Archives for May 2023

“The sense of the world must lie outside the world. . . . When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question. . . . The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.” Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus) “Perhaps our age has gone to analysis not to be loved or get cured, or even to Know Thyself. Perhaps we go to be given a case history, to be told into a soul story and given a plot to live by. This is the gift of case history, the gift of finding oneself in myth. In myths gods and humans meet.” James Hillman (Healing Fiction: On Freud, Jung, Adler) "...culture is an empirical reality of the first order in human life—that it, in the most profound … [Read more...]

"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests." Gore Vidal "...fear—a particular fear that has composed the very foundation of male selfhood from antiquity to the modern era, from the peasant villages of Afghanistan to the west wing of the American White House. It is the fear of being feminized. For many men, masculinity is a hard-won, yet precarious and brittle psychological achievement that must be constantly proven and defended. While the external factors may appear to be that … [Read more...]

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance." Karl … [Read more...]