Em > Recent Status Updates

"The temporal, spatial and personal separation of utilities and costs, the separation of an act committed now from the suffering that ensues, or the non-intersection between advantages that are privately consumable and disadvantages that have to be borne collectively, is an exceedingly seductive characteristic of modern scientific technologies."

"... material needs are created faster than the conditions for their gratification... the phenomenon of permanently frustrated people caught in an endless spiral of needs... the persistent and overwhelming compulsion of having to sell one's labour power in competition with other sellers... made subject to an accelerating time stress, which leaves little space for his feelings, soul and thoughts..."

"... no system becomes morally acceptable merely because human imagination has failed to produce an alternative to it at a given point in time."

"[...] the unity of mankind [reveals] as a menacing fate. Instead of hopeful appeals, sombre warnings provide the accompaniment. [...] No one can rock the boat without causing all of us to be united in our collective destruction. [...] There are no terrestrial wanderers [...] only passengers clinging fearfully to their vessel as it splits apart. [...] unity in our age [may be] consummated in catastrophe." pp117-118

""... each tongue contains its own way of perceiving man & nature, experiencing joy and sorrow, & finding meaning [...]. To pray or to love, to dream or to reason, evokes different things when done in Farsi, German or Zapotec. Just as certain plants & animals [maintain] large ecosystems, languages [sustain] cultures through time. Once species disappear, ecosystems break down; once languages die out, cultures falter."

"For us [...] technological and market dependence is becoming the only way to conceive of freedom. To be free is to devote oneself to consumption; even people themselves are reduced to consumer goods." p.92

"...where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable.... Everyone is trying to remedy everyone's life... the sidewalks and hospitals of the world overflow with reformers. The longing to become a source of events affects each man like a mental disorder or a desired malediction. Society-an inferno of saviours! What Diogenes was looking for with his lantern was an indifferent man. -E.M. Cioran" p.72

"The modern person places him- or herself under an uncompromising optimization imperative. No one is allowed to rest until everything that is has been improved - that is, no one is ever allowed to rest. For everything that has been improved is good only for a fleeting historical moment. Afterwards it is once again overdue for being surpassed". p.63

"Originally to be rich meant to have power of the sort a king has - that is, power over other people. It meant the kind of power you can only have when other people do not: where there are no subjects, there is no king." Lummis (2010).

"Neither in nature nor in society does there exist an evolution that imposes transformation towards 'ever more perfect forms' as a law. Reality is open to surprise. Modern man has failed in his effort to be god." Esteva (2010)

"... experts defined equity as a problem of the poor ... lack of income, lack of technologies, and lack of market access of the poor
... ... they worked at raising the floor, rather than lowering the ceiling. ... however ... the quest for fairness in a finite world means in the first place changing the rich, not the poor. Poverty alleviation, in other words, cannot be separated from wealth alleviation." Sachs '09

"The power of example is contagious. This is how cultures change." Word.

"When we experience frustration, failure, or obstruction, we need to remember that we are part of a very fine historical tradition."

"... commonplace saying is "you can't change human nature." But when we look at the breath taking span of our planetary history, the idea that "we'll never change" seems absurd. We are part of the most extraordinary un folding. Where will it go next?"

"Guilt is the uncomfortable awareness that our actions are out of step with our values."

"If we focus only on each separate activity, it is easy to dismiss it by thinking, "That won't do much." To see the power of a step, we need to ask, "What is it part of?".

"When we bring our fears into the open, they lose their power to haunt us."

Oh gosh, I'm going to run this quote to the ground.

"Admitting the depths of our anguish, even to ourselves, takes us into culturally forbidden territory. From an early age we've been told to pull ourselves together, to cheer shut up."

"Being able to make a difference is powerfully enlivening; it makes our lives feel more worthwhile. [It] is not about being dutiful or worthy so much as it is about stepping into a state of aliveness that makes our lives profoundly satisfying."

Time to pick up reading again, starting with revisiting and finishing this one!

"[...] struggles against dictatorship contain within them myriad forces and potentialities. [...] the particular democratic and political economic forms that emerge will depend on the power, strategies and capacities of the contending forces [...]" p.207

"The inescapable paradox of development theory and policy - the advocacy of exploiting, oppressing and constraining the human development of labouring classes, for their benefit-." p.185

""By neccesities I understand [...] whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lower order, to be without. Custom has rendered shoes a neccesary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public life without them."" p.177

""The fantasy about the magical value of work for women is a middle-class one - it presumes that jobs are well paid and fulfilling... One must ask if work that is badly paid, back breaking, exploitative, or boring liberates women."" p. 168

""The facts of the economy were originally embedded in situations that were not in themselves of an economic nature [...]."" "[...] not all forms of society in human history can be reduced to market relations and 'the logic of rational action'." pp. 139-140

'"To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment... would result in the demolition of society..."" p.135

""Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry."" p.122

"[...] the fallacy of composition - that what is good for one country is good for all countries -" p.102

"... [...] it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa."

"[...] the very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man."