Pablo Rodriguez

“In a crowd, Le Bon postulates, the individual’s consciousness “disintegrates” into a collective, and more primitive, state of mind. Under the right conditions, this primitive mind—Freud’s “id”—can be managed and manipulated by the careful choice of words, colors, music, and staged events. The result is the igniting of the two most powerful drives of the unconscious: Freud’s Eros, and Thanatos. These show themselves, Le Bon said, as the love and adoration for a leader, a thirst for violence, and “absolute certainty in the cause, a belief in their own omnipotence, and a furious hatred of perceived opponents.”10”
― Mary Wald, Sowing Hate and Chaos: How Propaganda Is Used to Destroy Democracy

“paraphrase the nineteenth-century Haitian historian Émile Nau. It is an impossible endeavor in many ways—we cannot simply slip into someone else’s place. But the attempt itself is essential. It has the potential to disrupt, if fleetingly, our assumptions about people, places, and pasts. It nudges us to glimpse the world differently, to grasp history on a more human scale, perhaps even to see ourselves through the eyes of others.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“We see then that the self too is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money. Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we’ve seen, novels we’ve read, speeches we’ve heard, and daydreams we’ve savoured, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“But the soul has no parts. You might argue that human souls did not evolve, but appeared one bright day in the fullness of their glory. But when exactly was that bright day?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow