Jaideep Sobti > Jaideep's Quotes

“Miranda: O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in it!

Prospero: 'Tis new to thee!”
― shakespeare, The Tempest

“A man may smile and bid you hail yet wish you to the devil; But when a good dog wags his tail, you know he’s on the level.”
― Anonymous

“With money in your pocket now, you were honest, you were street-smart, you were hardworking, you were clever, you were compassionate, & had unyielding integrity; And today, you are wise, you are handsome, you are empathetic, & sing well too.

(Adapted from a Jewish Proverb for the Brave New World we live in today)”
― Anonymous

“(We) thought justice came automatically; that virtue was its own reward, that good triumphs over evil. But as we get older we know this just isn't true.
- Jim Garrison”
― Kevin Costner

“Screens tell you not what is really out there but what the government or Facebook thinks you should see. If you searched for something and it wasn’t there, how would you know it really was? To paraphrase an old philosophical question, if a tree falls on the Internet and no search engine indexes it, does it make any noise? As we live our lives increasingly mediated through screens, when it doesn’t exist online, it doesn’t exist.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“Oh, and those like buttons on Facebook? You know why you feel that little thrill when they boost your score? You just experience peer approval and class validation. And that makes us all happy monkeys.”
― Michael T. Stevens, The Art Of Psychological Warfare: How To Skillfully Influence People Undetected And How To Mentally Subdue Your Enemies In Stealth Mode

“If we know all about how learning takes place, we use that knowledge to manipulate persons as objects. This statement places no value judgment on manipulation. It may be done in highly ethical fashion. We may even manipulate ourselves as objects, using such knowledge. Thus, knowing that learning takes place more rapidly with repeated review rather than long periods of concentration on one lesson, I may use this knowledge to manipulate my learning of Spanish. But knowledge is power. As I learn the laws of learning I use them to manipulate others through advertisements, through propaganda, through prediction of their responses and the control of those responses. It is not too strong a statement to say that the growth of knowledge in the social sciences contains within itself a powerful tendency toward social control, toward control of the many by the few. An equally strong tendency is toward the weakening or destruction of the existential person. When all are regarded as objects, the subjective individual, the inner self, the person in the process of becoming, the unreflective consciousness of being, the whole inward side of living, is weakened, devalued or destroyed.”
― Carl Rogers

“Now that we know how positive reinforcement works, and why negative doesn't, we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system, nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That's the source of the tremendous power of reinforcement - there's no restraint and no revolt. By a careful design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave - the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises.”
― B.F. Skinner, Walden Two

“the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“Once individuals are identified as belonging to an outgroup, there seems to be no limit to the human capacity for cruelty.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“ Suppression Techniques
1. Making invisible: Silencing or otherwise marginalizing people in opposition by ignoring them.
2. Ridicule: Portraying the arguments of an opponent, or the opponents themselves, in a ridiculing fashion.
3. Withholding information: Excluding a person from the decision making process, or knowingly not forwarding information so as to make the person less able to make an informed choice.
4. Double bind: Punishing or otherwise belittling the actions of an opponent, regardless of how they act.
5. Heaping blame/putting to shame: Embarrassing someone or insinuating that they themselves are to blame for their position.”
― Berit As

“Greenspan's eventual explanation for the growing gap between stock prices and actual productivity was that, fortuitously, the laws of nature had changed -- humanity had reached a happy stage of history where bullshit could be used as rocket fuel.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no felony cases. But when the stakes are in the hundreds of dollars, we kick in 26,000 doors a year, in just one county.”
― Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

“What kind of men, then, does our society need? What is the "social character" suited to twentieth century Capitalism? It needs men who co-operate smoothly in large groups; who want to consume more and more, and whose tasks are standardized and can easily be influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority, or principle, or conscience - yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected, to fit into the social machine without friction.”
― Erich Fromm, The Sane Society

“In the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures.

One was George Orwell's 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother, and Thoughtcrime and Newspeak and the Memory Hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love, and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever.

The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and Softer Form of Totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and Hypnotic Persuasion rather than through brutality; of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration; of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dimwitted serfs programmed to love their menial work; and of Soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects.

Which template would win, we wondered?

Would it be possible for both of these futures - the hard and the soft - to exist a the same time, in the same place? And what would that be like?

Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us.

Those of us still pottering along on the earthly plane - and thus still able to read books - are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, seventy-five years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers, and programmed conformists that it presents?”
― Margaret Atwood

“The Savage was silent for a little. 'All the same,' he insisted obstinately, 'Othello's good, Othello's better than those feelies.'

'Of course it is,' the World Controller agreed. 'But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.'

'But they don't mean anything.'

'They mean themselves, they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience.'

'But they're . . . they're told by an idiot.'

The Controller laughed. 'You're not being very polite to your friend, Mr Watson. One of our most distinguished Emotional Engineers . . .'

'But he''s right,' said Helmholtz gloomily. 'Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's nothing to say . . .'

'Precisely. But that requires the most enormous ingenuity. You're making flivvers out of the most minimum of steel - works of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation.'

The Savage shook his head. 'It all seems to me quite horrible.'

'Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensation for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Oh, they like to get you in a compromising position,
They like to get you there and smile in your face,
Yeah, they think they're so cute when they got you in that condition,
But I think it's a total disgrace.

- Authority Song, Uh-Huh”
― John Mellencamp

“The Senator did not know who owned the jet, nor had he ever met Mr. Trudeau, which in most cultures would seem odd since Rudd had taken so much money from the man. But in Washington, money arrives through a myriad of strange and nebulous conduits. Often those taking it have only a vague idea of where it's coming from; often they have no clue. In most democracies, the transference of so much cash would be considered outright corruption, but in Washington the corruption has been legalized. Senator Rudd didn't know and didn't care that he was owned by other people.”
― John Grisham, The Appeal

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Large corporate advertisers on television will rarely sponsor programs that engage in serious criticisms of corporate activities, such as the problem of environmental degradation, the workings of the military-industrial complex, or corporate support of and benefits from Third World tyrannies.”
― Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“119When you bring together the national security state and the military-industrial complex, when you bring together the prison-industrial complex and all the profits that flow from it, when you bring together the corporate media multiplex that don’t want to allow for serious dialogue... and then, when you bring together the Wall Street oligarchs and the corporate plutocrats, and they tell any person or any group, 'If you speak the truth, we’ll shoot you down like a dog and dehumanize you the way we did to dehumanize the brothers in Attica,' the only thing that will keep you going is you better have some love in your heart for the people.”
― Cornel West

“Today the game is rigged—rigged to work for those who have money and power. Big corporations hire armies of lobbyists to get billion-dollar loopholes into the tax system and persuade their friends in Congress to support laws that keep the playing field tilted in their favor. Meanwhile, hardworking families are told that they’ll just have to live with smaller dreams for their children.”
― Elizabeth Warren, A Fighting Chance

“The wealthy exert a commanding influence over the state through virtually unlimited political campaign contributions, armies of lobbyists, the revolving door that shuffles former government officials into corporate jobs as consultants and lobbyists (and moves bankers into positions in financial regulatory agencies), and the aforementioned control of news and media outlets that defines both the subjects of public discourse and the range of acceptable opinion.”
― David A. Nibert, Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict

“Corporations go to great lengths to employ geniuses: technologists, designers, financial engineers, economists, artists even. I’ve seen it happen,’ he said. ‘But what have they done with them? They channel all that talent and creativity towards humanity’s destruction. Even when it is creative, Eva, capitalism is extractive. In search of shareholder profit, corporations have put these geniuses in charge of extracting the last morsel of value from humans and from the earth, from the minerals in its guts to the life in its oceans. And these brilliant minds have been used to cajole governments into accepting their raids on the planet’s resources by creating markets for them: markets for carbon dioxide and other pollutants – phoney markets controlled by their employers! Unlike the East India Company, the Technostructure does not need its own armies. It owns our states and their armies, because it controls what we think. The dirtier the industry, the richer and more despised, the more its captains have been able to tap into the rivers of debt-derived money to purchase influence and to blunt opposition. Previously they would buy newspapers and set up TV stations; now they employ armies of lobbyists, found think tanks, litter the Internet with their trolls and, of course, direct monumental campaign donations to the chief enablers of our species’ extinction, the politicians.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“Countries are run by corporations, and they have been for some time. Your elected leaders are nothing more than bobble-heads that nod to the whims of their corporate masters, and it is the vast number of warring corporate entities with their armies of lobbyists that has brought your democratic governments to a standstill.”
― John Lyman, God's Lions - The Dark Ruin

“In his book Democracy Incorporated, Wolin, who taught political philosophy at Berkeley and at Princeton, uses the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our system of power. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but candidates must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state capitals who author the legislation and get the legislators to pass it. Corporate media control nearly everything we read, watch, or hear. It imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. It diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics—and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.”
― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

“The citizen is irrelevant. He or she is nothing more than a spectator, allowed to vote and then forgotten once the carnival of elections ends and corporations and their lobbyists get back to the business of ruling.”
― Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism - New Edition

“I started tracking billionaire wealth in my home country, India. Back in 2010 anger against the new wealth elite was growing, and my first parsing of the Forbes lists helped explain why. Although India is relatively poor, billionaire wealth had soared to the equivalent of more than 17 per cent of gross domestic product, one of the highest shares in the world, with most of the gains accruing to a narrow set of families in industries prone to crony capitalism.”
― Ruchir Sharma