Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Any system worth resisting is at its core religious, but any effective means of resistance must be religious as well. “Religion” need not mean what we’re normally told it means, a limited definition focusing on beliefs and rituals. All sorts of things are religions: capitalism is a religion; fascism is a worse one, democracy a…
“The ontology of this Marxian framework treats society as a complex of social relations among social individuals. This primacy of relations enables Marxian thought to avoid the unreal dichotomy of “the individual” versus “the society.” There are no real individuals standing outside of and prior to the relational nexus: each becomes a specific individual in…
“Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country…” – Donald Trump, June 19, 2018 … ““Infest” is the essential, and new, word here…It drives full-throttle toward the dehumanizatioour n of immigrants, setting aside legality in favor…
“The rise of the buffered identity has been accompanied by an interiorization; that is, not only the Inner/Outer distinction, that between Mind and World as separate loci, which is central to the buffer itself; and not only the development of this Inner/Outer distinction in a whole range of epistemological theories of a mediational type from…
“Peterson’s writings are a hodgepodge of Christian existentialism, Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal, and E. O. Wilson. But the main philosophical issue is his Nietzschean conception of power. Only a strong will, exercising itself against a contingent and meaningless world — and against the weak — can ever hope to flourish […] Peterson’s…
“Self-oriented perfectionism is the tendency to hold oneself to an unrealistically high standard, while other-oriented perfectionism means having unrealistic expectations of others. But “socially prescribed perfectionism is the most debilitating of the three dimensions of perfectionism,” Curran and Hall contend. It describes the feeling of paranoia and anxiety engendered by the persistent — and not…
“The notion that political enemies are human, too, sharing our common human hopes and fears, triumphs and vulnerabilities, is often deployed in a way to downplay political division and enmity. In reality, though, the fact that our enemies are human, too, is what makes them morally accountable. If they were inhuman monsters who thrived on…
In all of my conversations with men who own guns for “self-defense” (the vast majority of them being white men, btw) every single one of them comes out at some point trying to save face (presumably not wanting to sound like a complete monster) by saying something like, “I’d never want to kill anyone, it’s…
“In ‘The Death of the Author’, Barthes argues that writing destroys every voice and point of origin. This is because it occurs within a functional process which is the practice of signification itself…A writer, therefore, does not have a special genius expressed in the text, but rather, is a kind of craftsman who is skilled…
“That black people, who have lived for centuries under such derision and condescension, have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians. After all, in this analysis, Trump’s racism and the racism of his supporters are incidental to his rise. Indeed, the alleged glee with which liberals call out…