Ajey N

“The reign of such a one-dimensional reality does not mean that materialism rules, and that the spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are petering out. On the contrary, there is a great deal of “Worship together this week,” “Why not try God,” Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc. But such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“In our own time, the thought leaders have often been deployed to help us see problems in precisely the opposite way. They are taking on issues that can easily be regarded as political and systematic—injustice, layoffs, unaccountable leadership, inequality, the abdication of community, the engineered precariousness of ever more human lives—but using the power of their thoughts to cause us to zoom in and think smaller. The feminists wanted us to look at a vagina and zoom out to see Congress. The thought leaders want us to look at a laid-off employee and zoom in to see the beauty of his feeling his vulnerability because at least he is alive. They want us to focus on his vulnerability, not his wage.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“[Feminist] movement had given the culture the phrase “the personal is political,” credited to this passage from Carol Hanisch: “Personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.” It was an important and fruitful idea in February 1969. It helped people to see that things that happened in the quiet of personal life, and yet happened over and over again at the scale of the system, and happened because of forces that no individual was powerful enough to counteract alone—that these things had to be seen as and acted on politically, grandly, holistically, and, above all, in the places where the power was. A man beating a woman wasn’t just one man beating one woman; he was part of a system of male supremacy and laws and a culture of looking away that put the problem beyond solution by the woman in question. The shame one felt in getting an abortion wasn’t a feeling cooked up by the feeler; it was engineered and constructed through public policy and the artful use of religious authority. The feminists helped us to see problems in this way.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“Got to make a living' is a rationalization we tell ourselves to do things without integrity.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World