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“The Ancient Greeks had this idea that being physically beautiful was the same as being ethically good and, likewise, being physically ugly was the same as being ethically bad.’ They had a word for this: kalokagathia, which came from kalos, meaning beautiful, kai, meaning ‘and’, and agathos, meaning ‘good’. ‘This idea, that the bodily form is inherently important for understanding who someone is, is very much still with us,’ he said. The scholar Professor Werner Jaeger has written of kalokagathia’s roots in early Greek aristocracy, describing it as their ‘ideal of human perfection, an ideal towards which the elite of the race was constantly trained’. Just as John Pridmore’s self snatched core ideas of who he was and who he ought to be from his culture, so does mine.”
― Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
― Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
“This is where low self-esteem gets built into the core of the machine. For Aristotle, a person had innate potential and was naturally moving towards perfection. But for the Christians, a person was born in a state of sin and falling towards hell. God, not the individual, was where perfection lay. This meant that a person wanting to become more perfect would have to engage in a constant war with themselves – a war, not with forces out in the world, but with their own soul, their conscience, their mind and thoughts. And because perfection only existed outside the human realm, that struggle would always be hopeless. The Christians had given the Western self a soul, and then begun to torture it.”
― Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
― Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
“If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to meet it.”
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“People say, “I wouldn’t have done that.” But they haven’t been exposed to any of the things, culturally, that might have made them do it. And the warning I take is that the number of people in a group who will stand out against these cultural forces are much smaller than you think, and you’re probably not one of them. In fact, I think you can probably tell if you are because you’re pretty bolshie already. If you’ve got a good career, and you’re pretty sociable and you’re going up the hierarchy and all the rest of it, where are you going to get your sudden revolutionary spurt from?”
― The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science
― The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science
“One of the dictums that defines our culture is that we can be anything we want to be – to win the neoliberal game we just have to dream, to put our minds to it, to want it badly enough. This message leaks out to us from seemingly everywhere in our environment: at the cinema, in heart-warming and inspiring stories we read in the news and social media, in advertising, in self-help books, in the classroom, on television. We internalize it, incorporating it into our sense of self. But it’s not true. It is, in fact, the dark lie at the heart of the age of perfectionism. It’s the cause, I believe, of an incalculable quotient of misery. Here’s the truth that no million-selling self-help book, famous motivational speaker, happiness guru or blockbusting Hollywood screenwriter seems to want you to know. You’re limited. Imperfect. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
― Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
― Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
Mary’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Mary’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
529 books
|
52 friends
316 books
|
60 friends
428 books
|
90 friends
589 books
|
83 friends
684 books
|
47 friends
11 books
|
340 friends
55 books
|
341 friends
28 books
|
145 friends
More friends…
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