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Post by Admin on Sept 28, 2020 18:44:30 GMT
“Our "increasing mental sickness" may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But "let us beware," says Dr. Fromm, "of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting." The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of individuality," but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But "uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.”
~ Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
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Post by Admin on Nov 17, 2020 22:53:07 GMT
The elusiveness of sanity in an insane worldwww.informationclearinghouse.info/55889.htmBy Jonathan Cook November 17, 2020 "Information Clearing House" - Erich Fromm, the renowned German-Jewish social psychologist who was forced to flee his homeland in the early 1930s as the Nazis came to power, offered a disturbing insight later in life on the relationship between society and the individual. In the mid-1950s, his book The Sane Society suggested that insanity referred not simply to the failure by specific individuals to adapt to the society they lived in. Rather, society itself could become so pathological, so detached from a normative way of life, that it induced a deep-seated alienation and a form of collective insanity among its members. In modern western societies, where automation and mass consumption betray basic human needs, insanity might not be an aberration but the norm. Fromm wrote: The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane. Challenging definition This is still a very challenging idea to anyone raised on the view that sanity is defined by consensus, that it embraces whatever the mainstream prefers, and that insanity applies only to those living outside those norms. It is a definition that diagnoses the vast majority of us today as insane. When Fromm wrote his book, Europe was emerging from the ruins of the Second World War. It was a time of reconstruction, not only physically and financially, but legally and emotionally. International institutions like the United Nations had recently been formed to uphold international law, curb national greed and aggression, and embody a new commitment to universal human rights. It was a time of hope and expectation. Greater industrialisation spurred by the war effort and intensified extraction of fossil fuels meant economies were beginning to boom, a vision of the welfare state was being born, and a technocratic class promoting a more generous social democracy were replacing the old patrician class. It was at this historic juncture that Fromm chose to write a book telling the western world that most of us were insane. Degrees of insanity If that was clear to Fromm in 1955, it ought to be much clearer to us today, as buffoon autocrats stride the world stage like characters from a Marx Brothers movie; as international law is being intentionally unravelled to restore the right of western nations to invade and plunder; and as the physical world demonstrates through extreme weather events that the long-ignored science of climate change – and much other human-inspired destruction of the natural world – can no longer be denied. And yet our commitment to our insanity seems as strong as ever – possibly stronger. Sounding like the captain of the Titanic, the unreconstructed British liberal writer Sunny Hundal memorably gave voice to this madness a few years back when he wrote in defence of the catastrophic status quo: If you want to replace the current system of capitalism with something else, who is going to make your jeans, iPhones and run Twitter? As the clock ticks away, the urgent goal for each of us is to gain a deep, permanent insight into our own insanity. It doesn’t matter that our neighbours, family and friends think as we do. The ideological system we were born into, that fed us our values and beliefs as surely as our mothers fed us milk, is insane. And because we cannot step outside of that ideological bubble – because our lives depend on submitting to this infrastructure of insanity – our madness persists, even as we think of ourselves as sane. Our world is not one of the sane versus the insane, but of the less insane versus the more insane. Intimate portrait Which is why I recommend the new documentary I Am Greta, a very intimate portrait of the Swedish child environmental activist Greta Thunberg. Before everyone gets started, let me point out that I Am Greta is not about the climate emergency. That is simply the background noise as the film charts the personal journey begun by this 15-year-old girl with Asperger’s syndrome in staging a weekly lone protest outside the Swedish parliament. Withdrawn and depressed by the implications of the compulsive research she has done on the environment, she rapidly finds herself thrust into the centre of global attention by her simple, heart-felt statements of the obvious. The schoolgirl shunned as insane by classmates suddenly finds the world drawn to the very qualities that previously singled her out as weird: her stillness, her focus, her refusal to equivocate or to be impressed. Footage of her father desperately trying to get her to take a break and eat something, if only a banana, as she joins yet another climate march, or of her curling up in a ball on her bed, needing to be silent, after an argument with her father over the time she has spent crafting another speech to world leaders may quieten those certain she is simply a dupe of the fossil fuel industries – or, more likely, it will not. But the fruitless debates about whether Thunberg is being used are irrelevant to this film. That is not where its point or its power lies. Through Thunberg’s eyes For 90 minutes we live in Thunberg’s shoes, we see the world through her strange eyes. For 90 minutes we are allowed to live inside the head of someone so sane that we can briefly grasp – if we are open to her world – quite how insane each of us truly is. We see ourselves from the outside, through the vision of someone whose Asperger’s has allowed her to “see through the static”, as she too generously terms our delusions. She is the small, still centre of simple awareness buffeted in a sea of insanity. Watching Thunberg wander alone – unimpressed, often appalled – through the castles and palaces of world leaders, through the economic forums of the global technocratic elite, through the streets where she is acclaimed, the varied nature of our collective insanity comes ever more sharply into focus. Four forms of insanity the adult world adopts in response to Thunberg, the child soothsayer, are on show. In its varied guises, this insanity derives from unexamined fear. The first – and most predictable – is exemplified by the right, who angrily revile her for putting in jeopardy the ideological system of capitalism they revere as their new religion in a godless world. She is an apostate, provoking their curses and insults. The second group are liberal world leaders and the technocratic class who run our global institutions. Their job, for which they are so richly rewarded, is to pay lip service, entirely in bad faith, to the causes Thunberg espouses for real. They are supposed to be managing the planet for future generations, and therefore have most invested in recruiting her to their side, not least to dissipate the energy she mobilises that they worry could rapidly turn against them. One of the film’s early scenes is Thunberg’s meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron, shortly after she has started making headlines. Beforehand, Macron’s adviser tries to pump Thunberg for information on other world leaders she has met. His unease at her reply that this her first such invitation is tangible. As Thunberg herself seems only too aware when they finally meet, Macron is there only for the photoshoot. Trying to make inane small talk with someone incapable of such irrelevancies, Macron can’t help but raise an eyebrow in discomfort, and possibly mild reproof, as Thunberg concedes that the media reports of her travelling everywhere by train are right. Cynically insane The third group are the adults who line the streets for a selfie with Thunberg, or shout out their adulation, loading it on to her shoulders like a heavy burden – and one she signally refuses to accept. Every time someone at a march tells her she is special, brave or a hero, she immediately tells them they too are brave. It is not her responsibility to fix the climate for the rest of us, and to think otherwise is a form of infantilism. The fourth group are entirely absent from the film, but not from the responses to it and to her. These are the “cynically insane”, those who want to load on to Thunberg a burden of a different kind. Aware of the way we have been manipulated by our politicians and media, and the corporations that now own both, they are committed to a different kind of religion – one that can see no good anywhere. Everything is polluted and dirty. Because they have lost their own innocence, all innocence must be murdered. This is a form of insanity no different from the other groups. It denies that anything can be good. It refuses to listen to anything and anyone. It denies that sanity is possible at all. It is its own form of autism – locked away in a personal world from which there can be no escape – that, paradoxically, Thunberg herself has managed to overcome through her deep connection to the natural world. As long as we can medicalise Thunberg as someone suffering from Asperger’s, we do not need to think about whether we are really the insane ones. Bursting bubbles Long ago economists made us aware of financial bubbles, the expression of insanity from investors as they pursue profit without regard to real world forces. Such investors are finally forced to confront reality – and the pain it brings – when the bubble bursts. As it always does. We are in an ideological bubble – and one that will burst as surely as the financial kind. Thunberg is that still, small voice of sanity outside the bubble. We can listen to her, without fear, without reproach, without adulation, without cynicism. Or we can carry on with our insane games until the bubble explodes. Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net. If you appreciate his articles, please consider making a donation -
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Post by Admin on Nov 20, 2020 12:39:09 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 28, 2020 18:45:25 GMT
I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?
- Mark Fisher
#acidleft
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Post by Admin on Dec 3, 2020 14:24:27 GMT
"Mental health and wellbeing are now major concerns for government and big business, as stress, depression and anxiety become widespread in modern societies. But their focus is often solely on the attitude of the individual, which ignores the particular social and economic causes behind such conditions. Here, I discuss with William Davies the psychological demands and effects of neoliberalism and the science of happiness. WD: I think two things are worth focusing on. Firstly, there is the meritocratic ethos of contemporary capitalism, which states that social class is no longer relevant, and therefore everybody ends up with the socio-economic position they deserve. This produces a chronic sense of self-blame, unease, anxiety and self-recrimination, with individuals having nobody to blame but themselves for not being famous, very rich or more attractive. Secondly, we live in a time of psycho-somatic confusion, no longer knowing what to attribute to the ‘mind’ and what to the ‘body’, with the ‘brain’ serving as a medium between the two. Individually, we also of course need to learn how to disconnect better. Unfortunately this is often through other forms of self-discipline, many of which are also co-opted by digital capitalism, such as sleeping, digital detoxing, meditating and so on. Smart phones will surely go down as a historic moment in the expansion of digital surveillance and tracking, vastly expanding the range of activities and thoughts that are digitally captured and mediated, all within two or three years. Institutionally, we would probably be better if certain services and products were simply switched off. We should be honest about the fact that, if ever Facebook were under democratic control, the best thing to do with it would probably be to close it down. This is true for psychological, social and political reasons. We should defend and expand non-surveilled spaces and periods of time, although unfortunately that agenda tends to be a somewhat hipster and/or bourgeois one, of hippy parents wanting their children free from screens and theatre goers tutting phones going off. But the principle is right, and could be pushed further for people’s mental health benefit. We also need to challenge the quasi-military emphasis on control itself, not only the political economy that underlies it.” (CounterPunch) OCTOBER 18, 2017 Mental Health and Neoliberalism: an Interview with William DaviesBY JON BAILES www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/18/mental-health-and-neoliberalism-an-interview-with-william-davies/
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Post by Admin on Dec 7, 2020 21:40:25 GMT
Excerpt from "In An Insane World, Revolution Is The Moderate Position": It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose mass murder for profit and power. It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose the globe-spanning power alliance that is perpetrating most of that mass murder on the world stage today. It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose the existence of secretive government agencies which have extensive histories of committing horrific crimes. It should not be considered radical or extremist to say that everyone ought to have a basic standard of living instead of being deprived of food, shelter and medicine if they have the wrong imaginary numbers in their bank account. It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose the existence of a small class of elites who use their vast fortunes to manipulate our entire society toward their advantage. It should not be considered radical or extremist to want plutocrats and government agencies to stop deliberately manipulating people's minds using mass media propaganda. It should not be considered radical or extremist to want everyone to have an equal chance of getting their voice heard in our information ecosystem instead of a few select power-serving lackeys. It should not be considered radical or extremist to want a society that is ruled by the many for the benefit of the many instead of one that is run by the few for the benefit of the few. It is very normal, sane and healthy to want a world where everyone has what they need to live, where everyone is free to do, say and think whatever they like as long as it isn't hurting anyone else, and where nobody is being murdered by powerful governments. This is a very basic, intuitive, common sense desire to have for yourself and for your fellow human beings; it's wanting for your society what you want for yourself. Yet people who promote policies which are aimed at creating this kind of world are consistently marginalized and dismissed as radicals and extremists. It's okay to say you oppose war in principle, but if you oppose any specific acts of warmongering being perpetrated by your government you'll get labeled a Russian asset, a dictator apologist and all sorts of other pejorative labels which exist solely to justify keeping you off of mainstream platforms. It's okay to think we should live in peaceful collaboration with each other and our ecosystem, but if you promote specific policies to make that happen you're an evil commie, a class warrior and a moonbat in the same way. In An Insane World, Revolution Is The Moderate Positioncaitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/in-an-insane-world-revolution-is
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Post by Admin on Dec 15, 2020 20:55:07 GMT
"Many people work their asses off grinding away at awful monotonous crap that shouldn’t even have to get done at all. Our economy overflows with useless work. Utterly meaningless jobs, profoundly redundant tasks, excessively bureaucratic nonsense, woefully vapid spectacle production, joylessly soulless drudgery. They proliferate everywhere one looks." by Lee Camp #unemployment #healthcare #COVID19 Lee Camp: Unemployment Skyrocketing? An Evolved Society Would Celebrate Why do we still pretend crap jobs give our lives meaning? by Lee Camp www.mintpressnews.com/unemployment-skyrocketing-an-evolved-society-would-celebrate/273643/Washington DC (ScheerPost) — Leaf blowers are everything wrong with capitalism. . . . I’ll explain that in a minute. We all know times are irredeemably grim, and they’re only getting worse. The unemployment level in America seems to be setting the record books aflame, and for some bizarre reason those numbers correlate nicely with the number of Americans under 40 living with their parents again. Understandably, the entire country is a little on edge. If I spend more than 30 minutes around my parents, one eye starts twitching, a dull ringing settles into my inner ear canal, and I start to think Rachel Maddow (which they leave on 24/7 as if she’s Christmas music at Macy’s) makes some logical sense. Point being, in terms of discomfort, I would imagine living with your parents in your late thirties ranks somewhere between erectile dysfunction and having a brain-eating parasite. Anyway, back to unemployment. The Economic Policy Institute recently released new numbers showing, “Unemployment has especially skyrocketed for young workers in the COVID-19 labor market. . . . The overall unemployment rate for young workers ages 16–24 jumped from 8.4% to nearly 25% from spring 2019 to spring 2020 … Spring 2020 unemployment rates were even higher for young Black, Hispanic, and Asian American/Pacific Islander workers – close to 30% for all three groups.” Unemployment is raging. Out. Of. Control. Forgive me a quick aside about the inner workings of systemic racism. As those unemployment numbers make clear, not every problem in America involves racism, but every problem in America also involves racism. Systemic racism deniers refuse to comprehend this. When shit is bad for young people – it’s even worse for black young people. When life sucks for the elderly poor in the United States – it sucks even more for elderly poor Hispanics. If the police are using weapons of war to crack activist heads – they’re cracking black activist heads twice as hard. If there’s a clean water problem in America – the water in Indigenous communities isn’t just unclean, it has chunks of shit in it! (Usually chunks of something Dupont used to produce Teflon™. I mean, what’s a few thousand people with cancer in order to ensure the egg slides right off the pan?) Now let’s break down this unemployment problem because much like a good one-night stand, you must get to the bottom. (I’m only half sure I understand what that sentence meant.) So, the surface problem is obvious: a lot of young people are unemployed. They don’t have money, they can’t pay rent, they can’t pay their student loans, they can’t afford food or life, they can only buy a regular coffee at Starbucks instead of the Frappe Unicorn Caramel Almond Juice Latte™. So that’s one reason employment is important. Why should we all have to be slaves to the labor market to survive in the first place? But if we excavate down to the second layer, we find a more important – and largely censored – quandary: Why should we all have to be slaves to the labor market to survive in the first place? Many people work their asses off grinding away at awful monotonous crap that shouldn’t even have to get done at all. Our economy overflows with useless work. Utterly meaningless jobs, profoundly redundant tasks, excessively bureaucratic nonsense, woefully vapid spectacle production, joylessly soulless drudgery. They proliferate everywhere one looks. For example, daily outside my apartment window, in a parking lot, no fewer than three Leaf Blower People (technical terminology) blow the fuck outta thousands of leaves. The entire neighborhood sounds like the middle of a nonconsensual monster truck rally for three hours every single morning. And as if that’s not inane enough, most days it’s windy out. The leaves return to their original locations 15 seconds after the guy blows them. So – much like a fluffer on a porn set – his work doesn’t last long. Not to mention, why do leaves have to inhabit a particular location anyway? At the risk of sounding like a radical, let the leaves be leaves! Let them do their thing. I’m a strong supporter of leaf self-determination. It’s not like they’re scorpions and allowing them to run free near domiciles is a downright danger to society. No one has ever found a leaf in a parking lot, gasped with horror, then bellowed, “The children! Will no one think of the children?!” Plus, we’re talking about a damn parking lot. What car can’t park on leaves? (Other than a Kia.) And why the hell hasn’t someone invented a leaf blower silencer yet? We have a silencer for shooting people’s heads off, which one would hope happens far less often than leaf blowing. Where’s the Dyson vacuum guy when you need him? Get to work, mate! Invent the silencer. You can’t retire now – your legacy is not nearly secure. All you did so far was come up with a funny vacuum and a hand dryer that sprays fecal matter all over people at public restrooms. (Yes, scientists found that public restroom hand dryers simply hose us all down in shit flurries.) Well done, Dyson. Invent the leaf blower silencer post haste or you’ll be known as the “feces laminator” forevermore. So, we can agree leaf blowing is a nonsensical job. Much of the machinery of our society is filled with work, that pays people, that is inconsequential, insubstantial, and hollow. Yet, many of us do these jobs because we are wage slaves. We must hold down bullshit jobs to survive. David Graeber wrote a great book about inhuman empty jobs, and although I haven’t read it, I’m going to pretend I have to impress you. It’s a tremendous book. Can’t believe you haven’t read it yet. So this is the part of the column when I hit you with a groundbreaking, snot-snorting solution that rocks your boat and soils your pants. Here it is . . . How about NO? How about no more wage slavery? Alot of the jobs in this country don’t need to get done at all, a lot of them can be done by technology, and a lot of them could be thrown out if we just had a cultural awakening that scientifically analyzed our society to maximize efficiency, health, and sustainability instead of profit, profit, and profit. So at this point in the debate, people who suffer from Stockholm syndrome defend their wage masters by belching, “We can’t get rid of all those jobs and give people houses and food and clothing without endless life-draining soul-bleeding work – because then what will people do all day? People need to work at jobs they hate. It gives their lives meaning.” To that person I respond – Wow, what a rousing defense of slavery. It’s the same thing they said on the plantations. “If you free the slaves, then what will they do all day?” Well, if the people newly freed from their jobs have a passion, I assume they’ll pursue that. But if they don’t have anything they enjoy doing, then I actually don’t know what people will do with themselves — maybe choose to count their farts — but that’s fine because that’s called freedom. Many philosophers with far thicker gooey brain matter than I have said that we must create our own meaning for our lives. We must seek out and ascertain our own life purpose and folding shirts at Banana Republic is not a good answer. If people had the time, freedom, understanding and education, they would happily pick their own significance and aspirations. No one spends 23 hours a day grooming high-end dogs — making sure the ass hair is perfectly coiffed — because that gives their life drive. They do it because they need the money. How many people keep trimming the labradoodle’s “reardo” or folding the shirts or blowing the leaves after they win the lottery? It means he’s been indoctrinated so thoroughly, he can’t see life outside the factory. That’s like a prisoner who can’t leave the prison. This reminds me of a TV news story I saw about a blue-collar worker who won the lottery — millions of dollars — and said he was going back to work at the factory on Monday. And the news report gushed over how tremendous this was. “What a great guy! He’s going back to the factory!” But honestly, that shouldn’t be celebrated. It’s the result of a cultural brain disorder. It means he’s been indoctrinated so thoroughly, he can’t see life outside the factory. That’s like a prisoner who can’t leave the prison. It’s not something to have a goddamn ticker-tape parade over. We should want all the unemployed people to have jobs — because currently, without the jobs, they can’t afford their lives. But we should also discuss regularly how one day, preferably soon, we should not want to have these jobs — at least not full-time, slaving away at mind-numbing labor the employee loathes. But that conversation can’t be had on our mainstream media or even most alternative media. Everyone must partake in the wage slavery all the time because this is America – The freest country in the world! My boss told me so. Oh, and how will we pay for a leaf blower not to blow leaves? How about using the trillions we pay for wars that are never won. Lee Camp is the host of the hit comedy news show “Redacted Tonight.” His new book “Bullet Points and Punch Lines” is available at LeeCampBook.com and his stand-up comedy special can be streamed for free at LeeCampAmerican.com.
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Post by Admin on Dec 17, 2020 20:42:44 GMT
You Have No Obligation To Conform To A Wildly Sick Societycaitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/you-have-no-obligation-to-conformYou have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a Russian propagandist for criticizing the most powerful and destructive institutions on earth. You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a Chinese propagandist for advocating peace and detente instead of loyalty to the continual unipolar domination of a sociopathic global empire at all cost. You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a dictator apologist any time you oppose murderous interventionism and the lies which are universally used to manufacture support for it. You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a crazy conspiracy theorist for believing the plutocratic media distorts the truth to protect the interests of the plutocratic class. You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a deranged extremist for saying the system which has marched our species to the brink of extinction is not working. You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a freak and an outcast for saying everyone should be given what they need in a world of plenty instead of letting people die while elite predators hoard far more than they need. You have no obligation to conform to a society where you are branded a dangerous radical for saying that Black and Indigenous lives matter and that police funding should be re-routed to programs which actually work. You have no obligation to conform to a society where you are branded a misandrist bitch for saying rape culture is a problem and more consciousness needs to be brought to the power dynamics of gender. You have no obligation to conform to a society where you are branded a loser for choosing to heal your psychological wounds and bring consciousness to your inner processes instead of spreading your mental demons around the world in search of conquest and domination. You have no obligation to conform to a society which turns its back on gentleness, on kindness, on understanding, on deep listening, and stands with greed, violence, oppression, exploitation, and a rat race wherein you must step on your neighbor's head to keep your own above water. You have no obligation to conform to a society which rejects collaboration and harmony in favor of competition and obedience at the expense of the very ecosystem we depend on for survival. The madness of our society gives you permission to turn away from its doctrines and expectations. When everyone's dropping dead after drinking from the punch bowl, you are allowed to take a pass on the Kool-Aid. When the people standing in line for the ride are coming out the other end as ground mince meat, you have permission to jump the fence and go elsewhere. You have permission to reject the doctrines and expectations of your society. You have permission to reject the doctrines and expectations of your culture. You have permission to reject the doctrines and expectations of your family. You have permission to reject the doctrines and expectations you yourself have held dear all your life up until the very moment you read this sentence. You are not what they told you you are. You do not have to be what they told you you must be. You do not have to become what they told you you must become. Life is so very, very much more than the thin layer of mental chatter which makes up our whole society could ever begin to perceive. You are so very, very much more than the doctrines and expectations of our pervasively sick culture could ever even guess at. Set down the catechism of culture and make your home in the ineffable. Come and swim in the living waters. Come and sing with the hammerhead whales. Your every breath contains more adventure than all the garbage summer blockbusters that Hollywood has ever made. The energy crackling in your cells this very moment contains more truth than every religious scripture ever written. You are innately worthwhile. You were innately worthwhile the moment you arrived here, before you attained a single attainment, before you earned a single dollar, before you received your first nod of approval from someone with more power than you. You have permission to simply be that, and to see where that adventure takes you. Everything our species has tried has led us to a dying world and a society that is stark raving mad, so nobody is in any position to tell you that you are wrong. Find that still, guiding voice within you which existed before they began caging you with their word-spells, and just see where it leads you. Wherever it leads, it's better than following the proverbial lemmings off the cliff. ______________________
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Post by Admin on Dec 31, 2020 2:38:36 GMT
"We remain trapped in our individual minds, hostages to a world we indeed make but which we cannot control or even recognize as our own." It's not humans that are failing, suggests Michael Steinberg in this compelling piece for The Philosophical Salon, but rather a single idea - an idea about who we are, and how we live: the idea that "the personal and the social are separate, as are the private and the public, the human and the non-human. There are other ways to live." "At some point we will have to admit that we have failed. We will not have averted catastrophic climate change. We will not have spread prosperity as far as it could be extended, educated all the young, or cared for the old. And making these failures all the more bitter is the arrogance with which we will proclaim, with tragic self-importance, that it is humanity itself that has failed. But it is not humanity that is failing. One way for people to live with each other and with themselves is failing. There are other ways to live, and the end of this one would be no great loss if it were not taking so many lives along with it, human and non-human, and blighting so many future generations. The modern world of liberalism and capitalism claims universal validity, as the only social form that permits individuals to live as they really are. Underpinning all of this is a single idea: that each of us is essentially alone. We come to social life from the outside, nursing a pre-social essence which lies at our very root and to which we turn when we seek to find or express ourselves. The personal and the social are separate, as are the private and the public. The human and the non-human are separate, and so on. All of this seems obvious. But what if we are wrong? What if there is no standpoint external to social life, and those separations are simply the artefacts of self-consciousness? Our deepest ambitions and wishes would not be private but public, then, and what seem to be our own thoughts and feelings would be distorted echoes of a shared life that is as all-pervasive as it is inaccessible to conscious thought. If that is the case, our justifications for the way we live are mere bootstrapping. They rest on the belief that we have incorrigible access to an individual essence that logically precedes our interactions with each other. If that belief is false, our culture and our ideas of our selves are as delusional as the divine right of kings. A critique of individualism and separation runs through many indigenous traditions as well, which frequently envision individuals within a welter of intermingling powers and influences that can be glimpsed only through isolation, starvation, the ingestion of psychotropic drugs, or other practices that undermine the everyday sense that we are self-subsistent beings. We act out of emotion, not reason, and the thinking that seems to guide our acts is generally, perhaps entirely, the reflection and justification of intentions that originate in the drives and interconnections of our common lives. The spiritual world of which so many traditions speak has the same shape as this world of interconnected bodies. In our minds we are alone, but in our bodies we are connected at the heart. Nothing that issues from our embodied life can be separated from the lives of all others. These ideas may seem alien, but they explain why our embrace of individual empowerment condemns us to impotence rather than liberating us. Agency is and can only be shared; it vanishes the moment we try to claim it as our own. The dance of mutual self-creation looms before us as an assault on an ego, which we must defend at all costs. We pit that illusory self against a reified society, waging a war within ourselves, which we cannot win. The psychological toll of this stance is glaring, but its social and political consequences are even worse. We can aim at nothing more than negative liberty, the absence of constraint. Positive liberty—deciding anything at all about the shape of our common life—is an unjustifiable intrusion on the imagined freedom of individuals. Collective action can be nothing more than a congeries of individual actions, and a commitment to the welfare of others, to the preservation of the non-human world, or to future generations can be seen as just only if we freely choose to sacrifice our own immediate interests. Political life is thus hollowed out. Marx—like Fichte and Hegel—knew that self and world emerge together, simultaneous products of collective human self-fashioning, and he expected that the proletarian revolution would awaken us to our shared power and show us that we are genuinely our own creations. But there has been no awakening to this fact, only an even deeper slumber, one that is literally self-induced. We have chained ourselves, and the links of that chain are forged by our fantasy of freedom. The problem lies in the narrow channels through which our imaginations run. Separations between the inner and the outer, the public and the private, the individual and the social, act as scaffolding for our everyday experience and our political and philosophical speculations: we can think and see nothing that does not arise from or embody them. We remain trapped in our individual minds, hostages to a world we indeed make but which we cannot control or even recognize as our own. How, then, do we begin? We must learn to save what and whom we can without reproducing or reinforcing the delusions of our age. Our task may be nothing more than opening doors for others to walk through and tilling fields that our descendants might plant." IT IS NOT HUMANITY THAT IS FAILING: A MANIFESTOthephilosophicalsalon.com/it-is-not-humanity-that-is-failing-a-manifesto/
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Post by Admin on Jan 17, 2021 1:50:50 GMT
"SOCIAL MANIACS A suppressed and desperate cry surges through humanity. People shriek, "How can I make sense of human events?" You can't. The actions of lunatics in an insane asylum never make sense. Society is a mad-house occupied by frenzied maniacs who think they are sane. Sigh with relief. You don't have to try to figure it out any more. You can see through sick society, which means you are not part of it, which means you are sane. And now your life makes perfect sense."
SOLVED The Mystery of Life, p. 185
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Post by Admin on Jan 29, 2021 13:54:33 GMT
QAnon and evangelicals: Republicans baptized in crazywww.alternet.org/2021/01/qanon-and-evangelicals-republicans-baptized-in-crazy/Donald Trump is out, but parts of the Republican Party warmly embrace his dark legacy of white supremacy, the crazy QAnon conspiracy and civil war wrapped in faux Christianity. Like Trump, these fake Christians reject turning the other cheek in favor of threatening or promoting violence. The problem here isn't partisan politics, but public mental health. DCReport has covered extensively the mental-health debacle thanks to Dr. Bandy X. Lee, Harper West and other experts on how delusions spread like viruses, with Trump being a carrier. The evidence of craziness seems to be found entirely in the Republican Party. We looked for, but have yet to discover any Democratic Party leaders pushing baseless conspiracy theories or urging civil war. Readers who have found such material, please send links via our DCReport Tipline. Rest in Link
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Post by Admin on Feb 13, 2021 12:39:55 GMT
“I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas...”
— Charles Bukowski
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Post by Admin on Feb 20, 2021 0:16:45 GMT
"...the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. `He sees too deep and too much,' and what he sees is essentially chaos...he is the one man who knows he is sick in a civilization that doesn't know it is sick."
~ Colin Wilson
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Post by Admin on Feb 20, 2021 9:49:58 GMT
Excerpt from "They Don't Work To Kill All Dissent, They Just Keep It From Going Mainstream" One of the most consequential collective delusions circulating in our society is the belief that our society is free. Our society is exactly free enough to create the illusion that we have freedom; from that line onwards it's just totalitarianism veiled in propaganda. I get comments from people every day wagging their fingers at my criticisms of western imperialist agendas against nations like China or Iran saying "If you lived over there you wouldn't be allowed to criticize the government the way you criticize western governments!" It is true that dissidents are permitted to criticize the government systems of the US-centralized empire to an extent, but only to an extent. Yes, as long as my criticisms of capitalism, oligarchy and imperialism remain relegated to the fringes of influence I am indeed permitted to express my views unmolested. If however I somehow ascended to a position of significant mainstream influence I would be targeted and smeared until my reputation was ruined or I had a psychological breakdown and went away. You may be certain of this. The managers of empire do not work to crush and silence all dissent like a conventional totalitarian regime would do. They are much more clever than that. In a society that maintains the illusion of freedom in order to prevent outrage and revolution, it does not serve rulers to stifle all dissent. Just the opposite in fact: their interests are served by having a small number of dissidents hanging around the fringes of society creating the illusion of freedom. If Johnny Hempshirt over there is allowed to stand on a soapbox and criticize the US war machine, then the US must be a free country. So they don't work to silence all dissent. What they do is work to make sure that dissent never hits a critical mass and goes mainstream. That's their sweet spot. That's what the entire imperial propaganda engine is geared toward accomplishing. Not to eliminate socialist and anti-imperialist voices, but to make sure they never attain enough influence to be politically consequential. They Don't Work To Kill All Dissent, They Just Keep It From Going Mainstreamcaitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/they-dont-work-to-kill-all-dissent
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Post by wynona on Feb 20, 2021 17:55:23 GMT
Something I think is kind of insane is how in modern society, people are so far removed from the processes that make food, clothing, and shelter.
I could easily go my whole life without seeing a sheep---but I wear wool. Im afraid to look into how meat is processed. But I eat meat anyway. Ive never had to kill most of my animals for food.
Im grateful for modern conveniences but I feel like at least knowing how certain commodities are made informs your choices and gives you more of an appreciation for the things we consume and the people who work to get us those things.
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