Sometimes he would force himself to get up and walk two or three more miles up the river and back, just to get the memories out of his head.
“empirical evidence is precisely that which is sacred in so-called scientific thought, and by these means—there’s no point in denying it—we can go far, but at the same time, by following this method, we greatly distance ourselves from the problem, because it’s so, but so manifest that empirical proof itself is something that no one has ever heretofore truly dealt with, namely, no one has ever wished genuinely to confront the deeply problematic nature of empirical verification as such, because whoever did this went mad, or appeared to be a pure dilettante,”
― Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming
― Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming
“... television looks to be an absolute godsend for a human subspecies that loves to watch people but hates to be watched itself. For the television screen affords access only one-way. A psychic ball-check valve. We can see Them; They can’t see Us. We can relax, unobserved, as we ogle. I happen to believe this is why television also appeals so much to lonely people. To voluntary shut-ins. Every lonely human I know watches way more than the average U.S. six hours a day. The lonely, like the fictive, love one-way watching. For lonely people are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness—in fact there exist today support- and social groups for persons with precisely these attributes. Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. Let’s call the average U.S. lonely person Joe Briefcase. Joe Briefcase fears and loathes the strain of the special self-consciousness which seems to afflict him only when other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear, come across, to watchers. He chooses to sit out the enormously stressful U.S. game of appearance poker.
But lonely people, at home, alone, still crave sights and scenes, company. Hence television. Joe can stare at Them on the screen; They remain blind to Joe. It’s almost like voyeurism.”
― A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
But lonely people, at home, alone, still crave sights and scenes, company. Hence television. Joe can stare at Them on the screen; They remain blind to Joe. It’s almost like voyeurism.”
― A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
“Sometimes I feel my thoughts are not my own, that I am thinking wrong things, stupid things, ridiculous things, for the amusement of an unseen audience.”
― Antkind
― Antkind
“...we must never lose sight of that gaze with which we look at things.”
― Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming
― Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming
“The forces which dominate us, despite their immense power, are never concrete, visible, tangible — we live under the shadow of their abstract domination. Our activity is for the most part instrumental, but the ends which we are made into instruments for never seem to appear, as if we go through our entire lives chasing after a ghost — some mirage of happiness, fulfillment, shadow of something that would, for once, be valuable in itself. Modernity feels like a permanent transition, but all it ever transitions into is another cycle of its own self-perpetuation.”
― How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century
― How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century
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