Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment,…
“The adoption of fixed settlements also created problems with regard to the status of women. When a hunter-gatherer people took up fixed settlement, in actual practice it pursued its livelihood through fishing or simple cultivation and herding, but it preserved the lifestyle that had existed in the hunter-gatherer phase. In sum, a division of labor…
“All too many atomized Americans have taken up arms and carried out shocking acts of violence over the past decades, usually without anything more than the desire to harm and kill for their own sake. Mangione might be a sign of something new: a political moderate with no movement behind him, no history of activism,…
Munch: When Munch was a boy… freedom was a potato. It was you didn’t get killed today. Freedom from hunger, from the rusty blade. But to free himself, the man ate first so others could not. He killed before he was killed. He wanted nothing more, because only kings… had the freedom to want. But…
”Indeed, when the world presents as a force field of violence, the task of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate that world and offer no way out. The body can…
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be…
“When confronted with someone who literally thinks blacks are subhuman and should be killed off en masse, what is the appropriate response? […] Simply treating someone as an equal participant in the public sphere legitimates them. And given that they are speaking boldly in public, they are not susceptible to public shaming — indeed, they…
“[Police:] A term which describes both individual officers and a system, or institution in society that exists only at the split between those who have and those who do not. Historically and currently, the police system has served/serves mostly as a tool for the powerful in racial and class conflict. There have not always been…
“Violence is not only what black people do to white people as victims seek to change structure of their existence; it is also what white people did when they created a society for white people only, and what they do in order to maintain it. Violence in America did not begin with the black power…
Every problem in the world can be understood, at least partially, as a problem of consciousness. So it follows that the solutions to seemingly intractable problems, such as environmental degradation and climate change, nuclear proliferation and terrorism, hunger and overpopulation, unregulated globalization and gross inequality, can all be effectively ameliorated by raising or changing the…