It rained last night. I had run the Circus Spinner windsock up
the flag pole. In a gust, the Spinner
The ruling ideas of every period are
the ideas of the ruling class – Karl Marx
You get better and better at doing less and less until
eventually you become ‘excellent’ at doing nothing.
The “middle class” is located at the
apex of the American imagination – Stanley Arnowitz – Taking it Big, 2012 p125
Sports don’t see itself (the franchise infrastucture) as just a business –
it’s a cultural industry. It’s the same for the fans. A sports team can let you
down and it has nothing to do with its performance
As the work sphere declines in
meaning and gives no inner direction and rhythm to life, so have community and
kinship circles declined as ways of “fixing man into society.” – C Wright Mills
– White Collar
Only 5% of students in American higher education today
graduated from high school and enrolled in college within a year to attend a
four year institution and live on campus?
Modernity knows of no other life but
‘made’; the life of modern men and women is a task, not a given, and a task as
yet uncompleted and relentlessly calling for more care and new effort – Zygmet
Bauman – Liquid Modernity, 2000 p134
Humans produce 3,000 times more heat energy on average
than all the world’s volcanoes
Evil was, perhaps, necessarily
always more impressive than good. It had to make a show! It had to startle and
challenge! It was instability attacking stability. And in the end stability
will win – Agatha Christis – The Pale Horse, 1961
Those with the jobs are the failures of socialization. A new
study reports that 20% of CEOs are psychopaths.
Success in our society has to be
ratified by publicity - Christopher Lasch – The Culture of Narcissism, 1979 p60
In military terms – a failure is when defense costs more
than offense (as when a Patriot missile shoots down an unguided rocket – i.e. a
more expensive weapon is used to counter a less expensive one).
Much of what is euphemistically
known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now
reduced to proletarian conditions of existence - Christopher Lasch – The
Culture of Narcissism, 1979 p68
Real life is not like in the media – there is no rationality
to it, its quotidian and so very un-cinematic. Celebrities are newsworthy
because they are not real.
Every society reproduces its culture
– its norms, its underlying assumptions, its mode of organizing experiences –
in the individual, in the form of personality - Michael A Arbib - The
Construction of Reality, 1986 p34
Confirmation bias: we look for and accept evidence that
supports our existing views and reject any that contradicts them.
Psychosis is the final outcome of
all that is wrong with a culture – Jules Henry
Motivated reasoning: we interpret new information in ways
that are most sympathetic to our world-view
The political experience of the
individual citizen is always mediated by the propaganda machine. In the first
place, neither liberalism nor its main alternative, Marxism, takes account of
mass media as the provider of a pseudoenvironment filled with stereotypes to
fill the gap between the public and the corridors of power… both assert that
once people become aware of their interests, they will act rationally – Stanley
Arnowitz – Taking it Big, 2012 p136
Backfire effect: when confronted by an opinion, backed up by
facts, which contradicts our own, we have a tendency to double down and retreat
even more strongly into an entrenched belief.
Emotions provide a natural means for
the brain and mind to evaluate the environment within and around the organism,
and respond accordingly and adaptively Antonio Damasio – Looking for Spinoza,
2003 p54
On safari near Kenya’s Lake Naivasha, Mark Zukerberg in
pursuit of his philosophy of “sustainable living” is killing his own meat
rather than buying it in the supermarket. Hurrah for the superrich, the rest of
us will have to eat cockroaches and mice to maintain a “sustainable livestyle”
It’s only because they are all so
stupid / That a few are needed who are so clever … Could it be that / Governing
is so difficult only / Because swindling and exploitation take some learning? –
Bertrold Brecht – Poems
American children average only 8 minutes a day in outdoor
activity while spending 7 to 8 hours a day sitting in front of some kind of
screen. Almost 90% of British fist graders demonstrate some degree of “movement
difficulty for their age”. 30% of British children starting school exhibit
symptoms typically associated with ailments
(dyslexia, dyspaxia and ADHD) which can be improved with correct levels
of physical activity.
In a society in which the dream of
success has been drained of any meaning beyond itself, men have noting against
which to measure their achievement except the achievement of others - Christopher
Lasch – The Culture of Narcissism, 1979 p59
Running and gunning: a police catch phrase for chasing down
armed criminal suspects
Much of what is euphemistically
known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now
reduced to proletarian conditions of existence - Christopher Lasch – The
Culture of Narcissism, 1979 p68
A third of all individuals killed by a stranger are killed
by law enforcement. Three fourths of all
homicide victims were murdered by someone they knew
The pursuit of self-interest,
formerly identified with the rational pursuit of gain and the accumulation of
wealth, has become a search for pleasure and psychic survival - Christopher
Lasch – The Culture of Narcissism, 1979 p69
Mountain House, which used to make food almost exclusively
for the outdoors market, now does about 50 percent of its business in emergency
supplies. The first thing you notice about emergency-storage food is that it’s
the only kind you ever find – with the exception of bodybuilder drinks – that
actually boasts about how many calories it has.
The more man objectifies himself
in his work, the more reality takes on the appearance of illusion - Christopher
Lasch – The Culture of Narcissism, 1979 p90
The American Heart Association claims that a healthy person
will save $500 a year in medical expenses by walking 30 minutes a day. That
comes out to about $2.60 an hour. If you have a heart disease you could save
$2,500 making the payback for walking about $13.00/hour.
It ain’t what you don’t know that
gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. –
Mark Twain (attributed)
In a celebrity culture normality is whatever the famous say
it is
While celebrity culture confers
authority in a society utterly devoted to consumerism, it also represents less
a mode of false identification than a manufactured spectacle that cheapens
serious and thoughtful discourse and put into play a focus on the commercial
world of fashion, style, and appearances – Henry A Giroux – America at War
with Itself, 2016
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