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“The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing the disciplinary societies. ‘Control’ is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future.”
― Postscript on the Societies of Control
― Postscript on the Societies of Control
“Beauty is not a warrant for wellbeing and so does happiness not hinge on social success, but is only tangible via intricate, meandering discovery journeys in the mind. ("Absence of beauty was like hell")”
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“So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.”
― Negotiations 1972-1990
― Negotiations 1972-1990
“I don’t understand how you manage to love a mob of birds that has just tried to kill you.” “Oh, Fletch, you don’t love that! You don’t love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That’s what I mean by love. It’s fun, when you get the knack of it.”
― Jonathan Livingston Seagull
― Jonathan Livingston Seagull
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Books referenced in The Emerald podcast by Josh Schrei
Jordan’s 2025 Year in Books
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