"Not only are his fellow men unconscious of his presence, but all animate nature has cast him out: no bird or living creature acknowledges his being.” George Frederic Watts (speaking of the Biblical figure of Cain, quoted by John Berger, Landscapes) "Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?" Jeremiah, 12 “To make money honestly is to preach the gospel.” Russell Conwell (Acres of Diamonds, quoted by Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon) “Withhold not correction from the child, for if thou beatest him with the rod … [Read more...]

"There is no meaning to the objective existence of an electron at some point in space, for example at one of the two holes, independent of actual observation. The electron seems to spring into existence as a real object only when we observe it!" Heinz Pagels (Quoted by Paul Davies, The New Physics) "The basic commitment is that the fundamental constituents of reality — perhaps electrons and quarks — have incredibly simple forms of experience." Phillip Goff (Galillo's Error) "What contemporary society still gives that is good and beautiful comes from its humanistic roots from an ancient, poor and religious world. But the consumer society is irreligious, and therefore arid." Pier … [Read more...]

"What can be done?“ said Zeus, “for all is given; The crops, the hunt, the marts are no more free." Friedrich Schiller (The Division of the World, tr. Wm Wertz Jr.) " W.E.B. Du Bois deciding he had “not been Freudian enough” when he observed the body parts of a lynched Negro displayed in a local store." Eli Zaretsky (Political Freud) "Among the precepts of the Moses religion there is one that is of greater importance than appears to begin with. This is the prohibition against making an image of God—the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see." Sigmund Freud (Moses and Monotheism) "Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly … [Read more...]

"Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world such that man may endure exposing himself to the problems and tensions of the real world." Morse Peckham (Man's Rage Against Chaos) "The study of Homer and Picasso are once again a class prerequisite, a luxury for the wealthy." Curtis White (Bad Science of Something Else? Orion Magazine) “...the thinkers, the artists and the heroes { } ...They are lonely, self-centred, not by choice but by necessity. Genius has no place for team-work. Poets and prophets do not go into committees." Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (An Idealist View of Life) “Our critique of science, technology and the industrial system is a critique of … [Read more...]

"Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,--/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross." John Milton (Paradise Lost) "We don’t just talk anymore, we run programs. Whom do they serve?" Jonathan Beller (Digitality and the Media of Dispossession) "Bad philosophers are like slum lords." Ludwig Wittgenstein ( Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics) "Our supposedly algorithmic culture is not a material phenomenon so much as a devotional one, a supplication made to the computers people have allowed to replace gods in their minds, even as they … [Read more...]

“...if shame shows itself at all, then it does so precisely through self-concealment." Gunther Anders (Promethean Shame) "Few understand the extent to which Silicon Valley is the alter-ego of Pentagon-land, even fewer realise the impact this has had on the social sphere." The Cogent (How the West Was Won: Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet march 4th 2022) "The scientific verification of experience which is enacted in the experiment- permitting sensory impressions to be deduced with the exactitude of quantitative determinations and, therefore, the prediction of future impressions - responds to this loss of certainty by displacing experience as far as … [Read more...]

“Closeup jostled shots of thousands of people outside a stadium after a Goebbels speech, people surging, massing, bursting through traffic. Halls hung with swastika banners, with mortuary wreaths and deaths-head insignia. Ranks of thousands of flagbearers arrayed before columns of frozen light, a hundred and thirty aircraft searchlights aimed straight up—a scene that resembled a geometric longing, the formal notation of some powerful mass desire." Don DeLillo (White Noise) "Service and sacrifice in a higher cause had been part of the definition of the manly ideal almost from the beginning, but now such a demand was couched in the rhetoric of the First World War. That war made the … [Read more...]

"...the reduction of leisure time as the marginal utility of money income rose, and the real location of labor from goods and services for direct consumption to marketed goods that is, a new strategy for the maximization of household utility. We see it among peasant households concentrating their labor in marketed food production, in cottar households directing underemployed labor to proto-industrial production, in the more extensive market-oriented labor of women and children, and finally, in the pace or intensity of work." Jan DeVries (The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” The Journal of Economic History 54,#2) "Leveling in the context of necessities and personal … [Read more...]