Philip Slater > Quotes

“Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they’ll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.”
― Philip Slater

“Despair ... is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality - it's a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it.”
― Philip Elliot Slater, Earthwalk

“We fear storms and wild beasts, but we do not censor them. If we must guard ourselves from evil influences we thereby admit their seductive appeal.”
― Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point

“At a conservative estimate, there are probably a million men and women in their twenties and thirties who would happily work long hours doing what most needs to be done, if they were paid something for it.”
― Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point

“Individualism may be the greatest boon to authoritarianism since the whip, and has helped prolong it well beyond its natural lifespan. Its message is: 'Yes, fight the system by all means-- we all hate it, don't we? But you must fight it alone. That's what a real warrior does. Groups just stifle your creativity. You must stand alone!' It reflects the oldest authoritarian strategy-- divide and conquer.

The dissolution of a tyrannical system is possible only by a cooperative effort. Therefore, an ideology that sneers at cooperation, instills an allergic reaction to groups, and idealizes the lonely hero tilting at 'the system' serves to preserve that system, since it attaches our anti-authoritarian impulses to an approach that holds no possibility of success.”
― Philip Slater

“Spockian parents feel it’s their responsibility to make their child into the most all-around perfect adult possible, and although what this leads to may look like “permissiveness,” it’s actually more totalitarian, for the child no longer has a private sphere. His entire being has been taken over by parental aspirations.

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― Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point

“an excess of individualism thrives in the isolated family, where inordinate Oedipal pressure generates extreme narcissistic hunger, inner futility, stressful self-making, ferocious and disabling competition, and a “servility toward technology” which aims to solve the problems generated by individualism and rootlessness in the first place. At the same time, unbridled individualists try to compensate for their centrifugal tendency by delegating authority upward. Unable to find social solidarity horizontally, through cooperation, they search for it vertically, through authoritarian imposition.”
― Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point