194 The “openhearted.“- That person probably always acts in accordance with secret reasons. for he always has communicable reasons on his lips and practically in his open hand.
It is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.
Piet Mondrian
Radicalizing Democracy
Kick it Over magazine interview question in 1985: You’ve said in your writings that we are undergoing a change as far-reaching as the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture or from agriculture to industry. Could you elaborate on this and talk a bit about why this is occurring now?
Murray Bookchin: The transformation I have in mind is cybernation, genetic engineering, nucleonics, and the sophistication of electronic technology in vast numbers of fields and the development of means of surveillance of a highly sophisticated form. The extent of the transformation is absolutely astonishing. What we find today is a totally immoral economy and society which has managed to unearth the secrets of matter and the secrets of life at the most fundamental level. This is a society that, in no sense, is capable of utilizing this knowledge in any way that will produce a social good. Obviously there are leavings from a banquet that fall from the table but my knowledge and my whole experience with capitalism and with hierarchical society generally is that almost every advance is as best a promise and at worst utterly devastating for the world.
Read the rest here: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/raddemocracy.html
16 All drives are connected with pleasure and displeasure there can be no drive for truth, i.e. for a pure truth entirely without any consequences or affects, because at that point pleasure and displeasure would cease, and there is no drive that has no premonition of pleasure in its own satisfaction. The pleasure of thinking does not indicate a desire for truth. The pleasure of all sensory perceptions derives from the fact that they are brought into being through inferences. To that extent man is always swimming in a sea of pleasure. But to what extent can inference, a logical operation, give pleasure?
We live in darkness
a modern cave
we believe
not the messenger
who speaks differently
another way
not from heaven
but from earth
When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia. This is especially true in colleges and universities. We are turning out, as if through a mold, a type of human being whose chief interest is to find security, to become somebody important, or to have a good time with as little thought as possible.
Conventional education makes independent thinking extremely difficult. Conformity leads to mediocrity. To be different from the group or to resist environment is not easy and is often risky as long as we worship success. The urge to be successful, which is the pursuit of reward whether in the material or in the so-called spiritual sphere, the search for inward or outward security, the desire for comfort—this whole process smothers discontent, puts an end to spontaneity and breeds fear; and fear blocks the intelligent understanding of life. With increasing age, dullness of mind and heart sets in.
All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.
Joseph Goebbels
Every educated person is a future enemy. Martin Bormann
There’s an old German proverb to the effect that “fear makes the wolf bigger than he is,” and that is true.
Donald Trump,
Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one’s need to think. Adolf Eichmann
And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract—the Constitution—made eighty years ago, by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us, but which (it is claimed) has nevertheless bound three generations of men, consisting of many millions, and which (it is claimed) will be binding upon all the millions that are to come; but which nobody ever signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, or acknowledged; and which few persons, compared with the whole number that are claimed to be bound by it, have ever read, or even seen, or ever will read, or see.
No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
2 I set apart with high reverence the name of Heraclitus . When the rest of the philosopher crowd rejected the evidence of the senses because these showed plurality and change, he rejected their evidence because they showed things as if they possessed duration and unity. Heraclitus too was unjust to the senses, which lie neither in the way the Eleatics * believe nor as he believed – they do not lie at all. It is what we make of their evidence that first introduces a lie into it, for example the lie of unity, the lie of materiality, of substance, of duration.… ‘Reason’ is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.… But Heraclitus will always be right in this, that being is an empty fiction. The ‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘real’ world has only been lyingly added …
494 It is improbable that our “knowledge” should extend further than is strictly necessary for the preservation of life. Morphology shows us how the senses and the nerves, as well as the brain, develop in proportion to the difficulty of finding nourishment.
38 Are you genuine, or just an actor? A representative? Or the very thing that’s represented? In the end you may simply be an imitation of an actor . . . Second question of conscience.
39 Origin of rights. – Rights can in the first instance be traced back to tradition, tradition to some agreement. At some time in the past men were mutually content with the consequences of the agreement they had come to, and at the same time too indolent formally to renew it; thus they lived on as though it were continually being renewed and, as forgetfulness spread its veil over its origin, gradually came to believe they were in possession of a sacred, immutable state of affairs upon which every generation had to continue to build. Tradition was now a compulsion, even when it no longer served the purpose for which the agreement had originally been concluded. – The weak have at all times found here their sure stronghold: they tend to regard that single act of agreement, that single act of grace, as valid eternally
26 Animals and morality. – The practices demanded in polite society: careful avoidance of the ridiculous, the offensive, the presumptuous, the suppression of one’s virtues as well as of one’s strongest inclinations, self-adaptation, self-deprecation, submission to orders of rank – all this is to be found as social morality in a crude form everywhere, even in the depths of the animal world – and only at this depth do we see the purpose of all these amiable precautions: one wishes to elude one’s pursuers and be favoured in the pursuit of one’ s prey. For this reason the animals learn to master themselves and alter their form, so that many, for example, adapt their colouring to the colouring of their surroundings (by virtue of the socalled ‘chromatic function’), pretend to be dead or assume the forms and colours of another animal or of sand, leaves, lichen, fungus (what English researchers designate ‘mimicry’). Thus the individual hides himself in the general concept ‘man’, or in society, or adapts himself to princes, classes, parties, opinions of his time and place:
20.
In my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do no injustice to a related religion with an even larger number of believers: I allude to Buddhism . Both are to be reckoned among the nihilistic religions — they are both décadence religions — but they are separated from each other in a very remarkable way. For the fact that he is able to compare them at all the critic of Christianity is indebted to the scholars of India. — Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity — it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation.
1. The true world, attainable for the wise, the devout, the virtuous—they live in it, they are it.
(Oldest form of the idea, relatively clever, simple, convincing. Paraphrase of the assertion, “I, Plato, am the truth.”)
2. The true world, unattainable for now, but promised to the wise, the devout, the virtuous (“to the sinner who does penance”).
(Progress of the idea: it becomes more refined, more devious, more mystifying—it becomes woman, it becomes Christian . . .)
3. The true world, unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable, but a consolation, an obligation, an imperative, merely by virtue of being thought.
(The old sun basically, but glimpsed through fog and skepticism; the idea become sublime, pallid, Nordic, Königsbergian.)
4. The true world—unattainable? In any case, unattained. And if it is unattained, it is also unknown. And hence it is not consoling, redeeming, or obligating either; to what could something unknown obligate us? . . .
(Gray dawn. First yawnings of reason. Rooster’s crow of positivism.)
5. The “true world”—an idea with no use anymore, no longer even obligating—an idea become useless, superfluous, hence a refuted idea: let’s do away with it!
(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens [good sense] and cheerfulness; Plato blushes; pandemonium of all free spirits.)
6. We have done away with the true world: what world is left over? The apparent one, maybe? . . . But no! Along with the true world, we have also done away with the apparent!
293 Benevolent dissembling. In interaction with people, a benevolent dissembling is often required, as if we did not see through the motives for their behavior.
482 We set up a word at the point at which our ignorance begins, at which we can see no further, e.g., the word “I,” the word “do,” the word “suffer”:-these are perhaps the horizon of our knowledge, but not “truths.,,
Nochrisis 