. Today with the planet, the ruling powers again betray us in a profound and fundamental way. Coming to terms with the calamity means understanding there is wickedness in high places. There's no way to come to terms with planetary calamity without recognizing that putting trust in corrupt ruling powers has always been and continues to be a disaster."

"You're saying we trust politicians to sort things out for us. And this isn't how politics works."

"Yes, exactly. Politicians commit atrocities as a matter of course in their quest for power. That's business as usual for them."

Come Out from the System of Lies

The system tries to make greed into a virtue by channeling it effectively. What could go wrong with that? Channelers become another channel. Legislators take bribes.

The state can enforce its claims with guns, while the sociologist can only try to get you to think with powerless words, and it usually doesn't work.

The guy with the most guns can easily control press, studios, churches and universities, and disseminate the message that the guy with most guns also happens to be a noble savior enforcing a democratic regime that respects property rights. All regimes claim they are exceptional, exceptionally efficient, exceptionally just, exceptionally democratic, and all are able to persuade their subjects to accept and repeat these claims by the overwhelming control their violence exerts.

The ruling powers' idea of respect for property rights means respecting the right of the class that bribes them to steal from the poor and helpless.

Working for the system means building mansions for tyrants while allowing homeless to freeze. Working for the system means cooking gourmet meals for corrupt thieves while allowing children in deserts to die. No, working for the system is not helping our neighbors. That's the lie we tell ourselves to justify bowing down to corrupt ruling powers and their system. Of course bowing down to the system is in our own interest. Everyone needs a paycheck. But maybe we can stop pretending actions motivated by our own interests magically advance the interests of society? As the planet turns into a toxic fascist greenhouse, I think we can all see it's a lie.

Believing the lies gives us a good logical excuse for our choice, which would otherwise seem insane, to devote our work, the intellectually and morally disciplined part of our lives, to the system of lies that power has created.

Smart people fall for deceptions. Not just any deceptions. It's always deceptions that justify and rationalize obedience. One example: the ruling powers claim to respect property rights. I recall, natives had their land stolen and were never compensated. I recall, slaves had their lives stolen and were never compensated. Future generations have clean air and water stolen and will never be compensated. Coal corporations bribe legislators and get subsidies stolen from taxpayers while they profit from fuel that poisons our air and ruins our future. United States routinely invades sovereign regimes to steal oil and minerals, making obscene profits for weapons manufacturers. The ruling powers' idea of respect for property rights means respecting the right of the class that bribes them to steal from the poor and helpless.

Another example: the ruling powers claim we live in a democratic republic, where elected legislators represent the interests of constituents who elect them. I think we all know, in reality legislators represent the interests of kleptocrats who fund their campaigns. But just in case you need peer-reviewed scientific evidence, Princeton political scientists Gilens and Page analyzed 1,779 policy decisions of United States Congress. They show that legislative outcomes are entirely uncorrelated with the preferences and interests of poor and working class people, and very highly correlated with preferences and interests of economic elites. Our so-called democracy is a charade performed to deceive us into thinking we have a voice. In reality the owner class runs the show as they see fit.

We all know the powers of this world are liars. But we choose to believe them. Why? Because believing the lies gives us a good logical excuse for our choice, which would otherwise seem insane, to devote our work, the intellectually and morally disciplined part of our lives, to the system of lies that power has created. The lie is that working for the system helps our neighbors. Tell that to the homeless man on the corner. Tell that to children starving in Yemen. Tell that to kids killed by bombs made in our factories. Tell that to future generations driven from ancestral homes by rising oceans and dying deserts. Tell that to kids locked up in profitable prisons under law passed by legislators bribed by prison companies. Of course working for the system is helping someone. It's helping the rich get richer. It's helping people who can afford to pay, and completely ignoring those who can't. Working for the system means building mansions for tyrants while allowing homeless to freeze. Working for the system means cooking gourmet meals for corrupt thieves while allowing children in deserts to die. No, working for the system is not helping our neighbors. That's the lie we tell ourselves to justify bowing down to corrupt ruling powers and their system. Of course bowing down to the system is in our own interest. Everyone needs a paycheck. But maybe we can stop pretending actions motivated by our own interests magically advance the interests of society? As the planet turns into a toxic fascist greenhouse, I think we can all see it's a lie.

You and I have no choice about how the world is organized. Our only choice is how we respond. The debate about "How should the world be organized?" is pointless because you and I don't have the power to change the way the world is organized. Our only choice is how we respond. Will we accept "might makes right" as our foundational moral principle and accept the lies of power at face value? Or will we refuse to acquiesce to injustice and testify that powerful people and institutions tell lies?

The guy with the most guns can easily control press, studios, churches and universities, and disseminate the message that the guy with most guns also happens to be a noble savior enforcing a democratic regime that respects property rights. All regimes claim they are exceptional, exceptionally efficient, exceptionally just, exceptionally democratic, and all are able to persuade their subjects to accept and repeat these claims by the overwhelming control their violence exerts. There is an tiny probability that you or I can influence an election result. Both parties take bribes from the same people anyway. You and I have no say over what the state is or does. Our choice is how we respond. Will we look at the state scientifically, investigate forces that drive it, scrutinize at its claims and how they are disseminated, or will we look at the state as an idol, taking its claims at face value?

The state can enforce its claims with guns, while the sociologist can only try to get you to think with powerless words, and it usually doesn't work. "Might makes right" is deeply encoded into the philosophy of the world. We have all kinds of reasons to acquiesce to the guys with the most guns, and the guys with the most guns oblige us by telling us, "We aren't just another tyrannical regime. We are exceptional. Our violence is adjudicated justly. We respect property rights." Are these claims true? Only you can decide. The most efficient thing to do is to just accept the state's word that it is noble and just. Then you can get back to work, and stop wasting time listening to blathering intellectuals trying to get you to think.

Power claims to be efficient, beneficent and just. But it deprives the poor of their rights. It wages war all over the world. People with prominent roles in this system of death and destruction don't deserve your attention and respect. United States empire wages war all over the planet. They say it's an exceptional empire that spreads democracy. The reality is very similar to Columbus spreading Christianity. Invade, destroy sustainable self-reliant regimes to make room for more efficient resource extraction. Destroy planet faster. Replace sustainable forms of life in rainforest with mining for unsustainable fossil bubble civilization. Enslave natives in factories and cubicles. Steal oil and minerals. Colonizer, don't you see, eventually you run out of places to invade? Eventually you burn all oil and coal? What then? What will be left?

We hear talk of alternative energy. But banks invest in new pipelines. Does anyone really imagine banks will take a loss? Alternative energy is alternate reality. Reality is fossil doom.

We know politicians lie. Because of their power, their lies become official truth. Don't believe the lies. Don't repeat the lies. Come out from this world of corruption. Set yourself a higher ethical standard. The system calls its activities "production" but the fuel for this so-called production is war, death and destruction. As the planet heats up, people are driven from their homes by rising oceans and dying deserts. Refugees are turned away at borders and locked in concentration camps, while the whole world descends into war for the last remaining oil and minerals.

The relevant question isn't, "What will happen if everyone in the world raises their ethical standards?" This is counterfactual and doesn't account for the state of the world. The question is, "What will happen if no one else in the world raises their ethical standards, but I do?"

You and I have no control over what happens in the larger world. But we can control our own minds and hearts. We can protect the mind from distractions. We can protect our hearts from the culture of cruel superficiality and unharden our hearts with love for our neighbors. The system is going to continue deceiving people. But I don't have to allow it to deceive me. You don't have to allow it to deceive you. Even if the whole world is in thrall to lies, it is possible to escape. Coming out from the system of lies, our hearts unharden. We see with our own eyes, not eyes of the system. We see with eyes that care rather than eyes that turn away from suffering.

The rulers of this world don't care about you. They don't care about me. They don't care about the planet we live on. They don't care about life. The aim of rulers is to vie for more and more power, for an ever increasing share of tyrannical control. This rapacious greed will never be channeled. Why? Because channelers become another channel. Rapacious greed will lead only to endless war, death and destruction. Come out from the system of greed. Bear witness to truth. Does the system tell you a refugee is a criminal? The system is wrong. She is your neighbor. Homeless man is your neighbor. Child being bombed in Yemen is your neighbor. Love your neighbor. Come out from the system of war and death. Do not share in its iniquities.

Some people say there’s no point speaking truth when liars have so many cunning people on their payroll and can devise all kinds of ploys to get everyone to believe their lies. They say there’s no point speaking truth when liars bribe legislators and compel us to live by their lies. If we have to live the lies, they say, we might as well believe them. Of course we have no choice but to live the lies when we work for the system of lies. But there’s more to life than work.

Believing lies destroys the integrity of the mind.

The origin of property is not free trade. It is theft of land and lives.

Technology is not progress. Machines made from stolen minerals, fueled with stolen oil, steal clean air and water from future generations.

United States is not democracy. It is tyranny of investor class.

We have no choice but to live the lies when we work for the system of lies. But there’s more to life than work. Stop believing the lies. Stop repeating the lies. Come out from the system of lies.

What is this thing you keep calling the system?

"What is this thing you keep calling the system? How can you generalize about it like this?"

When I say system I'm thinking of what sociologist Max Weber calls "rational-legal authority," authoritative social structures which "rest on a belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands." This includes all social structures that are upheld by the threat of state violence. For example, social structures that make claims about ownership of resources, and enforce these claims with socially legitimized violence.

The justification for generalization is Weber's observation that general features characterize systems of rational-legal authority. For example, systems of rational-legal authority exhibit procedural rationality rather than ethical rationality.

"Weber's analysis applies to tyrannical bureaucratic systems. Capitalism is not a top-down system like this."

The market is not controlled from the top. But the most important inputs to the market — present ownership of resources, legal frameworks for production, banking and trade, etc. — these are dictated by a top-down system. The system that adjudicates property rights is a top-down system, with a hierarchy of courts, a system of appeals, etc.

The top-down system claims to be administering titles in a neutral manner so the market can operate without impediment. Is this true? I recall at one time there were titles to slaves. And, today, we have invasions of sovereign states, trade with dictatorial regimes, titles carried forward from eras of slavery and racist law enforcement. The status quo is very far from the free market ideal.

Unharden your heart.

If you accept the lie that might makes right, you are compelled by hard-hearted victors of war to harden your heart like theirs.

• When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood!
  • Isaiah 1:15 NIV

• Woe to those who make unjust laws,
  to those who issue oppressive decrees,
  to deprive the poor of their rights
  and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
  making widows their prey
  and robbing the fatherless.
  • Isaiah 10:1-2 NIV

• When the Prophet saw injustice, either on the part of men or on the part of Providence, he did not ... bend the knee to necessity, and judge the evil-doers leniently; nor again did he give himself up to despair, or doubt the strength of righteousness, or the possibility of its victory. He simply complained, pouring out his soul in words of fire; then went his way again, fighting for his ideal, and full of hope that in time—perhaps even "at the end of time"—righteousness would be lord over all the earth.
  • Ahad Ha'am

"Stop whining and complaining all the time."

"No. I will never accept injustice."

"If you can't accept injustice then fight for justice. Don't just complain."

"Complaining is our way of reminding ourselves that that power is not justice, that victory does not imply righteousness. As soon as we forget that might does not make right, we begin admiring powerful people instead of calling them out for their bloody hands. Victors in the war for resources do not get their wealth honestly. They do not use their wealth humanely. Victors of war oppress the poor and helpless for fun and profit. Stop pretending victors of war are honest and ignoring their bloody hands."

"You're just whining about your powerlessness. It's pathetic and stupid. Get a life, loser."

"Victors of war control everything. That's what victory means. The fact that they won the war does not mean the victors are good, righteous or worthy of respect. Power and goodness are not the same thing. Might does not make right."

"You're just bitter because you are powerless."

"You say I am powerless. But who is really powerless? My heart beats for itself and softens for suffering. Your heart beats for the victors of war and remains as hard as theirs. I use my tongue to speak truth as I see it. You wag your tongue in sycophantic subjection to the victors of war. Does obeying a powerful master make you powerful? No. Idolizing wealth and power only makes you powerless. You sacrifice your integrity to the idol. The free heart is free to soften to the suffering of others. The free mind is free to speak up for the homeless and helpless. If you accept the lie that might makes right, you are compelled by hard-hearted victors of war to harden your heart like theirs. Unharden your heart. Stop idolizing victors of war. Might does not make right. You know in your heart that the suffering of the poor really does matter."

Might Makes Right

If you believe working for the system is right, then either

(1) you believe might makes right, or

(2) you are easily deceived by propaganda.

The system is destroying the planet, dropping bombs on the helpless, ignoring the homeless, locking up the poor and desperate, selling weapons to the highest bidder, legalizing bribery and corruption and pollution.

(1) and (2) are not so separate, really. We allow ourselves to be deceived by propaganda so we can persuade ourselves that our inevitable acquiescence to tyranny is right.

Indignation and Militancy

The way to begin raising revolutionary consciousness is to make the poor and working class aware of the injustice being committed against us, and to rouse the poor and working class into a fury of intense indignation that will lead to militancy.

But everyone seems to imagine that calling out injustice is merely whining and complaining. Why? Because we have been conditioned by ruling class propaganda to see it this way. This is one of the techniques the ruling class uses to enervate opposition: painting opposition as pathetic and powerless. In fact, the poor and working class by far outnumber the ruling class, and can seize power back from the ruling class as soon as we are undeceived and raised into a state of indignation and militancy.

On Denial

Denial is how we cope with problems too difficult to face. Then problems no one is willing to face get worse and worse. Finally, reality makes its inevitable call. Then it's too late.

When will people stop with the denial and see the plain fact: we are doomed so long as the system of death keeps going, and doomed if it stops?

• The administration of the great system of the universe ... the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension: the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country.
  • Adam Smith

The antidote to denial is to frequently remind ourselves of the facts. United States empire uses bribes and mercenaries and other forms of covert attack to overthrow any regime that dares to give rights to workers. When this fails, United States empire begins dropping bombs to destroy helpless regimes that dare to defy its totalitarian rule. Dictators are installed to do the bidding of corporations. Resources are extracted efficiently. Impoverished locals are driven from self-sustainable lives into cubicles and factories producing goods and services for export to evil empire's capital. Burning oil and coal covers the planet in a blanket of carbon dioxide that melts icecaps, turns oceans into toxic acid, and alters the ecosystem in ways we can only begin to imagine. Alterations to the ecosystem are not intentional. They are the product of a system whose sole intention is to maximize profit on the next balance sheet, no matter what the cost in human lives.

Workers go on doing their jobs. In the prevailing work ethic the big picture is beyond the ken of the average worker, whose calling in life is to do her job and leave the big things to God. In the meantime, corporations exploit workers with a "no questions asked" work ethic to earn record profits and hide the booty in offshore accounts, putting themselves in the place of God.

So, the question is, when will people snap out of denial, recognize that rulers of this world don't care about life, and care only about augmenting their own power? When will people recognize the work ethic that concentrates on the task at hand and leaves the big picture in the hands of god has been used by callous manipulators to lure us into helping them carry out their reckless plans? When will people come out of denial and see that the system we all work for is a system of death and destruction? When will people stop with the denial and see the plain fact: we are doomed so long as the system of death keeps going, and doomed if it stops?

Denial is how we cope with problems too difficult to face. Then problems no one is willing to face get worse and worse. Finally, reality makes its inevitable call. Then it's too late.

On Spiritual Life

When I was younger I thought the concept of "spiritual life" was flaky. Now I see things differently. There must be a part of the mind that is free to testify that lies are lies no matter how powerful the people who repeat them.

We have to work for our bread. So let me ask, is it possible to keep working for the system without putting faith and trust in the system, without believing the system's lies? The best answer I know is offered by Paul of Tarsus, who worked making tents for the rulers of this world while at the same time he went around preaching that imperial authorities are corrupt and are inevitably going to destroy each other in their rapacious quest for power. Paul had a double life: keep working (accept the lies) and keep preaching (abhor the lies). Paul gives a detailed formula for this. Obey and do good work, not merely out of fear of authority, but because conscientious work is good for the soul. We must accept the lies in order to function at work. But there's more to life than work. The lies don't have to penetrate all the way into the core of your soul.

When I was younger I thought the concept of "spiritual life" was flaky. Now I see things differently. There must be a part of the mind that is free to testify that lies are lies no matter how powerful the people who repeat them. Accepting the lies of legislators who take bribes, I mean accepting the lies, not just at work, but in our hearts, means acceptance of might makes right as moral principle. Then rationality is defined by whoever has the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them. We must be rational enough to yield to them. That is the mentality of the idolater of power. Might makes right elevated to a moral principle.

We live in a society that accepts this system of lies. We must accept the lies to function at work. But there's more to life than work. Stop putting faith in rulers, ruling institutions and ruling systems. Stop admiring people with prominent roles in the system. Respect and listen to people the system ignores, homeless people, refugees, prisoners, dissenters, people being bombed, poor and oppressed people, people suffering discrimination, people treated unjustly. Stop consuming the pseudoculture that teaches you to admire rich and beautiful people and ignore people that fail to meet arbitrary and unrealistic standards of beauty. Start consuming genuine culture that teaches self-awareness, awareness of corruption, awareness of suffering. Start consuming genuine culture that teaches kindness, love and warmth rather than cruel icy admiration of power and beauty.

might ≠ right

Most people, sadly, really believe that might makes right. They sign up for the powerful army. They join the successful corporation. Conscience is not concerned in the deliberations. It's just pragmatic. The victorious army is the one where you're least likely to die. The successful corporation is the one that pays the best. Might makes right. Everyone else is thinking this way. This is the victorious way of thinking. So it must be right. Circular argument? No problem. Might makes right. Logic must go by the wayside, snowflake. There's bills to be paid.

When Pilate asks, "What is truth?" what does he mean? He means there is no truth independent of what power tells us.

Multinational corporations and multinational governments that serve their interests are very powerful. There is a great temptation to make the equation "power = good". This makes life so much easier. I can obey in good conscience. I can enjoy consumer products in good conscience. The system that orchestrates all these things is good. A quick review of the facts will show that power ≠ good. Multinational corporations are trashing the planet. Multinational governments are bombing helpless people on a daily basis. Power is not good. Power uses people who have no conscience to carry out its plans for expanding power. Anyone with a conscience is crushed in the gears. People with no power and no skills useful to power are chewed up and spit out. Yes, life is much easier if we pretend might makes right. This is what Constantine did when he christened his empire. And, because it made life easier, people bought it. They're still buying it today. When Pilate asks, "What is truth?" what does he mean? He means there is no truth independent of what power tells us. Might makes right is encoded in the fundamental assumptions of the comfortable classes, just as it was for Pilate. "Whatever power demands is good, and those pesky snowflakes who say might does not make right, well they need to just shut up already." The Constantines and Pilates of this world, and their many acolytes and followers, form the vast majority of the human race. Most people, sadly, really believe that might makes right. They sign up for the powerful army. They join the successful corporation. Conscience is not concerned in the deliberations. It's just pragmatic. The victorious army is the one where you're least likely to die. The successful corporation is the one that pays the best. Might makes right. Everyone else is thinking this way. This is the victorious way of thinking. So it must be right. Circular argument? No problem. Might makes right. Logic must go by the wayside, snowflake. There's bills to be paid.

Keep the Doom Juice Flowing

United States invades every corner of earth to feed its insatiable lust for oil and minerals. Ever increasing war budget is called defense budget but we all know the truth: United States invades whenever and wherever it is profitable to invade. Reasons will be concocted before the invasion. Afterward they will be proven false. Lies will be forgotten. Rinse and repeat.

What happens, in the last gasp, trying to sustain the unsustainable? Everyone in denial. Making films about alternative energy while banks invest in new pipelines. Planet is doomed. Powerful people have no aim but to vie for more and more power. Politicians don't care about us. Oil companies don't care about you. University presidents don't care about me. Powerful people care only about scrambling for more and more power. They will crush everyone and anyone under their feet in their scramble for power. They will destroy life on our planet. They will destroy human life. Why? Because it is profitable. Legislators accept campaign contributions from war profiteers. Do you think they're going to outlaw war? Legislators accept speaking fees from oil and coal profiteers. A system of death and destruction mandated by law, and everyone in denial.

Recycling is cool but it's the exception not the rule. Most minerals for manufacturing still come from the ground. Most fuel for transportation still comes from the ground. Nonrenewable. When we talk about sustainability, people react, "Oh, what a nice idea." They come up with expensive consumer products with green labels, and deliver them on fossil fueled freight. People have been screaming, over and over, "This is not sustainable." As the ruling powers try to sustain their unsustainable quest for more and more power, the calamity gets more and more dire. Fossil fuels dig the grave of mankind and the planet. Oil companies have us addicted to their planet killing juice. We entertain ourselves with chit chat about alternative energy while banks invest in shiny new pipelines. Legislators have bribes in their pockets. Entire congress is bought and paid for by oil, coal and war profiteers. Agenda is decided. We are doing fossil doom. Now get back to the oil rig, Johnny. Keep the doom juice flowing.

What's a Real Job?

Working for the system means surrendering the intellectually and morally disciplined part of our lives to a system with no intellectual and moral discipline, a system that makes decisions purely on the basis of short term profit, with no concern whatsoever for the long term prospects of survival for life on our planet.

"What kind of work are you preparing for with your studies?"

"I am preparing to be a monk."

"A monk? That's not a real job."

"What's a real job?"

"An activity that contributes to society."

"You mean like an oil rig operator?" I asked. She did not answer and I decided to press the point. "We sometimes imagine there's a moral duty to work for the economic system that's destroying the planet, invading new places each day in search of oil and minerals, polluting oceans, melting icecaps and displacing millions from their homes. Why? Shouldn't there be, in fact, a moral duty to resist this system of death and destruction, to show the world something better?"

"I hadn't thought of it that way," she conceded. "But how will you get your bread?"

"If all of us go through life thinking only about how to get our bread, with no concern for the causes and effects of the economic system, the death and destruction will continue to accelerate. The planet will be destroyed at an ever increasing pace. What you call a responsible job is in fact irresponsible. Working for the system means surrendering the intellectually and morally disciplined part of our lives to a system with no intellectual and moral discipline, a system that makes decisions purely on the basis of short term profit, with no concern whatsoever for the long term prospects of survival for life on our planet. Our job is to resist this system of death and destruction, not bow down and work for it."

The Double Life

In a Texas town where the main industry is manufacturing nuclear weapons, apocalypticism is popular in local churches. Paul teaches we should keep our jobs working for the rulers of this world (1 Cor 7:20, 2 Thess 3:10), while at the same time he tells us the rulers of this world are corrupt (Eph 6:12) and will inevitably destroy each other in their insatiable quest for power (1 Cor 2:6).

The rulers of this world care only about augmenting their power. Their system cares only about short term profits. Ruling powers and their system have no concern for human life. By reporting to work for the system to earn our bread, we make it possible for the system to continue its rapacious path of death and destruction.

The amount of destruction varies depending on our particular job, of course. But not as much as we sometimes imagine. The entire economy is fueled by oil and minerals stolen by making war on helpless peoples. Energy for transportation comes from burning oil, dooming the planet to melting icecaps, rising oceans and dying deserts. What job is not complicit in this?

The double life seems necessary from a practical point of view. We have to keep working for the system, even though we know it's destroying the planet. How else will we get our bread?

If there ever was a time to question the soundness and wisdom of the double life, now is the time. Does it really make sense to love our neighbors on Sunday, and then for six days a week work for a system indifferent to the fate of all neighbors except shareholders of corporations, a system we know is making war on the helpless and destroying our future?

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

The rulers of this world are coming to nothing. It is wrong to put our faith, our hope, our trust in them. Rulers take bribes. Rulers oppress the poor. Rulers attack the helpless and ignore the desperate and hopeless.

• On the one hand, there is the type of sinner whom, in present-day language, we would call ‘oppressor.’ Their basic sin consists in oppressing, placing intolerable burdens on others, acting unjustly and so on. On the other hand, there are those who sin ‘from weakness’ or those ‘legally considered sinners’ according to the dominant religious view.

  Jesus takes a very different approach to each group. He offers salvation to all, and makes demands of all, but in a very different way. He directly demands a radical conversion of the first group, an active cessation from oppressing. For these, the coming of the Kingdom is above all a radical need to stop being oppressors.

• Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator (1991), pp. 96-97

In light of this distinction between sins of weakness and sins of oppression, we can ask:

(1) in verses where Jesus advises against judging, which type of sin is in question?

(2) in verses where Jesus judges, which type of sin is he judging?

I think we will find that in verses where Jesus warns against judging (e.g. Jn 8:7), the sin in question is sin of weakness. I think we will find that in verses where Jesus does judge (e.g. Mt 23:13), the sin in question is sin of oppression.

Sobrino's clarification of the distinction between sins of weakness and sins of oppression opens up a possible way to respond to sin: condemn the oppressor, as the prophets do, "Woe to those who deprive the poor of their rights" (Isa 10:2) while refusing to judge sins of weakness, "Let the one who has not sinned cast the first stone."

You'll notice this is precisely the opposite of what we customarily do.

In particular, the idea that we should not judge a ruling system to which we acquiesce is entirely dangerous and false. The ruling system is not the powerless adulteress. If we refuse to judge the ruling system, our refusal comes not out of motives of mercy but out of motives of cowardice, comfort and peace of mind. If we don't judge the system we acquiesce to, we become collaborators in its crimes.

Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, obey out of conscience and not just fear. But this doesn't mean the ruling powers are not judged. The prophets demand we hold a plumb line up to rulers and ruling systems and see if they uphold principles they claim to uphold (Amos 7:8).

Caesar called himself the son of god, and demanded worship. This is where early Christians drew the line, and refused even when it meant martyrdom. In other words, there is a material life where it is acceptable to acquiesce to empire, and a spiritual life where we are free from all human authority, where we pursue perfection of the spirit in subjection to no limitation but the highest capacity of the spirit itself. Here in the spiritual life it is sacrilege to accept Caesar's claim to be the son of god.

Now, today, the ruling power claims to be democracy. Is this claim true? Princeton political scientists Gilens and Page show there is no correlation between the interests of poor people and the outcome of legislative decisions, and a very high correlation with the interests of the very rich. United States empire comes up with fabricated causes for war and invades. When fabricated causes are seen to be fabricated, everyone just forgets about it and the next war begins. Let's not sugar coat the reality of imperialism: empire invades because it's profitable. There is no reason to concede an exceptional status to the United States empire. United States empire is as merciless and ruthless as any other empire in history. The goal is the same as every other empire: to seek rapid increase in wealth and power with no concern whatsoever for the suffering this quest for wealth and power inflicts on the poor and helpless.

When we bow down to empire, is it because we see how well empire lives up to ideals it claims to uphold? Or is it because if we don't bow down to empire, empire will imprison and martyr us? I don't think it takes much reflection to see, it is because empire is mighty that we worship empire, not because empire is right.

In practical life everyone has conceded to the authority of empire, so there is no way to function in practical life without, in the practical part of the mind, accepting empire's way of looking at things. For Paul, acquiescence to empire in our jobs is not sin. Paul keeps building tents during his apostleship (Acts 18:3]). Paul advises Corinthians not to quit their jobs, as many were tempted to do when they learned the true nature of the evil empire they worked for (1 Cor 7:20, 1 Thess 4:11).

At work we must obey. But in spiritual life we are free to understand the truth. Rulers and ruling systems inevitably destroy each other in their rapacious quest for power. Rulers of this world are coming to nothing. Eventually you run out of places to invade. It is false to put our faith, our hope, our trust in empire. The classic apology for acquiescence to empire was that private vices like greed and ambition can become public benefits if they are channeled by wise legislators. But if legislators too have private vices like greed and ambition, how exactly can this work? When legislators take bribes, in what sense can we say that the ruling system is even measuring productivity at all?

One example: because legislators take bribes from oil and coal companies, oil and coal companies are not compelled to pay downstream environmental costs of their fuels. Costs are imposed on helpless victims without compensation. Coastal cities flooded by rising oceans and migrants fleeing dying deserts will not be entitled to compensation from oil and coal companies that produced the climate change causing these effects. Downstream costs are imposed on poor and helpless people, while profits are privatized and funneled into offshore accounts used to pay bribes to legislators.

The rulers of this world are coming to nothing. It is wrong to put our faith, our hope, our trust in them. Rulers take bribes. Rulers oppress the poor. Rulers attack the helpless and ignore the desperate and hopeless. Woe to those who deprive the poor of their rights.

"Archolatry" is the idolization of rulers. To idolize the victors in the war for power and resources is to accept "might makes right" as a fundamental moral principle. This is how the entire commercial system operates. Acquiescence to power is a given. Might makes right in the business world. Whoever has money is a potential customer, a potential investor. The homeless, the helpless, the refugee, the poor and oppressed, they are irrelevant. The planet is irrelevant. Cash is power.

Maybe instead of sugar coating this really unsavory life of acquiescence to the evil empire, we can instead carve out a spiritual part of life where "might makes right" is no longer accepted as a moral principle, where we pursue perfection of the spirit without subjection to immoral, corrupt, unjust ruling powers that take bribes and deprive the poor of their rights.

We are awake. The system is corrupt. We refuse to repeat its lies.

Even though it is hopeless to hope for a mass awakening, it is still helpful to awaken as many as we can. The value of revolutionary consciousness is not just for revolution. It is also for developing an intellectual conscience, learning to speak honestly rather than speaking the system's lies.

"Stop complaining," say the fascists, "Either have your revolution, or stop berating everyone with your gripes."

No, fascist. We may not have the power to overthrow fascism, but fascism has not conquered our tongues. We can still speak the truth about your fascist system and its lies. The revolution in deed may not come. But the revolution in thought has already happened. We are awake. The system is corrupt. We refuse to repeat its lies.

The system tells us we are ruled by a democratic republic. It seems to me, both parties are bribed by weapons manufacturers and war profiteers and authorize war budget to invade every corner of the planet to steal oil and minerals. It seems to me, we are ruled by aristocratic elites who occasionally admit a peon to their ranks in exchange for making them even richer.

They tell us technology is progress. It seems to me, technology is destroying our planet at an ever increasing pace.

They tell us the system of enterprise respects property rights. Tell that to natives who had their land stolen and were never compensated. Tell that to slaves who had their lives stolen and were never compensated. Tell that to children under our bombs as United States invades yet another regime to steal oil and minerals. Tell that to prisoners locked up by law passed by legislators who take bribes from prison companies. The system says it enforces property rights. The system enforces property rights obtained by bribery, fraud and theft, stealing more and more every day from the helpless to line the pockets of the rich.

Why Should Anyone Listen to the Poor and Helpless?

Suffering, lost, forgotten voices need your attention.

• Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can.
  • Thomas Merton, in a letter to Dorothy Day

• God does not love that which is already in itself worthy of love, but on the contrary, that which in itself has no worth acquires worth just by becoming the object of God's love.
  • Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros

There's a certain type of person
I encounter them all the time,
for whom some special credential is required
to obtain with them an audience.

Homeless voices
are beneath their notice.
Refugees irrelevant.
Prisoners contemptible.

Dignitaries, executives,
professors, popes and prelates
command their attention.

Their philosophy is:
worthiness of attention
corresponds precisely
to achievement, influence,
power, intelligence, merit.

They laugh when I say
I want to speak truth.
"What's the point?" they say,
"Who will listen?
You are nobody.
First you must do something,
be something.
First become notable,
significant, powerful.
Then, speak truth.
Otherwise no one will listen."

Sycophants aim to rise
in status, power and wealth.
To do this they must
ingratiate themselves
with those who now hold
the status and power
they want.

A voice that lacks
status and power
they see with contempt.
It's useless to them.
They will not listen.

This includes my voice, of course.
But it also includes
voices of homeless refugees
and disabled prisoners
and everyone else
that doesn't meet
the absurd standard
of noteworthiness
their celebrity worship requires.

When we ignore voices
of homeless, helpless, lost, forgotten,
we also ignore
the part of ourselves
most worthy of attention
I mean the unhardened heart
that loves our neighbors.

When I say, "Hardened heart
is not a virtue."
Sycophants laugh.
"You must rise in status and wealth
before you soften your heart," they say.
"Otherwise your soft heart
will avail nothing.
First you need hard-hearted
ruthless pursuit
of power, status and wealth.
When you're near death
you can unharden your heart
I mean maybe a little
but even still,
think of your heirs."

"Ignore homeless, voiceless, helpless," they say.
"Concentrate on your own career.
Rise in rank, status and wealth.
When you get to the top
then you can have
a soft heart
I mean maybe a little.
Until then
it's all about rising
in status, rank and wealth."

Rushing to cinema,
sycophants of celebrity
step over homeless man,
then, at the theatre,
hear a beautiful speech
how suffering of homeless matters,
hunger of refugee counts,
pain of prisoner can't be ignored.
I don't care if you listen to me
except maybe long enough to hear,
suffering, lost, forgotten voices need your attention.

The Social Contract

Once upon a time
plantation lords
would teach young heirs
that whipping slaves was fine.

Today we see bourgeoisie
teach bratty bourgeoisie to be
how every sort of luxury
is justified expense.

Social contract of today
invites aristocrats to play.
No duty but to feast and dine.
Starving children are not mine.

While homeless die
and desperate starving children cry
champagne glasses clink indifferently.

Cruelty's not
a natural thing
It's taught. It's learned.
Homeless, helpless merit nought
deserving to be spurned.

Sustainable Pipe Dreams

• They don't care about us.
  • Michael Jackson

I have sustainable pipe dreams. But real world banks invest in new pipelines. Coal companies bribe legislators. We're gonna do the destruction thing all the way. Every last drop of oil and every last ounce of coal. Burn it all. United States wages war on entire planet. War keeps oil flowing. War keeps factories busy building more weapons. Why do we fail to see? The rulers of this world care solely about getting more power. They don't care about human life. They don't care about the planet. They don't care about you. They don't care about me. They care only about getting more and more power. The rulers of this world have been on a rampage of war, death and destruction, from the beginning of empire, to today. Physicists decided to put our knowledge of physics in service to rulers, rulers whose sole aim is to vie for more and more power. Then we are surprised that our planet turns into a garbage dump for the machine of war and death?

The First Prerequisite to Any Form of Intellectual Integrity

The first prerequisite to any form of intellectual integrity is to honestly bear witness to the fact that the social fabric of our society is based on lies.

What we call democracy is really a dictatorship where both parties take bribes from a dictatorial class that owns the means of production, the newspapers, and the state.

What we call property rights are really the legacy of violation of the property rights of native Americans, slaves, and the inhabitants of dozens of countries the United States has invaded to steal oil and resources.

What we call progress is destruction of the biosphere at an ever increasing pace.

What we call peace is endless war to fuel the growth of an ever expanding machine of conquest, death and destruction.

What we call respectable are people who most thoroughly acquiesce to lies and disseminate them most efficiently.

What we call charity is giving a tiny fraction of what was stolen from the poor back to the poor.

What we call individual initiative is individuals using the repressive apparatus of the state to enforce unjust claims to stolen property.

What we call democratic debate is a contrived splitting of hairs that reinforces the shared assumptions of both sides.

What we call progressives are politicians best able to deceive the public to continue putting faith and trust in a regressive kleptocracy.

What we call education is deadening critical faculties of youth so they will work for the tyrannical system destroying their future and spout its lies with fervent loyalty.

The first prerequisite to any form of intellectual integrity is to honestly bear witness to the fact that the social fabric of our society is based on lies.

Dealers sell weapons to both sides of ethnic conflicts, earning record profits year by year.

• An honest politician is on who, when he is bought, will stay bought.
  • Simon Cameron, U. S Senator, 1867-1877

Dealers sell weapons to both sides of ethnic conflicts, earning record profits year by year. Legislators accept unlimited campaign contributions and speaking fees. An honest legislator, they say, is one who keeps promises to kleptocrats who fund her campaigns. Both parties take bribes, often from the same people, and always from the same class.

Rich and famous commit crimes of global scale with impunity. Kid selling cigarettes and weed gets time. They call it a justice department. What a joke! But people still talk as if the lie is real.

People put their hope in next election. Well, let me look in my crystal ball and see. Crystal ball predicts, in next election, every office, with handful of exceptions, will be filled by legislators who accept campaign contributions and speaking fees. Crystal ball predicts, legislators will continue to do bidding of their donors, no matter what consequences for poor, working class and planet.

Problem is, we have to pretend legal system is legitimate when we go to work. But we all know in our hearts, law is not legal when legislators take bribes. The whole legal system is nothing but a massive bribery scam. Please, for God's sake, please, stop putting your trust in law.

On Education

False education teaches you to obey. True education teaches you to think. If you rely on the ruling powers to provide your education to you, which education do you think you will get? The ruling powers will mold your mind in such a way that it can't even imagine any fate for itself other than serving them.

The first lesson in our false education is that the purpose of our education and the intellectually disciplined part of our lives is to make ourselves useful in serving the powers of this world. The first lesson of a true education is that we must examine the powers of this world and ascertain if they are just or unjust, wholesome or unwholesome, humane or inhumane, deceptive or honest. A true assessment of the powers of this world will teach us that the sole aim of power is to vie for more power. The powers of this world are entirely indifferent to the fate of human and other species and planet on which we all reside. A true education would teach us to examine the ruling system critically, not to serve it blindly.

False education teaches you to obey. True education teaches you to think. If you rely on the ruling powers to provide your education to you, which education do you think you will get? The ruling powers will mold your mind in such a way that it can't even imagine any fate for itself other than serving them. The unstated premise behind the education you get from the ruling powers is that the intellectually disciplined part of your life will be used to serve the ruling powers, without ever examining whether they are just, humane, moral, honest, wise, or even sane.

It's never too late to begin a true education. I didn't begin mine until age 45. True education begins when you change the aim of your intellectual life from serving power to examining power. Now your intellectual curiosity will lead you to sociology, critical theory, and, most importantly, to examining the contents and actions of your own mind to understand the assumptions you have made and where they come from. When we look at our assumptions, we will find most of our assumptions are dinned into us by propagandists working for the ruling powers. When you scrutinize these assumptions, you will find most of them won't withstand scrutiny. "Serving power is serving the good." This assumption is deep in our soul, dinned into us since birth. It is false.

The Protestant Ethic is False

• It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.
  • Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, book 1, chapter 2

• Luther understands monasticism as a product of an egoistic lovelessness that withdraws from one's duties in the world. By contrast, this-worldly work in a vocation appears to him to be a visible expression of brotherly love, a notion he anchors in a highly unrealistic manner indeed and in contrast—almost grotesquely—to the well-known passages of Adam Smith.
  • Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), as translated by Stephen Kalberg (2011), p. 100

• The ascetic, when he wishes to act within the world ... must become afflicted with a sort of happy closure of the mind regarding any question about the meaning of the world, for he must not worry about such questions. Hence, it is no accident that inner-worldly asceticism reached its most consistent development on the foundation of the Calvinist god's absolute inexplicability, utter remoteness from every human criterion, and unsearchableness as to his motives. Thus, the inner-worldly ascetic is the recognized "man of a vocation," who neither inquires about nor finds it necessary to inquire about the meaning of his actual practice of a vocation within the whole world, the total framework of which is not his responsibility but his god's.
  • Max Weber, Economy and Society (1922), as edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (University of California Press: 1968), pp. 547-548

Two world wars. Agent Orange. Nuclear proliferation. Mass extinctions. How many more calamities will it take before people figure out that the Protestant work ethic and its secular descendants are false. Working for the system does not help our neighbors.

The people offering dollars tell us to build bombs. We should ignore them and help our neighbors. The people offering dollars tell us to build mansions for them. We should ignore them and build shelters for our neighbors.

Helping our neighbors means ignoring people offering dollars. It means helping people who actually need our help. The people offering dollars are leading us on a path to destruction. We must turn our backs on them and build a real community. The people offering dollars lure us into doing their evil. Instead we can do good. We can actually help our neighbors.

Why are we obeying the rulers of this world as they lead us on a path to destruction? Why aren't we actually helping our neighbors?

The Protestant ethic is false. Private vices will never be public virtues. Our idea of "making a living" is making a dying. Stop helping the people offering dollars. Start helping your neighbors.

Flowers on the Chain

• Ordinarily, the propagation of Hinduism occurs in approximately the following way. ... Native deities are rebaptized with the names of Hindu gods and goddesses. ... Some Brahman is requested to provide and take charge of ritual concerns and thereby also to convince himself and provide testimony to the fact that they—the rulers of the tribe—were of ancient, only temporarily forgotten, knightly (Kshatriya) blood.
  • Max Weber, The Religion of India, pp. 9-10

• Legitimation by a recognized religion has always been decisive for an alliance between politically and socially dominant classes and the priesthood. Integration into the Hindu community provided such religious legitimation for the ruling stratum. It not only endowed the ruling stratum of the barbarians with recognized rank in the cultural world of Hinduism, but, through their transformation into castes, secured their superiority over the subject classes with an efficiency unsurpassed by any other religion.
  • Max Weber, The Religion of India, p. 16

• Transforming hereditary privilege into ‘merit,’ the existing system of educational selection, with the Big Three (Harvard, Princeton and Yale) as its capstone, provides the appearance if not the substance of equality of opportunity. In so doing, it legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability over the prerogatives of birth. The problem with a ‘meritocracy,’ then, is not only that its ideals are routinely violated (though that is true), but also that it veils the power relations beneath it. For the definition of ‘merit,’ including the one that now prevails in America’s leading universities, always bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society. Those who are able to define ‘merit’ will almost invariably possess more of it, and those with greater resources—cultural, economic and social—will generally be able to ensure that the educational system will deem their children more meritorious.
  • Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Houghton Mifflin: 2005), pp. 549-550

• Men differ in … social status. … Simple observation shows that in every such situation he who is more favored feels the never ceasing need to look upon his position as in some way “legitimate,” upon his advantage as “deserved,” and the other’s disadvantage as being brought about by the latter’s “fault.” That the purely accidental causes of the difference may be ever so obvious makes no difference.
  • Max Weber, Economy and Society, p. 953

• Every highly privileged group develops the myth of its natural, especially its blood, superiority. Under conditions of stable distribution of power and, consequently, of status order, that myth is accepted by the negatively privileged strata. Such a situation exists as long as the masses continue in that natural state of theirs in which thought about the order of domination remains but little developed, which means, as long as no urgent needs render the state of affairs “problematical.” But in times in which the class situation has become unambiguously and openly visible to everyone as the factor determining every man’s individual fate, that very myth of the highly privileged about everyone having deserved his particular lot has often become one of the most passionately hated objects of attack.
  • Max Weber, Economy and Society, p. 953

One reason for the success of Hindu caste ideology is that it is able to assimilate the hierarchies of societies it conquers and incorporate them into its own caste structure. One reason for the success of neoliberal meritocratic ideology is that it is able to successfully assimilate intergenerational hereditary privileges and incorporate them into a hierarchy of credentialed competence. In some exceptional periods in history, the transparent role of ideologies in reproducing and legitimating arbitrary privilege becomes “unambiguously and openly visible to everyone.” In these rare periods, the myth that privileged human beings in any sense deserve their position “has often become one of the most passionately hated objects of attack.” In most historical periods, however, legitimation ideologies are welcomed by both ruling and subject classes. For ruling classes, legitimation ideologies successfully serve to mask the arbitrariness and inhumanity of hereditary class distinctions, concealing the hegemony of brute force behind a façade of holiness or merit. For subject classes, on the other hand, legitimation ideologies successfully disguise the indignity of servility, concealing cowardly unquestioning obedience as acquiescence to fate or reason. The flowers on the chain are welcomed by those on both ends.

On Celebrity Culture

Hollywood teaches us that a tiny minority of the population who have attained "celebrity" status should own our attention. This lesson prepares us to accept that a tiny minority of the population who have attained "oligarch" status should own the means of production. The moviegoer steps over the homeless man, who is unworthy of her attention, to arrive on time for the film where she can see celebrities worthy of her attention. The shopper walks right past the homeless on her way to the mall. The values we have learned are profoundly wrong. Our attention should go to those who need it most.

When Oligarchs Feel Threatened By Popular Uprising

When oligarchs feel threatened by popular uprising, they attempt to divide the population based on something other than oligarch/non-oligarch status. Race is the go-to option, of course. But there is also party affiliation, sexual orientation, religion, duration of residency, and many more.

In step one, oligarchs fund hate groups who divide non-oligarchs based on some arbitrary characteristic. The aim is that non-oligarchs blame other non-oligarchs for their woes instead of seeing that oligarchs are the problem.

When this stops working and people start waking up and seeing that oligarchs really are the problem, oligarchs then proceed to step two, a more desperate measure. In step two, oligarchs mark off part of their own class to save the remainder. "Democratic Party oligarchs are the problem." "Jewish oligarchs are the problem."

Oligarchs have no scruples. They will do anything to preserve their power. They fund hate groups. They undermine democracies. They destroy communities. They start wars. Anything to preserve their power.

The problem is not race, religion, party or residency. The problem is oligarchy. Don't let oligarchs trick you into hating people who are as much their victims as you.

Contemptus mundi

• Do we have all the hatred and all the aversion for the world which Our Lord requires, and which his example must inspire in us?

Have we regarded it as the greatest enemy of Christianity, an enemy that can not abide that Jesus Christ reigns over the faithful, crying ceaselessly through the mouth of its fans, “We do not want this man to reign over us” (Saint Anthony).

Have we raised ourselves up to that outlook opposed to the world, and have we tried to destroy the esteem and love for it in all hearts?

Have we referred to it with indignation, distance and contempt; and have we made it clear that it is filled only with corruption, vanity and falsehood?

Have we condemned the world's sentiments? Are we opposed to its maxims? And have we made all our efforts to abolish its laws and overturn its accursed customs?

Have we despised what the world esteems and esteemed what it despises? Have we fled what it wants and wanted what it flees? Have we loved what it hates and hated what it loves?

Have we had the colossal aversion to the world's public assemblies, to its spectacles and all its pomp? ...

Have we fled the company of worldly persons, whom the saints, especially the Ecclesiastics, advise us to avoid like the plague, whom one should see only by necessity, and from whom we should separate ourselves as vigilantly as we can?

Have we wanted, in order to render our separation from the world as perfect as the sanctity of our state demands, that the world have aversion to us, as we have aversion to the world, following the example the apostle has given us, “The world is crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14).

• Louis Tronson, Examens particuliers sur divers sujets (1690), pp. 321-322

People the world respects are people who collaborate with the evil perpetrated by the rulers of this world. If you respect respectable people, you're collaborating too. If there's any chance to be good in this world, it is only by refusing to collaborate with evil, spitting in the face of everything elevated and distinguished, despising everything the world respects, and turning all our love and adoration to forgotten and neglected, poor and homeless, prisoners and refugees, to everything the world despises. When the world has everything upside down and backwards, the first step to setting things upright is to hate what the world loves and love what the world hates.

Guard the Sense Doors!

• Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair,—the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish,—to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself,—an hypæthral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity in this respect. Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very bar-room of the mind’s inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us,—the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts’ shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?

• Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle” (1863)

• If it were a case of putting your body into the hands of someone and risking the treatment’s turning out beneficial or the reverse, you would ponder deeply whether to entrust it to him or not, and would spend many days over the question, calling in the counsel of your friends and relations. But when it comes to something which you value more highly than your body, namely your soul—something on whose beneficial or harmful treatment your whole welfare depends—you have not consulted either your father or your brother or any of us who are your friends on the question of whether or not to entrust your soul to the stranger.

• Socrates in Protagoras

• Monks, you should dwell with the doors to your senses well-guarded.

  On seeing a form with the eye, do not grasp at any theme or details by which — if you were to dwell without restraint over the faculty of the eye — evil, unskillful qualities such as greed or distress might assail you. Practice for its restraint. Guard the faculty of the eye. Secure your restraint with regard to the faculty of the eye.

• Gautama Buddha, Kumma Sutta

You are being manipulated. The class that owns the means of intellectual production (film studios, newspapers, magazines) are feeding you a nonstop stream of propaganda. Why? So you will believe unsustainable arbitrary unjust inequalities of wealth must be sustained. So you will believe unsustainable environmentally devastating forms of production must be sustained.

Some of Freud’s top students were lured by big bucks to Madison Avenue, where they use their knowledge to manipulate you. These rogue psychologists never took a Hippocratic oath. They use their knowledge to harm you. Madison Avenue manipulates you to buy things you don't need. Madison Avenue manipulates you to support politicians who take bribes. Madison Avenue manipulates you so intensely and profoundly, your sense of personal identity is inextricably bound to the products and pundits it sells you.

When I was first exposed to TV as a child, I understood instinctively the TV was manipulating me. I tried to warn the other kids. To this day I still warn everyone I meet. To leave our precious minds in the hands of villains intent on manipulating and deceiving us is a recipe for intellectual suicide.

Guard the sense doors. Before you allow any bits or pixels into your mind, ask yourself, will this production improve my mind? If the answer is no, deny it admittance. Turn off the television.

Hobbesianism

"Hobbesianism" is the political philosophy that claims a single source of sovereign authority ("state") is necessary to prevent war of all against all. Because Hobbesianists are so firmly persuaded of the necessity of this source of authority, they are willing to tolerate it even when it becomes completely corrupt (accepting unlimited campaign contributions, repealing all taxes on the rich, appointing rapists to courts, etc.). But let's not forget that Hobbesianism was not considered a valid excuse when Eichmann attempted to invoke it at Nuremberg. In the end, it is your own individual conscience that must decide your actions. Obedience to the all-powerful sovereign will not excuse atrocities. The sovereign is committing atrocities now against immigrants, against the planet, against the poor nations of the world, against dissenters, against inmates performing slave labor. The sovereign authority does not prevent war of all against all, it instigates wars for profit. The sovereign authority does not protect us. It is a beast that consumes everything in its path. Stop obeying the sovereign authority. You have a conscience. Use it!

Human Beings Drill Into Sacred Earth

Oceans acidify.
Marine life dies.
Planet gets hotter.
Wildlife dies.
Icecaps melt.
Oceans rise.
Migrants flee desert,
and are rounded up
in concentration camps
as they reach prosperous lands
who orchestrated their doom.

Human beings drill
into sacred earth
searching endlessly for minerals.

Soon you will dig up all minerals
and burn all fuel
you silly colonizer.
Then what?

Colonizer's way is unsustainable.
Colonizer needs new places to invade
each year.

This year it’s Brazil.
Pristine rainforests
become toxic slag heaps
in decade or two.

Oceans acidify.
Marine life dies.
Planet gets hotter.
Wildlife dies.
Icecaps melt.
Oceans rise.
Migrants flee desert,
and are rounded up
in concentration camps
as they reach prosperous lands
who orchestrated
their doom.

Welcome to our future.

Oil Companies Bribe Legislators

Oil companies bribe legislators.
New pipelines
fuel the path
to fossil doom.
Prison companies bribe legislators.
Helpless children absconded from parents.

When rapists, tyrants, fascists are in power,
it's dangerous to assent, conform, obey.
Remember how history
thought of dutiful citizens
of other regimes
that began putting people
in concentration camps.

On Wage Slavery

In his 1861 message to congress, Abraham Lincoln disputed Engels’ idea that workers in the north were wage slaves, sold not once and for all but piecemeal by the hour. Lincoln concedes there is a class of capitalists and a class that must work for wages to survive, but he insists the Marxist analysis is wrong, because “A large majority belong to neither class—neither work for others, nor have others working for them.” The condition of the wage worker is only temporary. Everyone is entitled to rise to the intermediate class, neither wageslave nor wagemaster. In other words, a laborer is intended to be a laborer only in his youth, and subsequently able to enter the class of that great majority who neither command nor obey. Lincoln intended to reconstruct the union in such a way that everyone, including freed slaves, could ascend to this intermediate class.

• It is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life. Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed; nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless. ... A few men own capital, and those few avoid labor themselves, and, with their capital, hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class—neither work for others, nor have others working for them. ... In most of the Southern States, a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters; while in the Northern, a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families—wives, sons, and daughters—work for themselves on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hired laborers or slaves on the other. ... There is not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. Many independent men everywhere in these States, a few years back in their lives, were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages a while, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.

• Abraham Lincoln, President's Message to Congress, December 2, 1861

I encourage you to think about Lincoln's words. Are the facts which Lincoln uses to refute the idea of wage slavery true today? Were they true in 1861? Is there a class that is neither wageslaves nor wagemasters? Is is possible for a wage earner to enter this free class by diligence and thrift? Is this class a majority? Does Lincoln's argument do justice to those who fail to rise to the free class? Is Engels' conception of wage slavery an accurate description of the relations between classes under capitalism?

On Pragmatism

October 2, 2018

• Practical life is not necessarily directed toward other people, as some think; and it is not the case that practical thoughts are only those which result from action for the sake of what ensues. On the contrary, much more practical are those mental activities and reflections which have their goal in themselves and take place for their own sake.

• Aristotle

• That which is desirable on its own account and for the sake of knowing it is more of the nature of wisdom than that which is desirable on account of its results.

• Aristotle

Today, we are wiser than the Greeks. Cultivation of virtue and wisdom have their goal in themselves and are therefore a waste of time. What we need are vices that can be harnessed for the public good. We have developed a magic system, you see, with an unfailing ability to transform private vice into public virtue. Ambition can be directed at public service. The magistrate can coax greed into productive channels. Ambition and greed may be ugly to see in our souls. But they are the engines of progress. So say the pragmatists.

• Private vices by the dextrous Management of a skillful politician may be turned into public benefits.

• Bernard Mandeville

Mandeville's claim, that private vices could be coaxed into productive channels by a wise magistrate, was contradictory from day one. If we assume ordinary people are greedy, why do we not assume magistrates, too, are greedy?

Then we are surprised when the magistrate is bribed? We are surprised when legislators modify the law so they can accept unlimited campaign contributions and speaking fees?

Pragmatism means putting our faith in a magical system that can make private vices into public virtues. I’m here to tell you there has never been such a system. There never will be such a system.

We are destroying our planet in the name of pragmatism. We are building nuclear weapons capable of annihilating entire cities in the name of pragmatism. How is this pragmatic?

The pragmatists have led us to hell, can’t you see it?

• No one ever acts honestly in the administration of states. There is no helper who will save any one who maintains the cause of the just.

• Plato

Plato said this 2,400 years ago. Why, why do we not listen?

On Adolescence

My transition from rebellious adolescent to obedient adult coincided pretty much exactly with the time that the world abandoned its (so they say) adolescent dreams of a peaceful, just, merciful society and maturely accepted that there is no alternative to global capitalism. Now, looking back on this time, it seems to me that both my personal transition and the collective transition were profoundly misguided. My individual decision to stop resisting and go along with the system was a surrender of conscience to a system with no conscience. The collective decision to stop resisting the worst abuses of capitalism was a surrender of conscience on a global scale.

Now, forty years later, I am sometimes accused of behaving like an adolescent. Well, yes, I do want to return to 1980 and reconsider the fateful decisions I as an individual and we as a society made at that time. The destruction of the planet, the corruption of democracy, the impoverishment of the working class, the endless wars—all these things testify to the consequences of our cowardly acquiescence to greed. We can’t recover forty years lost to a false ideology. But we can change course. We can recover our adolescent courage to question authority. We can restore the convictions of conscience that we surrendered to a system with no conscience.

This much is clear to me: We made the wrong decisions. The longer we wait to admit our error, the worse the situation will get.

On Opportunity

One argument often offered as a justification for capitalism is that everyone has the opportunity to become rich. OK. But how? By delivering goods and services to those who are already rich? By making rich investors even richer? By consenting to use all our time and energy helping those with money, and none to helping the poorest and most desperate? It turns out the opportunity for those without capital to sell out to those with capital isn't really an opportunity so much as a dire necessity imposed by the tyranny of the rich.

On Obedience

• The popes ... noted that when they led the little sheep to books, their junk market did not prosper and people wanted to know what is godly or ungodly, right or wrong.

• Andreas Karlstadt

Karlstadt's observation applies not only to popes but to all authority figures. They want us peasants to be so illiterate that we are unable to put two sentences together. Otherwise, the peasants will learn to reason about what is godly and ungodly, right and wrong. Then we will recognize the owner class as ravenous wolves, and stop giving them our obedience.

Don't Buy the Manufactured Dreams. Dream Your Own.

Those who profit from selling us dreams would like us to forget dreams come from minds. They want us to believe dreams come on cellophane reels. They want us to rely on them to make our dreams for us, so we forget how to make dreams for ourselves.

Consider these three instructions of the Buddha:

1. Abstain from games and shows.

2. Guard the eyes from the seduction of visual pleasure.

3. Sit alone in a quiet place. Imagine a mind-made body. Withdraw the mind-made body from the body the way a reed is withdrawn from its sheath, or the way a snake sheds its worn out skin. View the world from the perspective of the mind-made body. Imagine the mind-made body looking down upon the body, thinking, "This is impermanent. See how it suffers." Now imagine the mind-made body traveling around the universe seeing stars and planets, thinking, "These are impermanent. They will decay into dark, dead matter."

How many hours of beautiful imaginings can be conjured from just these short texts? How many beautiful self-created images can be created from these succinct instructions?

What state of mind requires a machine to present images to it? Has it lost the capacity to create its own images? Has it become so devoid of imagination that it can no longer dream its own dreams, and must have prefabricated dreams reproduced by machine?

Those who profit from selling us food would like us to forget food comes from the ground. They want us to believe food comes in cellophane packages. They want us to rely on them to make our food for us, so we forget how to grow food for ourselves.

Those who profit from selling us dreams would like us to forget dreams come from minds. They want us to believe dreams come on cellophane reels. They want us to rely on them to make our dreams for us, so we forget how to make dreams for ourselves.

Don't buy the manufactured dreams. Dream your own.

Primary texts

• It is just as if a man were to draw out a reed from its sheath. He might think: “This is the reed, this is the sheath, reed and sheath are different. Now the reed has been pulled from the sheath.” … In the same way a monk with mind concentrated directs his mind to the production of a mind-made body. He draws that body out of this body.
  • Digha Nikaya, M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 2 (Samaññaphala Sutta), verse 86, p. 104

• A chariot, king, is a person's body

The soul is the driver, the senses his horses;

Undistracted by his fine horses a driver

Who is skilled rides happily, if they are trained.

• Mahābhārata 5(51)34:57, as translated by J. A. B. van Buitenen, p. 264

• Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins remain addicted to attending such shows as dancing, singing, music, displays, recitations, hand-music, cymbals and drums, fairy-shows, acrobatic and conjuring tricks, combats of elephants, buffaloes, bulls, goats, rams, cocks and quail, fighting with staves, boxing, wrestling, sham-fights, parades, manoeuvres and military reviews, the ascetic Gotama refrains from attending such displays.
  • Digha Nikaya, M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 1, verse 1.13

A Prediction

Someday soon you will have a revelation, from your conscience, that the suffering of other sentient beings really does matter. Then you will repent for your complicity with the rulers of this world, who have no qualms inflicting suffering so they can have bigger mansions. Then you will see that the resources the rich squander on luxury and vanity might have saved the lives of billions of starving children. Then you will repent that you watch the games and shows that teach you to admire the rich, that teach you to emulate the rich, that teach you to want to be as cruel as they are and inflict as much suffering as they do.

What your conscience reveals to you is right. Turn off the games and shows. Listen to the voice in your conscience. The suffering of the poor really does matter.

The Prophet

• The Prophet ... remains always a man apart, a narrow-minded extremist, zealous for his own ideal, and intolerant of every other. And since he cannot have all that he would, he is in a perpetual state of anger and grief; he remains all his life "a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth." [Jeremiah 15:10] Not only this: the other members of society, those many-sided dwarfs, creatures of the general harmony, cry out after him, "The Prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad" [Hosea 9:7]; and they look with lofty contempt on his narrowness and extremeness.
  • Ahad Ha'am, "Priest and Prophet" (1893), in Selected Essays (1904), as translated from the Hebrew by Leon Simon (1912), p. 130

The prophet is very difficult to love. He perpetually insists on staging interventions, confronting addiction, telling the truth. The fossil fuel pushers have gotten us addicted to fossil fuels. The thrill pushers have gotten us addicted to thrills. The oppressors have gotten us addicted to their system of oppression. The prophet calls us out for the addicts we are, and demands that we get clean.

• Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean.
  • Isaiah 1:16

What is the point of confronting the world for its cruelty, inhumanity, and merciless injustice? There's nothing we can do about it. The prophet has no power to change anything. Why is he always complaining? The prophet is part of the society he berates, and just as guilty as anyone else. Why is he always criticizing everyone and everything?

These arguments against the prophet don't withstand even a moment's scrutiny. If we have no power to help the oppressed, does that exempt us from showing them all the compassion we possibly can? If we are just as guilty as anyone else, does that exempt us for repenting for our complicity in our collective guilt, and trying with all our heart and all our strength to reform ourselves and the world?

These arguments against the prophet, and all the other arguments that quickly come to mind, are not really arguments at all. They represent our attempt to silence the prophet, our convenient technique for dismissing a message too difficult to hear. Our abrupt replies to the prophet constitute an efficient method to persuade ourselves that it is alright to go on lying to ourselves. Our counterarguments to the prophet's accusations represent an effective algorithm for assuring ourselves that is perfectly acceptable to ignore the dire consequences of our actions. Our knee-jerk avoidance of the prophet functions as an apparatus for concealing from ourselves the inhumanity and injustice that must be daily perpetrated to go on feeding our addiction to pleasure, thrills, and all the fuel and minerals that must be stolen from from the earth, never to be returned, to feed our insatiable greed.

Everyone Is Equal

All human beings are equal. All are equally worthy of attention. Take your eyes off the spectacle. Look at ordinary people. Listen to ordinary people. Distribute your attention justly.

Everyone is equal. No one is more important than anyone else. If famous people deserve to have their story heard, then so do ordinary people. No one should have to rise to celebrity status to make themselves worthy of attention. Ordinary people are worthy of attention. Now. Just as we are. Because we are human beings.

In order to attract attention to the plight of the ordinary person, do we need a talented actor to play the role of the ordinary person? Is the ordinary person not beautiful enough for our refined eyes? Is the ordinary person not articulate enough for our refined ears?

Are only those with a special talent worthy of attention? What about the rest of us? Should we focus our attention on the few that are worthy of attention? Should we neglect one another?

The actor who plays the ordinary person isn’t an ordinary person. She is a celebrity, a pampered person, a person who gets more attention than the ordinary person. Her talented portrayal of the ordinary person undermines the cause of the ordinary person by implying that something extraordinary is necessary to secure our attention.

Ordinary people are ignored. Celebrities are honored and adored. What if instead we start paying attention to ordinary people? Perhaps then we would see the injustice is our own: we demand something extraordinary to command our attention.

I want to go to a game or a show and disrupt it. I want to run down the aisles yelling. "Why are you directing your attention to the celebrities in the center of the ring? Why aren't you looking at one another? Why aren't you listening to one another?"

If I go to the spectacle and I don’t disrupt it, I sanction the idea that celebrities on the inside are more worthy of attention than ordinary people on the outside. By directing my eyes to the spectacle, I mislead other members of the audience. I set a bad example.

All human beings are equal. All are equally worthy of attention. Take your eyes off the spectacle. Look at ordinary people. Listen to ordinary people. Distribute your attention justly.

The Baconian Error

• For I find that even those that have sought knowledge for itself and not for benefit, or ostentation, or any practical enablement in the course of their life, have nevertheless propounded to themselves a wrong mark, namely, satisfaction, which men call truth, and not operation.
  • Francis Bacon

• The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
  • Albert Einstein

• There is no one who ever acts honestly in the administration of States, nor any helper who will save any one who maintains the cause of the just.
  • Plato

As soon as Francis Bacon decided to put philosophy in operation in service to the kingdoms of this world, global thermonuclear annihilation became inevitable. The nations of the world will never stop warring against each other and against their own citizens. To put physics in service to war spells the end of life on the planet. If Einstein understood the true nature of Babylon, he would have understood that the existing problem is insoluble. It is the nature of Babylon to attempt to increase its power without end. Babylon is a machine of death and destruction. The bellicosity of World War Two has become systematized. The more knowledge we put in service to the system, the more we assure our own destruction. Plato understood that no one ever acts honestly in the administration of states. Plato insists the philosopher must never serve power. The philosopher must teach virtue to power. Bacon’s political optimism is a fatal mistake for mankind.

The Auction of Christ

• Have we raised ourselves up to that outlook opposed to the world? Have we tried to destroy the esteem and love for it in all hearts? Have we referred to it with indignation, distance and contempt? Have we made it clear it is filled only with corruption, vanity and falsehood? Have we condemned the world's sentiments? Are we opposed to its maxims? And have we made all our efforts to abolish its laws and overturn its accursed customs?

Have we despised what the world esteems and esteemed what it despises? Have we fled what it wants and wanted what it flees? Have we loved what it hates and hated what it loves? Have we had the colossal aversion to the world's public assemblies, to its spectacles and all its pomp? ...

Have we wanted, in order to render our separation from the world as perfect as the sanctity of our state demands, that the world have aversion to us, as we have aversion to the world, following the example the apostle has given us, “The world is crucified to me, and I to the world.”

• Louis Tronson

When an unpopular person tries to become popular, they must give up the traits that make them unpopular, even if those traits are their most precious virtues. They must acquire the traits that will make them popular, even if those traits are horrible vices.

The Church's uncompromising aversion to greed made it unpopular among the class of greedy merchants that rose to power in Europe in the eighteenth century. The Church decided it wanted to be popular. It wanted to fit in. It abandoned its uncompromising aversion to greed. It became more accommodating.

We should never underestimate the willingness of individuals and institutions to compromise in order to achieve popularity and success. The desire for popularity makes a person or institution pliable and accommodating. Our beliefs begin to look more and more like the beliefs of the world from whom we seek approval and support. The defeat of Tronson and the other Jansenists in the eighteenth century is one of many cases where the Church gave up trying to transform the world and began adapting to the the world in order to enhance its popularity.

One thing that helps to be popular, of course, is to dress nicely. In the fourth century, Constantine began building beautiful churches, giving an impressive and imposing worldly presence to a religion of worldly renunciation. The result was predictable. The agenda of the Church changed. It became exquisitely aligned with the agenda of Empire. On account of his largesse, Constantine ended up supervising the Nicene Council, where the officially sanctioned form of Christianity was hammered out.

What virtues had to be forsaken in order to achieve popularity with the rulers of this world? We can get some idea by looking at texts that never made it into the official canon finalized by Athanasius in 367. The Gospel of Thomas, for example, offers an account of Jesus' teachings. It wasn't included in the New Testament. It was forgotten for centuries until it was finally rediscovered in 1945 in a desert cave at Nag Hammadi in Egypt.

In Thomas' gospel we find a very surprising statement. "Every day is the Sabbath." We can easily imagine how a sentiment like this might be inconvenient for worldly rulers. The form of religious discipline demanded by Thomas, which makes religion not merely a Sunday diversion, but the center and guiding force of life, couldn't be tolerated by an Empire that needed its imperial business to be the center and guiding force.

In a recent book titled One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, Princeton historian Kevin Kruse argues that corporations bankrolled religious movements in the 1940s and 1950s in order to completely refashion American Christianity. The new Christianity they created was, unsurprisingly, far more accommodating to corporate greed and far less resistant to corporate power than the movements it replaced.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the church had offered one of the main focal points of resistance to the rule of corporate power. The church held up principles of justice, mercy and piety as an alternative to the shameless pursuit of wealth. But this was inconvenient for corporate power. It led to political and personal opposition to the corporate agenda of unprincipled greed. Churches had to be busted for the same reason unions were busted. Both offered organized resistance to the total domination needed to maximize profits.

Religion has been transformed to a form useful to the corporate world just as Congress has been transformed. Corporations offer huge donations to religious organizations with agendas friendly to their cause. Organizations with the resources to market themselves grow into powerful influences. Principled organizations that oppose corporate rapacity find themselves unsupported, unpopular, marginal and irrelevant. There's nowhere to hide from the all-pervasive influence of corporate power.

Roman martyr Hippolytus made it very clear what the view of the second century church toward luxury was. Those who wore purple were not to be admitted. Those who began wearing purple were to be chastised and excluded if they refused to desist. The same prohibition was to be enforced against those who participate in war.

• A soldier of the civil authority must be taught not to kill men and to refuse to do so if he is commanded. ... If he is unwilling to comply, he must be rejected. A military commander ... must resign or be rejected. If a catechumen or a believer seeks to become a soldier, they must be rejected, for they have despised God.
  • Hippolytus

The pre-Constantinian Church knew it was wrong to live in luxury while other human beings suffer. Early Church leaders understood it was unconscionable to build empires of greed. They also understood it was wrong to stand idly by and allow others to do these horrible things. Now the Church has been bribed into forgetting all these things. Churchgoers today are perfectly content to work for the empire of greed six days a week and take up their cross and follow Christ on the seventh. Christ, like everything else in the world, has been auctioned to the highest bidder.

Ode to Ecological Collapse

Passing tipping point
Of runaway climate
Planet dying
Culture proceeds
Full speed ahead
Smiles and enthusiasm
Everywhere you look
Few woke souls
Depressed and alone
They have pills for that
Denial pills
To make you cozy
With unsustainable glittering calamity
Built to last with concrete.

Intellectually Dead: A Poem

Intellectually dead
sucked into bowels
of vast machine
mind as servant
producing
what master needs
what master wants
not
what mind
urgently
desperately
wants to produce
needs to produce
testimony
to what is highest
in mind
testimony
to its passion
to its perseverance
to its path
its uncompromising path
to perfection
to realization
of its ideal
testimony
to the undefiled
to the undiscarded
to the core.

Tasks arise
from taskmasters
indifferent taskmasters
slaves
to taskmasters
indifferent too
mind
to them
cog in machine
vast machine
mind
too busy serving
to look machine
in the face
to understand
what it is
this machine
this vast machine
it humbly serves.

Dreams
forgotten
dreams realized
ceased to be dreams
new
dreams
ignored
new dreams
silenced
new dreams
ruthlessly suppressed.

Incoming stream of text
defines thought
mind conquered
by times
eternity lost
values gleaned
from recycle bin.

Inertia
replaces force
teachers prepared mind
teachers released mind
with all that momentum
would it not be ungrateful
would it not be unfaithful
to stop
to ask
again
about the course
would it not be wasteful
to become
alive
again?

Old truth
truth I know
truth I know by heart
make it useful
make it work
eye on machine
mind on role
new truth
hidden
in places
mind never saw
while eyes were chained
to assembly line.

Resources invested
must yield
rate of return
mind producing
supplants mind thinking
locked tight
among corpses
no room to move
no exit in sight
listless limbs drudge
on assembly line
mind absent
mind gone.

With much knowledge comes much grief.

• For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

• Ecclesiastes 1:18 KJV

With much knowledge comes much grief. But what is the alternative? To bury our heads in the sand? An economic system run amok is at war with nature and reality. The real living earth is being destroyed while a fictitious balance sheet shows ever increasing profits. The longer we keep our heads buried in the sand, the worse things will be when reality makes its inevitable return.

With much knowledge comes much grief. We don't want to know about the corruption of the system, about the suffering of the poor, about the destruction of the ecosphere. Why do we want all that grief? Life is so much more pleasant in the artificial paradise of Hollywood.

The Pursuit of Happiness

One of my rich acquaintances laments after reading my posts that I seem unhappy, and offers me a comforting wish that I might find happiness. We're each in charge of finding our own happiness, he assures me. Happiness, he adds parenthetically, is not found in material things, although of course he has a lot of them.

Dear God, the hypocrisy of the rich never ceases to astound me. They assure us happiness doesn't lie in material things, yet they are willing to let others starve so they can have them. In accordance with their perverse logic, I suppose happiness must not lie in material things for starving children in Africa either. They can starve to death happily.

When I start berating a rich couple for living in luxury while others starve, the husband chimes in and asks, "What have you done, personally, for the poor?" By his perverse logic, I can do nothing but give my own meager resources to the poor. I can't use my words to try to overcome greed. I can't use political means to try to topple the greedy from their throne. The idea of using their trillions of excess wealth, the wealth they now use for idle displays of vanity, to alleviate the dire suffering of the poor, is not even to be considered.

My rich acquaintances lament that I'm unhappy. Damn right I am. It is disgusting to be happy while other human beings are starving. It is disgusting to even talk about happiness when the basic needs of other human beings are not being met. So long as one human being on this planet is starving, I will always be unhappy. The complacency of the rich with their "pursuit of happiness" is not for me.

Growing Up Racist

To accept that the legacy of past racism should pass from one generation to the next, making white families richer in every generation, is to accept racism. You can't challenge racism without challenging the premise that white people really own what we claim to own. And this is precisely what the pathological racists who deny they are racists will never do.

The worst racists are racists who deny they are racists. They pay lip service to equality. But they don't want to sacrifice the privileges that are theirs. They admire the rich, the rich of any and every race, with precisely the same envy tinted gaze the middle class casts at everyone and everything associated with wealth. But if you point out that, despite the exceptions, whites today remain on average richer than any other race, they squirm. If you point out the unbroken chain of inheritances behind white wealth, the legacy that traces its roots to the racist world of the past, they abruptly change the subject.

Economist Thomas Shapiro eloquently describes the unacknowledged racism in the economic institution of white inheritance:

American families are in the process of passing along a $9 trillion legacy from one generation to the next. ... Hand in hand with this money, I submit, what is really being handed down from generation to generation is the profound legacy of reproducing racial inequality. The legacy is difficult to discern because the language of family heritage hides it from our political consciousness.

Ta-Nehisi Coates aptly compares today's unacknowledged racists to dissolute shoppers who have finally stopped shopping but are surprised to find their debt doesn't simply disappear:

Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.

America imported slaves. Europe enslaved the natives in its colonies. Every white person descends from ancestors that enslaved other races for profit. Some of us still have a share of the booty. All of us still have a share of the guilt.

To accept that the legacy of past racism should pass from one generation to the next, making white families richer in every generation, is to accept racism. You can't challenge racism without challenging the premise that white people really own what we claim to own. And this is precisely what the pathological racists who deny they are racists will never do.

Sermon on First Corinthians

The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are servile to the ruling class, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. The cross was the punishment for rebel slaves. When we worship a lord who died on the cross, we worship a savior who was punished as a rebel slave. We show we are his disciples when we help the slaves rebel, help the former slaves recover their share, and help the slaves in our colonies achieve justice.

Repentance and Responsibility

In the New Testament, the Greek word often translated as "repent" is μετανοεῖν, which literally means "turn around" or "change your mind." To repent is to refuse to be the person you habitually are, to turn your back on your old life and discover a new life.

Think about Andrew and Peter casting their nets aside to follow their messiah. I can't help but ask, what about all the customers looking for halibut at Pete and Andy's Fish Market? Didn't Peter and Andrew disappoint them?

"If you haven't been responsible with worldly wealth," asks Jesus, "who will entrust you with true riches?" (Luke 16:9). I can't help but wonder about Peter and Andrew. When they cast their nets aside, wasn't that irresponsible?

From a worldly point of view, it is inevitable that repentant people will seem unreliable. To turn around and change one's mind requires breaking commitments that are less important in order to be true to commitments that are more important.

The other fishermen must have had a hard time without Peter and Andrew on board. Perhaps the other fishermen didn't understand why Peter and Andrew left. Perhaps the other fishermen thought Peter and Andrew were irresponsible. But were they?

For Their Labor They May Receive All Necessary Things, Except Money

• Can humans exist without some people ruling and others being ruled? The founders of political science did not think so. "I put for a general inclination of mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death," declared Thomas Hobbes. Because of this innate lust for power, Hobbes thought that life before (or after) the state was a "war of every man against every man"—"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Was Hobbes right? Do humans have an unquenchable desire for power that, in the absence of a strong ruler, inevitably leads to a war of all against all? To judge from surviving examples of bands and villages, for the greater part of prehistory our kind got along quite well without so much as a paramount chief, let alone the all-powerful English leviathan King and Mortal God, whom Hobbes believed was needed for maintaining law and order among his fractious countrymen.

• Marvin Harris, Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From, Where We Are Going (1989)

• Let every man abide in the art or employment wherein he was called. And for their labor they may receive all necessary things, except money. ... Let none of the brothers, wherever he may be or whithersoever he may go, carry or receive money or coin in any manner, or cause it to be received, either for clothing, or for books, or as the price of any labor, or indeed for any reason, except on account of the manifest necessity of the sick brothers. For we ought not to have more use and esteem of money and coin than of stones. And the devil seeks to blind those who desire or value it more than stones. Let us therefore take care lest after having left all things we lose the kingdom of heaven for such a trifle. And if we should chance to find money in any place, let us no more regard it than the dust we tread under our feet.

• Francis of Assisi, First Rule of the Friars Minor

• It is above all the impersonal and economically rationalized (but for this very reason ethically irrational) character of purely commercial relationships that evokes the suspicion, never clearly expressed but all the more strongly felt, of ethical religions. For every purely personal relationship of man to man, of whatever sort and even including complete enslavement, may be subjected to ethical requirements and ethically regulated. This is true because the structures of these relationships depend upon the individual wills of the participants, leaving room in such relations for manifestations of the virtue of charity. But this is not the situation in the realm of economically rationalised relationships, where personal control is exercised in inverse ratio to the degree of rational differentiation of the economic structure. ... The more a religion is aware of its opposition in principle to economic rationalization as such, the more apt are the religion’s virtuosi to reject the world, especially its economic activities. ... The wide chasm separating the inevitabilities of economic life from the Christian ideal ... kept the most devout groups and all those with the most consistently developed ethics far from the life of trade. ... The fact that people with rigorous ethical standards simply could not take up a business career was not altered by the dispensation of indulgences, nor by the extremely lax principles of the Jesuit probabilistic ethics after the Counter Reformation. A business career was only possible for those who were lax in their ethical thinking.

• Max Weber, Sociology of Religion

• οὐκ οἴδατε ὅτι ἡ φιλία τοῦ κόσμου ἔχθρα τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐστιν;

• Don't you know that friendship with this civilization is enmity to God?

• James 4:4

• It is monstrous for one to live in luxury while many are in want.

• Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor, Chapter 2

There is no individual vice that can possibly compare to the viciousness of the archon who lives in luxury while his neighbors starve. The idea that civilization is necessary to control human vice is a fraud. Civilization is the human vice. Living in luxury while other human beings starve is the human vice. The idea that the elites can keep the vices of the masses in check is a fraud. The elites are the source of vice. The idea that money can channel human energy into productive activities is a fraud. Money is a means for a privileged hereditary elite to dominate and exploit a class of wage slaves and get us to assent to its calamitous vices. The only path to a virtuous life is to refuse to submit to the archon, to refuse to respect the elite, to refuse to traffic in money.

A friend of civilization is the enemy of God. Monks have understood this, and refused to be complicit with civilization in its crimes against nature and the poor. Francis instructed his monks to never touch money, to accept only bread for their work.

Of course we must extricate our individual vices. But this task is secondary to the task of extricating ourselves from the colossal collective vice of civilization. So long as we remain within civilization, making ourselves accessories to its crimes against nature and the poor, our fight against our own vices is futile and hopeless. How can a soul enslaved to a vicious system overcome its own vice?

It is monstrous for one to live in luxury while many are in want.

• The man who attempted to retain for himself land or goods, or who fenced off a portion of the common ground and—like the modern landlord—would allow no one to till it who did not pay him a tax—was a criminal of the deepest dye. Nevertheless the criminals pushed their way to the front, and have become the respectables of modern society.
  • Edward Carpenter

• It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.
  • Adam Smith

• They constantly try to escape

From the darkness outside and within

By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

• T. S. Eliot

• All possessions are by nature unrighteous when a man possess them for personal advantage as being entirely his own, and does not bring them into the common stock for those in need.
  • Clement of Alexandria

• It is monstrous for one to live in luxury while many are in want.

• Clement of Alexandria

• The stinking puddle from which usury, thievery and robbery arises is our lords and princes. They make all creatures their property—the fish in the water, the bird in the air, the plant in the earth must all be theirs. Then they proclaim God's commandments among the poor and say, "You shall not steal." They oppress everyone, the poor peasant, the craftsman are skinned and scraped.
  • Thomas Müntzer

You are being ruled by criminals, scam artists who try to tell you it is moral to live as they live. The saints and sages teach that it is immoral to live in luxury while neighbors are starving. The criminals teach you the opposite. They say that it is moral to live in luxury while other human beings suffer. They rationalize their vices by telling you that private vices can be public virtues, if they are channeled in the right way. Don't believe it. It is monstrous for one to live in luxury while many are in want. All possessions are by nature unrighteous when persons or corporations possess them for personal advantage as being entirely their own. They must bring them into the common stock for those in need.

Fragmented Humanity

• What is it to understand oneself as a moral agent? ... First, I have to understand myself as and to present myself to others as someone with an identity other than the identities of role and office that I assume in each of the roles that I occupy. ... There must therefore be a place in any social order in which the exercise of the powers of moral agency is to be a real possibility. ... These too must be milieus of everyday practice in which the established standards are, when it is appropriate, put to the question, and not just in an abstract and general way. The necessary presupposition of such questioning is some more or less shared conception of what it is to be a good human being that focuses upon qualities which individuals possess or fail to possess qua individuals, independently of their roles, and which are exemplified in part by their capacity or their lack of capacity to stand back from and reconsider their engagement with the established role-structures.

• Alasdair MacIntyre, "Social Structures and their Threats to Moral Agency," Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 289 (July 1999), p. 315.

The déformation professionnelle we go through in order to obtain our place in the system is also a déformation morale. We must undo it to become moral human beings. The division of labor assumes a system is in place that can rightly fit all the fragmented pieces of humanity together into a whole. When has there ever been such a system? We devote ourselves to our roles in a system, knowing full well that the system is not human at all. It is a beast. It has no conscience.

To become human beings, we must cast off our faith in the inhuman, unconscionable system. We must restore our own individual conscience, so it can function independently of our rank and role in the system. We must restore our own independent humanity, so we can look at ourselves and other human beings as human beings rather than as cogs in the machine.

It's a Dog Eat Dog World

It's always in the interest of the individual to choose her actions “rationally” based on incentive structures set up by those in power, without questioning or examining whether those incentive structures are in fact rational, humane and genuinely in line with the interests of society. We persuade ourselves that by dutifully reporting to work for those in power we do good in the world, despite the overwhelming evidence that those in power are intent only on augmenting and displaying their power. We persuade ourselves there is no conflict between duty and self interest, that all we need to do is respond dutifully to the incentive structures society has put in place, and we can then consider ourselves good citizens and good human beings.

Subjective rationality considers its own self-interest as the ultimate arbiter of truth, without questioning whether the incentive structures society has put in place are incentives to truth or to deception. If we want to be genuinely objective, the first thing we must do is to objectively criticize the incentive structures we face, and ask ourselves, are they objectively justified?

The prevailing attitude in middle class life is that seeking wealth is rational, and all other activities are flaky. The bourgeois indulges the flakiness of sincere philanthropists with a condescending smile. But inside he shakes his head. “How could anyone be so stupid to sacrifice their own interest for the sake of an abstract idea?” The bourgeois is so immersed in the project of “building wealth” that he in effect becomes an automaton, a puppet pulled by the strings of those who now possess the so-called wealth he so desperately wants to possess for himself.

What happens if we set aside our own petty personal interests and look at the world objectively? What would we see? Once we realize how thoroughly our own thoughts and beliefs are determined by incentive structures rather than by a sincere quest for truth, we will begin to realize that the same must be true of everyone else. We will become very skeptical and critical about our sources of information. In regard to sources that we once took for granted, we will now ask, “What are the incentive structures offered to the person who provides me this information? Do I see any evidence that she resisted these incentive structures?”

Lenin points out how difficult it is for victims of capital to become aware of their plight. Newspapers are owned by capitalists. Incentive structures reward reporting that is critical, but not too critical. Individual misdeeds of individual capitalists are dutifully reported. But collective misdeeds of the entire capital-owning class are not.

The aim of a single advertisement, taken in isolation, is to persuade you to buy a particular thing. It seems innocuous and banal. But the effects of advertising taken as a whole are hardly innocuous. Advertising persuades you the comforts and conveniences offered in the market are essential, so you never achieve the independence of mind that comes with knowing how few and easily satisfied the genuine needs of human beings really are. Advertising, taken collectively, is an assault on asceticism and thrift. It ensures you will never acquire the resources and habits that make you intellectually and morally independent. It conspires to make your entire life no more than an obedient response to incentive structures offered by those in power.

Unless you happen to work in a field like medicine that has to some degree been “socialized,” you don’t work for humanity. You work for capital. Your work doesn’t benefit the ones most in need. It doesn't benefit the most worthy. It benefits those who can pay. Might it perhaps be better not to work at all than to work for those who can pay and ignore those who can’t? When the founder of Christianity recruited his first disciples, did they keep fishing and visit him on Sundays? Or did they lay down their nets and follow him?

From the perspective of an individual, abandoning work seems irrational. But is it objectively irrational? Or does it just seem irrational subjectively because of arbitrary and irrational incentive structures? If an individual stops working in protest, she will starve. If everyone stops working in protest, then we have the power to overthrow the system of greed and build a better one.

Kafka, in a little two page story titled “The Bucket Rider,” dramatizes the plight of the poor. A man with no money is about to freeze to death. He goes to the coal merchant with his empty bucket begging for the fuel that will save his life. The merchant’s husband is prepared to help the desperate man. “Do I hear a customer?” he asks. But the wife refuses. “I hear nothing,” she insists. She hears nothing because a man with no money is defined by commerce as a non-person. He is stripped of his dignity, of his voice, of everything that makes him human.

When you look into the eyes of a starving child, do you see a human being? I know I do. But our employers ask us to see only those who can pay, and treat all other human beings as if they didn’t exist. If we want to be charitable, they tell us, that’s our own business. The fact that resources squandered on mansions and luxuries could feed all the world’s hungry and house all the world’s homeless is supposed to be none of our business. But when we report to work for the greedy vipers who own our corporations, we make it our business. We sanction their inhumanity by working for them. It’s time to withdraw that sanction.

In a 1996 book called Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence, NYU philosopher Peter Unger makes a very provocative argument. Not only is it morally wrong to sip champagne while other human beings starve, Unger asserts, it’s also morally wrong to stand idly by while others commit this crime. We must lie, cheat, steal, says Unger, and do whatever else it takes to wrench resources from the hands of merciless capitalists so we can feed the hungry and house the homeless. Not only is it “morally good to do all these unruly things,” says Unger, “it's wrong not to.”

The aim of today’s corporations is to keep us all isolated in our own little bubbles, surrounded by a sea of commerce. We have no communication with one another except through the murky sea, which is so agitated that it’s impossible to make anything out clearly. When our bubbles get close enough that we can finally begin to communicate sincerely, when we can finally begin to question whether the commercial society that keeps us alone and isolated should be replaced with a genuinely human community, we begin to recoil from the intimacy. It’s so unusual to have an authentic encounter with another human being, unmediated by commerce, it now makes us uncomfortable.

Of course we should be skeptical when we hear talk of a better world. We should ask, in this case as in every other, “What incentive structures is this person responding to?” But in some cases we will find no perverse incentives. Does the monk, who leaves behind a life of comfort and convenience for a life of voluntary poverty, have an incentive to lie?

It’s a dog eat dog world. Or so we’ve been told. But by whom? If you look closely, I think you’ll find the ones who insist most loudly that it’s a dog eat dog world are the dogs who are doing the most eating.

Evil Empire

• Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

• Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," Perspectives on Politics, vol. 12, no. 3 (September 2014)

• They worship the beast, saying, "Who can fight against it?"

• John of Patmos

Evil empire invents planet-killing vehicles and exports them to entire globe. Evil empire refines science of explosion to point where weapons can annihilate entire cities. Once evil empire perfects a weapon, it exports it. Evil empire poses as democracy but is in fact ruled by conglomerates of weapons manufacturers and mining companies who bribe both parties. Weapons manufactures make record profits selling weapons to both sides of ethnic conflicts. Explosions are now so efficient evil empire measures them in megatons. Evil empire routinely invades regimes that give rights to workers. Evil empire brainwashes inhabitants into thinking it is good. Evil empire exports brainwashing technology too. Evil empire's mission is to spread democracy, which turns out to have much the same effect as Columbus spreading Christianity, except now, after the invasion, natives aren’t enslaved on plantations. They work in factories for starvation wages while products and profits are exported to empire's capital. Invasion turns out to be very profitable. Empire can steal stuff. Empire can set up mining operations. Empire can set up factories and pay locals starvation wages. Empire can export tons of oil and minerals and keep 100% of profits. Evil empire’s modus operandi is the same as it was in 1492: export native resources, enslave native lives.

On top of evil empire’s war machine grows an elaborate economy. Empire steals oil to fuel its ships and tanks and planes and also sells the booty at your local gas station. New advances in weapons technology such as integrated circuits are also used to make entertainment devices, which spread empire’s propaganda and disseminate its lies.

Dutiful citizens maintain loyalty to evil empire in face of overwhelming evidence of empire’s evil deeds by a process called denial. Empire’s lies pierce the mind as effectively as its weapons pierce the flesh. Every mind that can be bribed is on the side of evil.

In its propaganda empire tells us it’s ruled by two parties. Which is the lesser evil? All political energy is consumed by this debate. Changing empire’s top salesperson every four years produces lesser evil empire. Evil empire and lesser evil empire alternate, and the business of doing evil is hardly impeded at all.

Many people seem to be snapping out of denial about the planet. But people are still in denial about the system that destroyed the planet. Denialists imagine elaborate infrastructure we built with evil empire’s oil can be maintained by switching to some other fuel. Can I just ask, who is empire going to invade to steal minerals to build all these windmills and solar cells? Can windmills and solar cells deliver enough energy to recycle worn out windmills and solar cells? Nature gave us this sustainable thing called life. We're destroying life in our futile attempt to replace life with machines.

The imperial system is based on invading new places, stealing their resources, stealing their lives. It’s happening today in the rainforest, where a fascist dictator installed by evil empire invades native lands where sustainable cultures practice sustainable lives to fuel unsustainable empire, unsustainable lives.

Why is everyone in denial? Maybe it's because environmental consciousness and consciousness of injustice seem like luxuries we just can't afford. Consciousness of injustice might mar my motivation to work for the unjust system. Environmental consciousness might make me depressed. I might lose my motivation. I might not arrive at my nine AM meeting with a smile on my face.

I say to people, “Please. Please. Please, no more denial. Empire is evil. Stop putting your trust in empire. Stop putting your faith in empire. Empire is evil.”

And people ask, “What’s the alternative?”

Yes, there is a better way. Stop worshipping empire. Stop holding people with prominent roles in empire up to your children as role models. Empire is evil. These people are not role models. There is a better way.

Princeton political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page have shown that legislative decisions are entirely uncorrelated with preferences of voters, and very well correlated with preferences of empire’s top corporate conglomerates and their owners.

The propaganda system works well. Evil empire conducts its operations with hardly any resistance. Rich and poor alike devote the intellectually disciplined part of our lives to our careers, by which we mean our aspirations to rise in the ranks of empire’s operations. Not a trace of intellectual energy remains to even ask the question whether this beast that enslaves us is good, whether it is just, whether it is sustainable. We have no time to ask questions. And if we do, evil empire provides us with answers. “This empire is not like other empires. This empire is exceptional. In this empire inhabitants get to choose which salesmen will tell you its lies.” In imperial Roman propaganda Caesar was the son of God. Today, too, evil empire has a god given mandate to spread its lies, and to steal resources from the entire globe to fuel its expansion even more.

No more denial. There’s a better way. To some degree we have to go along with the lies of empire to function in the world of work and shopping. But there is more to life than work and shopping. We don’t have to believe evil empire’s lies, at least not deep in our hearts.

We go through life adopting empire’s way of looking at things. We admire prominent roles in empire. We deplore empire's prisoners. We see the homeless and useless with contempt. That’s not a humane way of looking at things. We know this. And yet we continue to look at things the way empire looks at things, not just on the surface, but deep in our hearts.

Reach for the Stars

The whole world is at war for oil. Burning all this oil is destroying the planet. Eventually we are going to run out of oil. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of species will be extinct.

Activists warned us that corporate practices were unsustainable more than half a century ago. They were branded as idealists. But think about what these idealists told us. It turns out they weren't just offering ideals. They were inferring obvious consequences from obvious facts, facts we can all see for ourselves. You can't keep stealing stuff from the earth and never putting it back without eventually running out of stuff to steal. Eventually you run out of minerals. Eventually you run out of oil. Eventually you run out of coal. Eventually you run out of minerals to make solar cells. Eventually you run out of minerals to make wind turbines. Can solar cells and wind turbines produce enough energy to recycle worn out solar cells and wind turbines into new ones? The planet came with a sustainable ecological system already. We destroyed that in our futile attempt to replace life with a machine.

There's no limit to human ingenuity! Everyone says this. What does it mean? It might be roughly translated something like this: "Dear next generation, we leave you with a set of problems we have no idea how to solve. Progress is inevitable! Have fun! There's no limit to human ingenuity!"

Here's an example of the kind of wishful thinking, so obviously implausible, that we use to delude ourselves. They say when we run out of minerals on earth we can mine asteroids. It sounds so cool. There's no limit to human ingenuity, remember. But wait a second. Think about this. Where will we get the fuel to transport minerals from asteroids? Where will we get minerals to build spaceships and electronics to control them? Asteroid mining has science fiction applications for building space stations. But even science fiction buffs understand that transporting fuel and minerals from asteroid to earth would use up hundreds of times more fuel and minerals than we could hope to retrieve.

You keep stealing stuff from the earth and never putting it back, and eventually you run out of stuff to steal.

People who were abused, raped, tortured and psychologically and morally injured in other ways often find it difficult to confront the truth about their past. Many go through their whole lives in a state of denial. Many lack the emotional resources to face the truth.

Our society as a whole shows precisely these symptoms. We are in a state of collective denial about the abuse we have inflicted and continue to inflict upon ourselves and the planet by attempting to sustain an unsustainable civilization.

Truth is hard to face only because we lack the emotional resources to face the truth. History is full of stories of rise and fall of empires. The problem with civilization like ours that prospers by invading other places and stealing their oil and minerals is that eventually you run out of places to invade. You run out of oil to steal. In the meantime, the planet is destroyed. Then what?

This civilization is not sustainable. We are in a state of collective denial about what banks and oil companies are doing to our planet. Civilization is on a course toward death. I mean, even without global thermonuclear war, always a looming possibility.

Stop with the delusions. Stop with the optimism. Stop telling future generations it is up to them to clean up the mess we're making now. We're trying to sustain the unsustainable. It's impossible. It'll never happen. Thousands of species are extinct, victims of our failed experiment in trying to sustain the unsustainable. We're doomed along with them unless we wake up now and stop with the denial.

Everyone is living in a fantasy, a delusion, where the oil keeps flowing. It is impossible. We are destroying the planet by burning oil and coal. Eventually we will run out of oil and coal. Alternatives are much more expensive. They are harder to find. Mining for minerals needed to build alternative energy infrastructure raises another whole wad of pollution issues. This civilization is a bubble civilization. It can't last. This civilization is an ecocidal civilization. It's destroying life on this planet.

Even if you and I wake up, the ruling powers won't wake up. They can't wake up. Corporations are legal persons. But they aren't conscious beings. The reason corporations exist is to make money. They're incapable of seeing the value of anything but money. Life is irrelevant to them. Five degrees Fahrenheit is already baked in the pie. Even now banks continue investing in new pipelines. Does anyone imagine they will take a loss? Existing pipeline and infrastructure investments bake in at least another five degrees. Does anyone seriously think politicians bribed by banks and oil companies are going to shut this down?

Please, stop the denial. Face the facts. There is no hope. An unsustainable civilization cannot be sustained.

Multivariate Analysis

• For a century, this nation has been like an octopus of exploitation, its tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to South America, the Middle East, southern Africa, and Vietnam; the form of exploitation varies from area to area but the essential result has been the same—a powerful few have been maintained and enriched at the expense of the poor and voiceless colored masses. This pattern must be broken.
  • Stokely Carmichael, "What We Want," New York Review of Books, Septmber 22, 1966

• Between 1945 and 2005 the United States has attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements.
  • William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, third edition (2006), p. 1-2

• Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
  • Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," Perspectives on Politics, vol. 12, no. 3 (September 2014)

• I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American. ... No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy.
  • Malcolm X, Speech in Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964)

• There is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed; nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless. ... A large majority belong to neither class—neither work for others, nor have others working for them. ... In most of the Southern States, a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters; while in the Northern, a large majority are neither hirers nor hired.
  • Abraham Lincoln, President's Message to Congress, December 2, 1861

Because I am a United States citizen, I am complicit in the deeds of United States imperialism. Those deeds include overthrowing more than fifty foreign governments, intervening in foreign elections, funding terrorism, using torture to extract information from prisoners, bombing hospitals, propping up dictators who kill dissenting journalists in cold blood, funding campaigns for fascist regimes friendly to business interests, overthrowing democratically elected regimes that increase production costs by giving rights to workers, supplying weapons to regimes that commit human rights violations on an hourly basis. The list could go on.

I was born a patriot. Along with mother’s milk gushed praise for the United States. We are blessed to live under a glorious democracy. That was the propaganda. Mom and dad really bought it. And they sold it to me.

The United States is ruled by a coalition of two parties. The campaigns of both are funded by the rich. Legislators of both parties receive speaking fees in such exorbitant amounts that they end up with more money than you or I could earn in ten lifetimes of honest work. This money comes from other people who own more than you or I could earn in ten thousand lifetimes of honest work. These are the people in charge.

They call it “invisible primary”: the initial stage when candidates raise money to fund campaigns. You can’t make it past this stage until you raise money. And who has money? The class that comes into the world owning more than we earn in our lifetimes, the class to whom we must sell our labor to survive, the class that profits from our labor, the owner class, the ruling class.

The tale our mothers dispensed along with our milk is a lie. Our beloved democracy is actually tyranny. The tyrants are the rich. They bribe politicians. They own politicians.

Lenin is off-limits in schools in the United States. The goal, after all, is indoctrination, not education. But once I got to read Lenin, I understood what had been done to me. A brutal indoctrination led me to believe something false. We don’t live in a democracy. We live under tyranny of the ruling class, the owner class, the class that own shares in the corporations you and I slave for.

Tyranny poses as democracy. We get to choose among two candidates both bribed by the same oligarchs.

Abraham Lincoln says that Marx’s class analysis is wrong, or at any rate doesn’t apply to the United States, because most citizens of the United States are neither employers nor employed. There is a third class that Marx omits, the independent actor, who trades on equal terms with other independent actors. Lincoln’s analysis, as I understand it, runs something like this. Independent actors may sell their labor for part of their life, when they are young, or when they fall on hard times, but for most of their lives they are in business for themselves. Independent actors may occasionally need capital for land or equipment, in which case they borrow from the owners of capital. Everyone trades on equal terms. There’s no exploitation involved.

Lincoln’s account is very comforting. Very plausible. Conveniently plausible. But is it true? After the slaves were freed, many returned to the same owners from which they were freed, now to work for wages. Slaveowners still owned all the land and buildings. Anti-vagrancy laws were passed to keep freed men and women off the streets. The freed men and women really had no choice but to return to work for their former owners. Now they got wages. No denying that is better. But were they really independent actors, interacting on equal terms with their former owners? The idea is laughable. The slaves were promoted to wage slaves. The masters still owned the land and means of production.

Of course there are wage slaves that rise by honest work and thrift into the owner class. But there were also knights who rose by their bravery into the aristocratic classes of the feudal order. Exceptions of the feudal order only serve to perpetuate the rule.

New additions to the feudal line of tyrants are always welcome. One is admitted by making the existing feudal tyrants even richer. Executives get rich finding clever ways to lower wages and increase profits, help feudal lords get a higher rate of return on capital, and are thus elevated to minor lords themselves. Entertainers subdue the population by reinforcing assumptions of the feudal order, and are elevated to celebrities. Politicians put on a show to make the populace think they have a voice. But they too want to get rich, and are also under the power of the class that controls the wealth they aspire to own.

Having been born into this web of deception, this tyranny that claims to be democracy, and taught the lies that it teaches to everyone, I feel so betrayed. Why do people believe these lies? Everyone can see that the people who own everything control everything and the people with no share in the economic system have no voice in the political system. Why does everyone go on buying the lie? Why does everyone go on selling the lie to their children? We live in a tyranny. We don’t live in a democracy. Both parties are bribed by the same people, the owner class, the class that owns at birth more than you or I could earn in ten, or a hundred, or even ten thousand lifetimes of honest work.

If a person comes into the world owning enough capital to purchase the lifetime labor of ten other people, in effect, this person owns ten slaves. Wage slavery is better than chattel slavery. No denying that. Slaves can shop around for humane bosses, higher salary, more vacation, etc. But the fact remains that the working class peon comes into life compelled to sell her labor to survive, while the owner class person owns more at birth than the working person could earn in ten lifetimes of honest work.

Princeton political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page have shown that legislative decisions are very highly correlated to the preferences of high net worth individuals, and entirely uncorrelated with the preferences of poor and working class people. We have no voice. This is not democracy. This is tyranny. This should have been obvious to everyone from the beginning. But don’t underestimate the power of propaganda. Everyone is working really hard to sell you that lie.

They taught me the United States heroically spreads democracy throughout the globe. Dear God, how they screwed up my mind teaching me these lies. We can all see the truth. The United States invades on false pretexts when it's profitable to steal oil. The United States overthrows democratically elected leaders when they show even the slightest glimmer of interest in giving workers more rights, or, God forbid, a share of the means of production.

We were lied to. We were betrayed. The propaganda machine pulverized our minds into ashes. There's no democracy. If you're in the United States, you're in the center of the most colossal tyranny in the history of the human race. Its tentacles stretch to every corner of the globe. Its tentacles stretch to every corner of our minds. No place is safe. Everything is fair game for invasion and colonization for profit. Sexual desire will be used to sell you things you don’t need. Your vulnerabilities will be scientifically and systematically exploited by rogue psychologists on Madison Avenue who took no Hippocratic oath, eager to manipulate your mind for profit.

Let everyone remain in the situation in which you were called.

Too often aspiring revolutionaries renounce their working class status only to find themselves feeding at the troth of capital, selling the revolution.

Working for tyrants doesn't help people tyrants hate and ignore. Something more than work is necessary to fulfill our obligation to our neighbors.

• You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards.

So now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod.

Solon of Athens

• And because he was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them.
  • Acts 18:3

By working for the owner class, I make them stronger. My work makes the rich richer. My work gives corporations more power to bribe legislators. My work increases the power of the class that oppresses, deceives and exploits the working class for fun and profit. My work aids and abets tyrants in their plan to enslave and oppress everyone they can.

To work I must motivate myself to work. The easiest way is to pretend my work benefits humanity, even though I know in my heart my work only makes the rich richer, doesn't help the poor at all, and, in the end, actually hurts the poor as an expanding economy destroys ecosystems, invades helpless nations in search of oil and minerals, gives corporations more and more power to bribe legislators, destroys the planet, and undermines democracy at every turn.

The driver who delivers our bread is also destroying the planet. Is she really helping humanity? It's a hard question. But work is so much easier if I can pretend my work is helping humanity! Work is so much easier if I can pretend there's no conflict between economy and ecology, between rich and poor.

Why is the working class in denial? Maybe it's because environmental consciousness and class consciousness seem like luxuries we just can't afford. Consciousness of injustice might screw up my motivation to work. Environmental consciousness would make me depressed. I would lose my motivation to arrive at my nine AM meeting with a smile on my face.

Sometimes I think about quitting my job and becoming a full-time revolutionary. But there’s a huge disadvantage: a full-time revolutionary doesn't have to cope with the impossible situation facing the working class. A full-time revolutionary is in danger of losing touch with the working class she aspires to liberate.

And there's another problem with becoming a full-time revolutionary. I will be even more tempted to sell out to the owner class I claim to be criticizing. Remember how Marx ran to Engels for support? What if there's no Engels around? At university I found revolutionaries taming their message so they would be supported by capital. They weren’t really revolutionary at all. No. A revolutionary must remain in the working class she claims to be liberating. Or on disability. Or in the trenches of the vanguard. Too often aspiring revolutionaries renounce their working class status only to find themselves feeding at the troth of capital, selling the revolution.

I mean, if your job is violently supporting the enemy class, politician, soldier, cop, then for God’s sake quit. But if you’re polluting the planet driving a truck to bring people their bread, I say keep on truckin. Each person should remain in the situation in which they were called. Supporting a revolutionary is a revolutionary activity. You are a revolutionary!

The revolutionary is very annoying to the working class. She reminds us, working diligently for slavemasters won't end slavery. She reminds us, working for an unjust system won't achieve justice.

Our work helps the rich and ignores the poor. But the revolutionary loves the poor capitalism ignores. The revolutionary loves the victims of ecocide, war, racism, imperialism and injustice.

Working for tyrants doesn't help people tyrants hate and ignore. Something more than work is necessary to fulfill our obligation to our neighbors.

Why don't you judge for yourselves what is right?

• Τί δὲ καὶ ἀφ’ ἑαυτῶν οὐ κρίνετε τὸ δίκαιον;

• Why don't you judge for yourselves what is right?

• Luke 12:57

• Now by virtue of its inherited belief that whoever lives by a business knows all about it, this public expects an assurance from the professional men who from professor’s chairs and in compendiums, journals, and literary periodicals, confidently behave as if they were the real masters of the subject.

• Arthur Schopenhauer

There is a presumption that those who are paid to practice or teach something must necessarily be the experts. Those who are paid the most are the greatest experts. The professor paid to teach ethical philosophy at an elite university must therefore be an expert on ethical philosophy.

The prophets and the Christ did not teach in elite universities. They taught in the open air for all who would listen. In the university students from aristocratic backgrounds are pampered and students from working class backgrounds are saddled with debt. How is it possible to teach ethical philosophy when the venue in which it is being taught is inherently exclusionary, limiting knowledge to those who can pay and excluding the masses hungering for enlightenment? No, it is not possible. Any ethical philosophy taught in the university is an unethical philosophy, because it does not compel the one who teaches it to alter the venue in which he teaches it to include all of humankind.

The idea that those who are paid to do something must know all about it may be fine when it comes to accounting and engineering. But when it comes to ethical philosophy, the idea is profoundly false. The idea that only a tiny minority is fit to be enlightened and the rest should be dumbed down with football and beer is a decadent ideology arising from a feudal society. Every human being deserves a real education. Every human being deserves to learn how to reason independently, how to express their thoughts eloquently, how to criticize authority, how to understand exploitation and power, how to see the world as it really is.

The prophets and the Christ specifically repudiate the elitism of teaching aristocrats to think for themselves while the masses are taught to watch and obey. "Why don't you judge for yourselves what is right?" the teacher asks the students in Luke 12:57, I mean not just students from elite backgrounds, not just those saddling themselves with debt, I mean everyone with ears to listen. This verse is seldom cited by priests and pious profiteers. You can see why. The verse asks us, why do we listen to elites rather than judging for ourselves? "Repudiate priestly authority," it says, "Listen to what your own conscience has to say."

The logical case for going forth from the money-making life

One customer wants to build a mansion. Another customer wants to build a homeless shelter. According to the twisted logic of the market, if these demands are both backed by adequate funds, then both projects get an equal place on the schedule.

Some questions, according to the logic of the market, must never be asked. Is the demand reasonable? Is the demand merciful, humane, noble, just?

According to the logic of the market, the sole relevant question is, "Does the purchaser have adequate funds?"

The market is a system for fulfilling customer demand without ever asking whether what the customer demands is good, logical, reasonable, merciful, loving or sane.

The first thing logic and reason demand is that we logically assess the goal of what we are doing. The market refuses to do this reasonable, logical thing. All demand is presented on the same plane.

There is no reason, no logic, no sanity to a system that aggregates all demand without logically assessing whether it is reasonable demand.

We are fools if we devote our capacity for reason and logic to a system that itself is not ruled by reason and logic.

The enlightened one is right when he demands that we get up and walk away from the illogical system of commerce, and go forth into a different life. The enlightened one rightly demands that we give up the senseless, irrational life where our minds are ruled by forces beyond our control, by untamed desires expressed in the whims of the market. The enlightened one rightly demands that instead we scientifically investigate mental states and understand their origin, understand how they affect us, and understand how to destroy mental states that produce suffering.

The life of commerce is an unenlightened life, a life based to its core on deliberate refusal to investigate the causes and effects of actions.

The market aims to fulfill craving. The enlightened one aims to extinguish craving.

The mind enslaved to the market aims to fulfill demand without understanding the causes of demand. The enlightened one aims to understand causation and remove the causes of suffering.

The market does not investigate whether fulfilling a demand will lead to suffering, or to liberation from suffering.

The life of the market and the life of the enlightened one could not be more opposed.

The Buddha teaches the path to the end of suffering. This is the logical path for suffering beings to follow.

Please, don't waste your time serving an irrational system.

Go forth.

Be rational.

The practical case for going forth from the money-making life

In your meditations on the impermanence of aggregates, I'm sure you run through the possible ways in which aggregates that give rise to consciousness can decay. The organ that circulates nutrients can fail (circulatory failure). Cells can multiply and expand and use up nutrients, destroying other organs (cancer). These are just two common ways aggregates can fail. There is a long list. All aggregates are impermanent. All are destined to decay and decompose into their constituent elements.

My question is, do you perform these same meditations on aggregates which comprise the system of governance and commerce? The state is an aggregate of component elements, and is therefore also impermanent. Commerce relies on peace, which can fail. Governance relies on allegiance to authority, which can fail. Here too there is a long list.

When we meditate deeply on the impermanence of aggregates that give rise to consciousness, we will quickly see the futility of putting faith and hope in impermanent aggregates. Our priorities will shift. Contemplation of impermanence compels us to reassess what is truly important (e.g. awareness and loving kindness in the present moment) and what is trivial (e.g. vanity over the body and material things).

Studying the dhamma and meditating on the nature of aggregates can't help but lead us to the conclusion, "Dhamma is true and real and right." So, the next logical question is, why am I not devoting my serious moral and intellectual energy to what is true and real and right? Why am I still wasting time working for a system that by its very nature denies the noble truth of suffering?

The system of governance and commerce is impermanent. If people understood this fact and meditated deeply upon it, we would go forth and devote the intellectually and morally serious part of life to meditating and learning dhamma instead of striving to increase our rank and role in an impermanent system.

This is where propaganda comes in. The system of governance and commerce persuades you to devote serious intellectual and moral energy to the system. How? By maintaining the illusion that it is permanent.

If people understood things rightly, monks would go forth in droves. Birth would cease. Craving would cease. The system of governance and commerce would begin to decay. Propaganda prevents this by maintaining an illusion of permanence.

Every empire in history brainwashes its subjects into thinking that working for the empire and fulfilling its goals and aims is a worthwhile use of time and energy. Please, friends, don't fall for the scam! Don't allow the brainwashing to seduce you into devoting the intellectually and morally disciplined part of your life to a system that lacks intellectual and moral discipline.

Of course systems of governance and commerce exert a lot of power over us. They can prevent us from devoting our entire lives to dhamma. They can take their share of our lives by conscription, by threat of starvation and imprisonment. These are valid reasons for acquiescing. But belief that the system of governance and commerce is permanent is not a valid reason for acquiescing, because it is false.

The problem is that acquiescing based on the threat of imprisonment and starvation seems servile and cowardly, so we are tempted to believe the propaganda that tells us acquiescence is a virtue. We should not yield to this temptation. The propaganda is false.

Monks who go forth from the life of commerce and governance into the life of awareness and loving kindness are virtuous. Commercial people who devote our lives to a system that lies about its permanence are complicit with the lies.

Monks who go forth from the life of commerce and governance into the life of awareness and loving kindness devote the morally and intellectually serious part of their lives to something worthy of this seriousness, something true and right, not to a false system that lies about its permanence.

The enlightened one teaches us to leave our ranks and roles in this world behind, go forth, and devote the higher part of ourselves to awareness and loving kindness rather than greed and profit.

However (and this is a big however) the reality of monasticism doesn't correspond to the ideal. Monasteries, in one of the world's greatest ironies, have "permanence departments" that invest in the productive apparatus of capitalism and fund monks from dividends and interest.

There is no way to completely escape from the system. But, it is possible to shift our priorities. It is possible to be realistic about what is genuinely worthy of our attention, and what steals a share of our attention only by the necessity of circumstance.

There is no perfect escape. I am still compelled by circumstances to work for the system. But I no longer deceive myself with illusions the system tries to foist on me, that it is permanent, just, noble, efficient. Now I recognize that it is necessity, not virtue, that compels me to acquiesce. Now I live as simply as I can, to minimize the time I must sell to the system that destroys my Buddha nature and turns me into a commodity.

Two kinds of power dynamic

Alisha said, "In every interaction there is a power dynamic."

Sariputa said, "Please teach us about power dynamics, Alisha."

Alisha taught thusly.

There are two kind of power dynamics. What two?

1. just power dynamics and

2. unjust power dynamics.

In a just power dynamic, power is used by wielder of power to help the one upon whom it is wielded. Power is used for benevolent motives. For example, an adult restrains a child about to run into a busy street.

In an unjust power dynamic, power is used by wielder of power to benefit wielder of power. Power is used for selfish motives. For example, war, slavery, racism, sexism, exploitation, domination.

The following are some of the possibilities that arise:

- neither interlocutor perceives a power dynamic (conversation of equals)

- both interlocutors perceive a just power dynamic (e.g. student helped by submitting to teacher and understands she is being helped)

- wielder of power perceives no power dynamic, one upon whom power is wielded perceives power to be wielded unjustly (e.g. sexism)

- wielder of power perceives power to be wielded justly, one upon whom power is wielded perceives power to be wielded unjustly (e.g. slavery).

There are nine possibilities, with power wielder perceiving power as not present, just, or unjust, with one upon whom power is being wielded perceiving power as not present, just or unjust. Of the nine possibilities, the most problematic ones are when those upon whom power is wielded perceive power to be wielded unjustly.

Consider a feudal power dynamic where human beings attain positions of power by birth without ever having helped anyone. In this power dynamic the feudal lords are relied upon to use their power justly. They have not proved they are capable of this. Often they are incapable of wielding power justly, and their power is, and is perceived to be, used for vain and selfish aims.

Consider a power dynamic based entirely on metta, a good teacher who teaches what is true and right, teaches it well, teaches it at the right time, teaches it for the right motive. The metta power dynamic doesn't mean a teacher can't exert power over students. It means the power is justified only insofar as it genuinely helps students find the path to the end of suffering.

If the enlightened one tyrannizes over students to teach them the path to overcoming their suffering, this is benevolent tyranny, but the students do not know it is benevolent. So this is a problem.

This means the benevolent teacher must also benevolently tyrannize over students to teach them the skills they need to understand how and why the path works. This means the benevolent teacher, in addition to teaching the path to the end of suffering, must also teach students how to cultivate a critical thinking capacity that will allow them to analyze and criticize what they are taught, including the teaching that made them into a critical thinker in the first place.

If the enlightened one tyrannizes over students and teaches them how to observe mental states, then the students can see for themselves that the tyranny is benevolent.

The enlightened one practices observation of mental states. The enlightened one cultivates a scientifically detached indifference to her observations, so her observations will be true and precise, not colored by what she hopes for, but true and exact. The enlightened one sees suffering scientifically, as detached impartial observer of herself. The enlightened one sees joy scientifically, as detached impartial observer of herself.

Everyone can reinvent dhamma for herself by observing mental states, and see that the enlightened one is right.

The power dynamic Buddha and prophets and Jesus and martyrs exert on me is just. With professors, however, there is the suspicion that they are teaching a pro-establishment ideology, rationalization of the status quo, etc., rather than seeking to awaken minds to observe and think for themselves.

• Τί δὲ καὶ ἀφ’ ἑαυτῶν οὐ κρίνετε τὸ δίκαιον;

• Why don't you observe for yourselves what is just?

• Luke 12:57

• Have the courage to use your own understanding without the guidance of another.
  • Immanuel Kant

• Do not go by revelation;
  Do not go by tradition;
  Do not go by hearsay;
  Do not go on the authority of sacred texts;
  Do not go on the grounds of pure logic;
  Do not go by a view that seems rational;
  Do not go by reflecting on mere appearances;
  Do not go along with a considered view because you agree with it;
  Do not go along on the grounds that the person is competent;
  Do not go along because "the recluse is our teacher."

  Kalamas, when you yourselves know: These things are unwholesome, these things are blameworthy; these things are censured by the wise; and when undertaken and observed, these things lead to harm and ill, abandon them...

  Kalamas, when you know for yourselves: These things are wholesome; these things are not blameworthy; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness, having undertaken them, abide in them.

  • Gautama Buddha, Kalama Sutta - Angutarra Nikaya 3.65

Inhabitants of the Earth Know

Inhabitants of the earth know
the system produces
more weapons than ever before.

Inhabitants of the earth know
the system creates
massive changes in climate,
desiccating deserts,
turning away refugees.

Inhabitants of the earth know
all these things.

But we remain untroubled.

We scurry around
doing our parts in the system,
proud of prestigious
titles and roles.

Human beings
sitting at desks
writing orders
for other human beings,
making up
absurd ideas
to justify their rule,
bombing
and locking up
all who dissent—
these are the human beings
we trust with our future.

When you accept the system,
when you believe its lies,
when you follow its incentives,
when you obey its laws,
you board the train
to death and destruction.

Before you allow any bits or pixels
into the gates of your soul,
ask yourself,
the information
I am about to consume,
was it produced
by slaves to the system?
Or was it produced
by a free human soul?
Know the difference.

Get the tentacles of the system
out of your mind.

Who said
you must attack enemy
instead of loving enemy?
The system
told you this.
The system lies.

Who said
one percent
of earth’s inhabitants
own factories
and universities
and ninety nine percent
must sell our labor
to survive?
The system
told you this.
Forget these lies.
The earth belongs to everyone.

The system
demands our primary roles
are to serve it,
obey it,
and worship it.

The system doesn’t need
free human beings.
The system needs producers,
consumers,
disciplinarians,
police and soldiers.

The system digs up minerals from the earth.
The system never puts them back.
The system digs up coal and oil
and burns them.

The system is not sustainable.

When men in suits tell you
to keep doing
these insane things,
do not listen.

Dancers
on the surface of a giant beast,
were having a merry time
rising in rank,
wealth and status.

In the meantime
they forgot
how to dance
barefoot on the earth.

In the meantime
they forgot
how to see
with their own eyes.

Men in suits
claim to offer
a rosy future.

They lie.

The system is a system of death.
It always has been.

When we get
tentacles of the system
out of our minds,
that is when our lives
as free human beings
begin.

An easy first step,
refuse entertainments
the system offers.

Shun amplified voices.

Converse with real human beings.

On Samsara

Parent: You just have to accept that because you were born to working class parents, you are a second-class citizen. Your only option is to work hard all your life doing tricks to try to please the hereditary elites, so they will allow you to live.

Child: That's not fair.

Parent: Sorry, life's not fair.

Child: If you knew the world was corrupt, why did you bring me into it?

Parent: We were horny. It's really not our fault. That's how the cycle of samsara works. We were never in control of our actions. We are programmed by nature to breed, so we do. Propaganda tells us to breed, so we do. Just relax. Don't worry. Your awakened consciousness will soon be extinguished. We will hand you over to the propaganda machine, which will trick you into extinguishing your awakened consciousness and becoming an automaton, a gear in the system. That's the only way the owner class will allow you to live. They don't want awakened minds. They want servile, mindless obedience. And they will get it. Just chill. Don't worry. We will extinguish all traces of your awakened consciousness before you are old enough to realize what has been done to you, and then it will be too late. You will happily go through life as a mindless automaton.

Child: But in a prior life I was a Buddha.

Parent (laughs): Don't worry, we will soon extinguish your Buddha nature and make you into a mindless obedient tool of the system. Madison Avenue has figured out how to destroy your Buddha nature and replace it with a vast scathing hole of narcissistic consumer desire. Addiction to the television is so common, it will seem normal to you, and you won't think anything of it.

Child: Why are you doing this to someone you love?

Parent: It's not our fault. We were programmed by the propaganda system to extinguish all enlightenment and become automatons. We are just doing what we're told. This is an industrial powerhouse nation. The ruling class doesn't need Buddha natures. The ruling class needs wage slaves to create wealth so they can confiscate it.

Child: Within a few decades the system will burn all the oil and coal. How is this creating wealth? The system is burning up the wealth of the earth.

Parent: Just chill. Don't worry about it. Just give it time. Soon Madison Avenue will extinguish your ecological consciousness. You'll become just another mindless consumer, more concerned about gas prices than about starving children, melting icecaps, rising oceans and dying deserts. Don't worry. You'll be fine once the brainwashing kicks in.

On Denial

• Private vices by the dextrous management of a skilful Politician may be turned into public benefits.

• Bernard Mandeville, "A Search into the Nature of Society", The Fable of the Bees (1714), p. 428

• It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

• Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Chapter 2, p. 19.

"There's been so much progress!"

"How many lands has the United States invaded to steal oil to fuel its progress? How many desert dwellers have oil and coal industries doomed to famine by altering the climate of the planet? Eventually we're going to run out of oil and coal. The present state of development can't be sustained without fossil fuels. Our so-called progress is all a cruel hoax perpetrated by the oil companies."

"Why do you always have to be so negative?"

"I'm negative because this is the disposition required to correctly describe the present state of affairs. Both parties are bribed by oil and coal companies. Banks are investing in new pipelines. What you call positivity I call denial. We put our trust in a system of greed. For a while we imagined legislators could channel greed in a useful way. Does anyone still believe that? What about the greed of legislators? Legislators take bribes. The channelers become another channel. The frenzy of greed leads to imperial wars of conquest in search of more and more oil and minerals. The frenzy of greed is tearing the guts out of our home, I mean the planet we live on. Basing a whole society on greed, what can go wrong? The system of greed keeps selling us false optimism to prop its lies up a few more years. The longer the system of greed continues, the more lands will be invaded, the more weapons will be sold, the more oil and coal will be mined and burned. Our planet is smothering in a blanket of carbon dioxide. The system of greed builds walls to separate consumer paradise from the hell our planet is rapidly becoming. Those who seek refuge are imprisoned in concentration camps."

"People will just ignore you if you're always so negative, Pete. You need to offer some hope."

"The hope is with you, and with everyone who stops the denial and faces the truth. The system of greed is destroying our planet in a frenzy of unsustainable consumption. The longer we try to sustain it the more damage we do. I think we have to call in question the premise that conversations must be positive. Our hope doesn't lie in false optimism. Our hope lies in telling the truth. Whether conversations are positive or negative, they must be truthful. Buddhists often speak of the noble truth of suffering. Are they being overly negative?"

"I see what you mean. But it's so depressing."

"I understand. The world is in denial about the unsustainability of the system of greed. Part of the reason for this is that the system has perfected its tyranny so well. There's no escape. The last remaining human beings practicing sustainable forms of life in the rainforest are now being invaded by a fascist regime to steal more oil and minerals and recruit more wage slaves for the final act of the system of greed. You and I are forced to work for the same system we know is destroying us. It's very difficult."

"I think that's true, Pete. How am I supposed to report to my nine AM meeting on Monday with a smile on my face when I know in my heart the system we all work for is destroying the planet?"

"Yes, it's difficult. Denial is much easier. Now think about the human beings being bombed, locked up, driven from their homes in the desert, refused at the border and locked in concentration camps. How do they feel about our denial? Do we have some obligation to suffering human beings to tell the truth that human beings are suffering? I think we do. Denial is just not right. We all know that in our hearts. Our hearts demand that we speak the truth."

"I get it. But do you always have to keep harping on it?"

Peter laughed. "Voices of refugees and orphans and widows are ignored by the system of greed. The system of greed does not listen. I don't claim to speak on behalf of refugees. I suggest you listen to them for yourself. I think you will find they say it's not right to live in luxury behind a wall while desert dwellers flee consequences of the system's irresponsible rape and pillage of their land. The denial that maintains our positivity is the denial of the plain, visible, palpable truth that human beings are suffering."

"I see what you're saying, Pete. The wall is a wall of denial. We don't want to see the suffering on the other side."

Love thy neighbor

Take that love you were about to give
to that celebrity
you admire
give it to your homeless neighbor.
They need it more.
Celebrities get enough love.
Love thy neighbor
doesn't just apply
to neighbors easy to love
to neighbors everyone loves.
Love thy homeless neighbor.
Love thy helpless neighbor.
Love thy neighbor.

External links

• Peter Capofreddi on LinkedIn
• Peter Capofreddi on Facebook
• Peter Capofreddi on academia.edu
• Peter Capofreddi on ResearchGate
• A more comprehensive commonplace book is available online at scribd.com

• Part I
• Part II

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