AMALGAM OF CURRENT PREJUDICE

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:

'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”

Doris Lessing, 1971

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

this isn't mine. it's from here. 

HEDONIC TREADMILL

A true saying it is, Desire hath no rest, is infinite in itself, endless, and as one calls it, a perpetual rack, or horse-mill."

Augustine of Hippo

EVEN TRUER NOW

"And then rush home to get away from work and begin the real business of life, to enjoy ourselves. You know, for the vast majority of American families the – what seems to be the real point of life, what you rush home to get to is to watch an electronic reproduction of life. You can’t touch it, it doesn’t smell, and it has no taste.

You might think that people getting home to the real point of life in a robust material culture would go home to a colossal banquet or an orgy of love-making or a riot of music and dancing; But nothing of the kind.

It turns out to be this purely passive contemplation of a twittering screen. You see mile after mile of darkened houses with that little electronic screen flickering in the room. Everybody isolated, watching this thing. And thus in... no real communion with each other at all. And this isolation of people into a private world of their own is really the creation of a mindless crowd.

And so we don’t get with each other except for public expressions or getting rid of our hostility like football or prize-fighting. And even in the spectacles one sees on this television it’s perfectly proper to exhibit people slugging and slaying each other but oh dear no, not people loving each other, except in a rather restrained way.

One can only draw the conclusion that the assumption underlying this is that expressions of physical love are far more dangerous than expressions of physical hatred. And it seems to me that a culture that has that sort of assumption is basically crazy and devoted – unintentionally indeed but nevertheless in fact - devoted not to survival but to the actual destruction of life."

Alan Watts

NOWADAYS

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

Antonio Gramsci

all progress depends on the unreasonable man

sometimes I enjoy a well-known quotation so much that it becomes a staple of my conversation. I'll reach for it whenever it seems apposite. I probably overdo it sometimes. one such much-loved quote has cropped up once or twice on this is my england. it is a remark made by George Bernard Shaw, suggesting that we avoid the temptation to get drawn into debates with those who refuse to play nice in a lively exchange. Shaw talks to us in terms of wrestling with a pig.

this image is most likely to surge to the front of my mind when I'm feeling the urge to spar with the writers of very horrible comments added, below the line, to articles or news items presented to me on the laptop screen or on the phone. same thing back when I used to bother with Internet messageboards. it can happen in the context of Twitter, too, of course.

no huge surprise, then, to find myself stumbling upon another Shaw quote today and deciding that it may well become as well-liked and come to be(over)used as regularly as the pig wrestling bit:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

readers who are more well-read than me. readers who are better educated. readers who really KNOW their Shaw. they may all be smiling, sighing or eye-rolling at the spectacle of a middle-aged blogger only coming to know of the above quotation today. at the childlike wonder with which he's enjoying it as something fresh. at the idea that he openly professes the likelihood of working into his limited repertoire of rhetorical flourishes. but I don't mind. I'll never meet you anway. and I like it. just like it. find it pleasing. find it to be neatly and so, so obviously useful and versatile. and I like the slim, slight book in which it cropped up for me today. more on that soon.

THE CORRUPT

The corrupt cannot imagine people different from themselves; they can only imagine people who have succeeded in hiding their true nature.

Danilo Kiš, The Book of Kings and Fools

CHARITY

[People] find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this... Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim... The worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it... Charity degrades and demoralises... It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.

Oscar Wilde

RACISM, SEXISM & CAPITALISM

"The answer to the question "Why do American liberals carry on about racism and sexism when they should be carrying on about capitalism?" is pretty obvious: they carry on about racism and sexism in order to avoid doing so about capitalism. Either because they genuinely do think that inequality is fine as long as it is not a function of discrimination (in which case they are neoliberals of the right). Or because they think that fighting against racial and sexual inequality is at least a step in the right direction of real equality (in which case, they are neoliberals of the left). Given these options, perhaps neoliberals of the right are in a stronger position - the economic history of the last thirty years suggests that diversified elites do even better than undiversified ones."

Walter Benn Michaels, 2008

MARKETING, PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AND COST

"Life is cheap, never forget it. Corporations make marketing decisions by weighing the cost of being sued for your death against the cost of making the product safer. Your life is a factor in cost-effectiveness."

George Carlin

only an insane God

It struck him with a horrible force. His parents, whoever they were, had probably made love out of just such an itch. For fun, for this momentary satisfaction, they had conceived him, and because he was obviously inconvenient, dumped him in the orphanage; because he, the life they had created while they were being careless and thoughtless, was not part of the fun of it all; he was just a harmful side effect of the scratching of the itch; he was the snot in the handkerchief after the nose had been blown, just something disgusting to be gotten rid of in secret and forgotten. Cold rage filled him, rage at his unknown parents, rage at the life he had been given, and for such trivial, stupid reasons! For one wild second of ejaculation! For that, he had been born. This same thing that was keeping him awake nights, and inexorably turning him into a prancing faggot, was the cause of his existence. Fifteen or twenty minutes on a forgotten bed between two probable strangers had given him twenty-four years of misery, pain, and suffering and promised, unless he were to die soon, to go on giving him misery for another forty or fifty years, locked up in one small room or another without hope of freedom, love, life, truth or understanding. A penis squirts, and I am doomed to a life of death. It has got to be insanity; there has got to be a God, because only an insane God could have created such a universe.

Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling (1966)

BUCKY

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”


Richard Buckminster Fuller

do the math

the streets are dangerous

Anywhere in the world now, the entire machinery of education, government and media is devoted to one thing: convincing people that the streets are dangerous and that they should stay home and, by inference, turn over their lives to some polite, sophisticated crackpot institution (i.e. themselves). Occasionally, in some rap song, I get a notion that there is something to be learned in the streets besides bloodshed, but no other medium advances such subversive knowledge. Take away the streets and you take away freedom of movement, people's innocence, their right to gaze, create, respond, discover anything new. If the 19th century is the study of how the people, often in a misguided form, took the streets from the king and queen, the 20th century is the study of how they returned the streets to a series of "democratic" institutions that supposedly represented the interests of the people, but found increasingly ingenious ways to get people off the street. They have succeeded because most town and cities in the U.S. at 6:30 on any given evening are deserts of concrete and glass. Cross the border from Mexico into the United States, and cleanliness and order strike the eye, not life. The great science of the 20th century, then, is not nuclear fission or aerodynamics but crowd control refined to the point of crowd elimination.

Guillermo O'Joyce, from an essay on Irving Stettner (which can be found in his Miller, Bukowski  & their Enemies)

crouching monster

Reading the excellent Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude - published in 1947 and set during WWII. A long lifetime away, but anyone who commutes into our capital today will surely think that the opening two paragraphs could have been written about yesterday or tomorrow:

London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels. 

The men and women imagine they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their own free will, but the crouching monster sees all and knows better.

starry droog

How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if ya have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou!

national pride

High levels of economic inequality have long been known to pose grave threats to democracy. Because nationalism averts these dangers by discouraging citizens from recognizing inequality and mobilizing against it, democratic states may be expected to respond to greater inequality by generating more nationalism among their citizens.

Frederick Solt, Southern Illinois University 2006

there is always a mechanism

I do not see in religion the mystery of the incarnation so much as the mystery of the social order. It introduces into the thought of heaven an idea of equalization, which saves the rich from being massacred by the poor. 

Napoleon Bonaparte

Is it too much to suggest that consumerism has become a kind of alternative faith, a religion of sorts? Religions are characterized by some vision of a good life, by their rituals and by a particular language. Consumerism seems to be developing all three apace.

Anthony B. Robinson

emptier

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.

Friedrich Nietzsche

clamping down on crime

"Those who make the wrong decision, who engage in criminality, must be identified, arrested and punished, and we will make sure that happens."

Home Secretary Theresa May, 11th August

"The United Kingdom further states that the criminal prosecution of bank employees due to participation in tax offences is highly unlikely."

Clause in UK-Swiss tax deal agreed by Chancellor George Osborne, 23rd August

(spotted in Private Eye No. 1296)