“We want people to be very low-status, but we don’t want to feel sympathy for them—slaves are always supposed to sing at their work.”
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“Low-status players will avoid letting their space flow into other people. Kneeling, bowing and prostrating oneself are all ritualised low- status ways of shutting off your space. If we wish to humiliate and degrade a low-status person we attack him while refusing to let him switch his space off. A sergeant-major will stand a recruit to attention and then scream at his face from about an inch away. Crucifixion exploits this effect, which is why it’s such a powerful symbol as compared to, say, boiling someone in oil.”
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“Reading books on the Amish, all positive, all written by sympathizers,34 one is struck by how dark their picture of the outside world is. It is a world where people spend most of their efforts in competitive endeavor and display, in keeping up with the Joneses, where lives are divided among the almost wholly separate circles of work, family, and church, where little meaningful happens or can happen, a world of boredom and alienation.”
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“Best car England ever made,' was how Jim had introduced his car. 'Out of production, thanks to socialism.”
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“In order to join the Congregational Church, the applicant not only had to affirm each and every tenet of Calvinism, he had to demonstrate that he had gone through a standardized sequence of spiritual experiences. (Alcoholics Anonymous is the only Protestant cult which still imposes this requirement.)”
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Chris’s 2025 Year in Books
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