EB Christen

“There’s always a fascination in watching anybody do a job which he really understands. Watch a woman—a woman who really knows how to cook, I mean—rolling dough. She’s got a peculiar, solemn, indrawn air, a satisfied kind of air, like a priestess celebrating a sacred rite.”
― George Orwell, Coming Up for Air

“I wasn’t a highbrow any longer. I was down among the realities of modern life. And what are the realities of modern life? Well, the chief one is an everlasting, frantic struggle to sell things. With most people it takes the form of selling themselves”
― George Orwell, Coming Up for Air

“Paradoxically, it is the “convertible competencies” of the present elites, the fact that they are equally fit to run a bank in Bulgaria or in Bangladesh or to teach in Athens or Tokyo, that makes people so suspicious of them. People fear that in times of trouble, the meritocrats will opt to leave instead of sharing the cost of staying.

In this sense, meritocratic elites contrast with land-owning aristocratic elites, who are devoted to their estates and cannot take their estates with them in case they want to run away. They also contrast with communist elites, who always had better goods, better health care, and better education. But what they did not have was the power to leave; it was always easier for an ordinary person to emigrate.”
― Ivan Krastev, After Europe

“Putin does not dream of conquering Warsaw or re-occupying Riga. On the contrary, his policies, to repeat, are an expression of aggressive isolationism, an attempt to consolidate one’s own civilizational space. They embody his defensive reaction to the threat to Russia posed by global economic interdependency and digital interoperability as well as the seemingly unstoppable diffusion of Western social and cultural norms.”
― Ivan Krastev, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning