Quotes: 11 November 2025
Thoughts to ponder
“Storms, earthquakes, fire and flood assail the land” says Mephistopheles, though he sounds like somebody reading their newsfeed. Should the Anthropocene reach its terminus when, despite its name, it becomes impossible for the planet to sustain human life, then capitalism will have revealed itself as the most disastrous ideology in history. Or, perhaps more accurately, not capitalism or technology per se, but those powerful individuals which view both of those things as an end unto themselves rather than as a means unto an end. Right now we’re at an impasse—there is a new, global, political, and spiritual reawakening from the movement Extinction Rebellion to Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato sí which attempts to imagine a more equitable future—but there’s also the enthusiasms of the Lords of Capital, none more so than the confidence men of Silicon Valley who like Jeff Bezos shoot octogenarian actors into space or like Musk tinker with monkey brains, praying to Moloch’s final incarnation in the form of the techno-utopian Singularity, their creed being nothing less than Faust’s injunction “Bin ich ein Gott? Mir wird so licht!”—“Am I a god? Light fills my mind.”
Few political movements have been more effectively tarred than the Luddites who agitated among the textile mills of England a generation before Thoreau, men who understood that mechanization signaled their economic obsolescence, and thus under capitalism their extinction. Far from being antiquated bumpkins, they were radicals attacking the instrumentalism of unfettered technology. It’s not technology that’s the problem—it’s the doctrine that it’s something more than a tool, that in fact we’re tools for it. When Thoreau heard the locomotive’s whistle, his fear was that rather than riding the train the train was riding upon us. The central economic, political, ethical, and spiritual question of the remainder of this century—no matter how much time we actually might have left—is how to stall that engine so that we’re able to get off of the tracks. How to finally void the contract that our ancestors signed.
Simon, Ed. Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain (pp. 276-277). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Whatever the merits of the opening claim of the American Revolution—no taxation without representation—it certainly could not appeal by virtue of its charms. It was altogether different with the speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the actual doing which proved necessary to drive this claim to its logical conclusion: independent government and the foundation of a new body politic. It was through these experiences that those who, in the words of John Adams, had been ‘called without expectation and compelled without previous inclination’ discovered that ‘it is action, not rest, that constitutes our pleasure’.
Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution (Penguin Classics) (p. 24). (Function). Kindle Edition.
The Origins of Totalitarianism
It has often been said that the British acquired their empire in a fit of absent-mindedness, as consequence of automatic trends, yielding to what seemed possible and what was tempting, rather than as a result of deliberate policy. If this is true, then the road to hell may just as well be paved with no intentions as with the proverbial good ones.
Politics was, to say the least, a rough, rowdy, and very much of a male theater of public power; indeed, a fierce celebration of the gender exclusions that kept women and other dependents on the outside. The selection of polling places in town and country (saloons, livery stables, courthouses, and militia grounds), the routine consumption of alcohol, the commonplace drunkenness, the swearing and physical violence were not only designed to reward loyalists and intimidate foes who, in principle, could participate. They were meant to create sites of political belonging and nonbelonging, warning off, and, if necessary, expelling those not welcome to tread there. Over the course of the nineteenth century, various campaigns to reform political practices, including those demanding the enfranchisement of women, explicitly acknowledged the coercions, harassments, intimidations, and frauds that appeared firmly embedded in electoral politics.
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Historically, the police and the United States armed forces had little to do with one another. Professional police departments took shape in large American cities during the mid-nineteenth century, replacing informal night-watch patrols, and were tasked with keeping order on city streets.
We are now witnessing an attack on the bright line that has traditionally separated the military from law enforcement, all to our great peril.
As for unions, they hardly exist in Smart America. They’re instruments of class solidarity, not individual advancement, and the individual is the unit of worth in Smart America as in Free America. It’s impossible to imagine a successful life that doesn’t involve rising from a good university into a good career.
Sad but true.
By the time of the First World War, radicalism in the labor movement had come to be identified not with opposition to the functional differentiation between capital and labor but with industrial unionism. This kind of radicalism, however, posed no challenge to Taylorism or to the new interpretation of the American dream proposed by Taylor, among others, according to which the promise of American life rested not on “manly independence” but on the abundance generated by never-ending improvements in productivity.
The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy
These changes coincided with a growing recognition that economic expansion was the “overriding purpose” of social organization and that people ought to be judged by the single test of how much they increase production. Meritocracy, in [Michael] Young’s description, rests on a mobilized economy driven by the compulsion to produce.
“A compulsion to produce.” That does capture a great deal of our social ideal.
Western modernity has many overlapping features with the phenomenology of schizophrenia, as Louis Sass has convincingly demonstrated in Madness and Modernism; and I submit that this is because modernity simulates not a disease state, but a hemispheric imbalance, as I suggested in The Master and his Emissary. The testimony of people with schizophrenia and autism provides us with articulate accounts of what living in the left hemisphere’s world feels like, when most fully expressed.
St. Francis de Sales wrote: “I am glad you make a fresh beginning daily; there is no better means of attaining… than by continually beginning again.”
Compare to St. Augustine: Initium ergo ut esset, creatus est homo—‘That there be a beginning, man was created,’
Only the heroic loner, the man with a mission and God’s suffering servant can take on tasks without expecting appreciation. Recognition from others is part of communal feedback. In part, we always are as others see us.