Human futilitarianism

The problem, it turns out, is not an overabundance of humans but a dearth of humanity. Climate change and the Anthropocene are the triumph of an undead species, a mindless shuffle toward extinction, but this is only a lopsided imitation of what we really are. This is why political depression is important: zombies don’t feel sad, and they certainly don’t feel helpless; they just are. Political depression is, at root, the experience of a creature that is being prevented from being itself; for all its crushingness, for all its feebleness, it’s a cry of protest. Yes, political depressives feel as if they don’t know how to be human; buried in the despair and self-doubt is an important realization. If humanity is the capacity to act meaningfully within our surroundings, then we are not really, or not yet, human.

Crisis capitalism

According to David Wallace-Wells, estimates for the total global fossil fuel subsidies paid out each year run as high as $5 trillion.

With this money, we could eliminate hunger, homelessness, illiteracy, poverty, safeguard the environment and establish a basic income for all.

Brave New World Revisited

How romantically misleading are the lyrical accounts of the Middle Ages with which many contemporary theorists of social relations adorn their works! "Membership in a guild, manorial estate or village protected medieval man throughout his life and gave him peace and serenity." Protected him from what, we may ask. Certainly not from remorseless bullying at the hands of his superiors. And along with all that "peace and serenity" there was, throughout the Middle Ages, an enormous amount of chronic frustration, acute unhappiness and a passionate resentment against the rigid, hierarchical system that permitted no vertical movement up the social ladder and, for those who were bound to the land, very little horizontal movement in space. The impersonal forces of over-population and over-organization, and the social engineers who are trying to direct these forces, are pushing us in the direction of a new medieval system. This revival will be made more acceptable than the original by such Brave-New-Worldian amenities as infant conditioning, sleep-teaching and drug-induced euphoria; but, forthe majority of men and women, it will still be a kind of servitude.

Aldous Huxley

1894 - 1963

The uninhabitable earth

What cause is there for hope? Carbon hangs in the air for decades, with some of the most terrifying feedbacks unspooling over even longer time horizons — which gives warming the eerie shimmer of an unending menace. But climate change is not an ancient crime we are tasked with solving now; we are destroying our planet every day, often with one hand as we conspire to restore it with the other. Which means, as Paul Hawken has perhaps illustrated most coolheadedly, we can also stop destroying it, in the same style — collectively, haphazardly, in all the most quotidian ways in addition to the spectacular-seeming ones. The project of unplugging the entire industrial world from fossil fuels is intimidating, and must be done in fairly short order — by 2040, many scientists say.But in the meantime many avenues are open — wide open, if we are not too lazy and too blinkered and too selfish to embark upon them.

Fully half of British emissions, it was recently calculated, come from inefficiencies in construction, discarded and unused food, electronics, and clothing; two-thirds of American energy is wasted; globally, according to one paper, we are subsidizing the fossil fuel business to the tune of $5 trillion each year. None of that has to continue. Slow-walking action on climate, another paper found, will cost the world $26 trillion by just 2030. That does not have to continue. Americans waste a quarter of their food, which means that the carbon footprint of the average meal is a third larger than it has to be. That need not continue. Five years ago, hardly anyone outside the darkest corners of the internet had even heard of Bitcoin; today mining it consumes more electricity than is generated by all the world’s solar panels combined, which means that in just a few years we’ve assembled, out of distrust of one another and the nations behind “fiat currencies”, a program to wipe out the gains of several long, hard generations of green energy innovation. It did not have to be that way. And a simple change to the algorithm could eliminate that Bitcoin footprint entirely.

As the news from science has grown bleaker, Western liberals have comforted themselves by contorting their own consumption patterns into performances of moral or environmental purity — less beef, more Teslas, fewer transatlantic flights. But the climate calculus is such that individual lifestyle choices do not add up to much, unless they are scaled by politics.

The uninhabitable earth

 

A turtle eating a plastic cup

According to David Wallace-Wells, plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, when there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

The dispossessed

 

Dialogue between Oiie and Shevek:

“We know that nominally there’s no government on Anarres. However, obviously there’s administration. And we gather that the group that sent you, your Syndicate, is a kind of faction; perhaps a revolutionary faction.”

“Everybody on Anarres is a revolutionary, Oiie... The network of administration and management is called PDC, Production and Distribution Coordination. They are a coordinating system for all syndicates, federatives, and individuals who do productive work. They do not govern persons; they administer production. They have no authority either to support me or to prevent me.”

“The one thing everybody knows about Odonians, I suppose, is that you don’t drink alcohol. Is it true, by the way?”

“Some people distill alcohol from fermented holum root, for drinking. They say it gives the unconscious free play, like brainwave training. Most people prefer that, it’s very easy and doesn’t cause a disease. Is that common here?”

“Drinking is. I don’t know about this disease. What’s it called?”

“Alcoholism.”

“Here in A-Io, you see, educated people get their news from the telefax, and radio and television, and the weekly reviews. These papers are read by the lower classes almost exclusively — written by semiliterates for semiliterates, as you can see. We have complete freedom of the press in A-Io, which inevitably means we get a lot of trash. The Thuvian paper is much better written, but it reports only those facts which the Thuvian Central Presidium wants reported. Censorship is absolute, in Thu. The state is all, and all for the state. Hardly the place for na Odonian, eh, sir?”

Ursula Le Guin

1929 - 2018

The Devil is a busy man

You don't try and teach a pig to sing.

POP QUIZ 4

Two late-stage terminal drug addicts sat up against an alley's wall with nothing to inject and no means and nowhere to go or be. Only one had a coat. It was cold, and one of the terminal drug addicts' teeth chattered and he sweated and shook with fever. He seemed gravely ill. He smelled very bad. He sat up against the wall with his head on his knees. This took place in Cambridge MA in an alley behind the Commonwealth Aluminum Can Redemption Center on Massachusetts Avenue in the early hours of 12 January 1993. The terminal drug addict with the coat took off the coat and scooted over up close to the gravely ill terminal drug addict and took and spread the coat as far as it would go over the both of them and then scooted over some more and got himself pressed right up against him and put his arm around him and let him be sick on his arm, and they stayed like that up against the wall together all through the night. 

Q: Which one lived.

Infinite jest

Suicide is a sort of present: 

one never knew, 

after all, 

now did one 

now did one 

now did one

Too late, Desmurget!

Michel Desmurget escreveu dois livros que vieram muito tarde. Tarde demais. O mundo digital conseguiu fabricar um número muito grande de imbecis e cretinos e está aprofundando o analfabetismo secundário. 

Os faladores de merda têm mais influência do que todo o sistema universal de educação, tanta influência que se candidatam à prefeitos, governadores e chegam à presidência. Os músicos que não enriquecem a linguagem do subdesenvolvido ficam milionários. Os programas primitivos de auditório tem uma audiência alta e fidelíssima. As subjetividades estão completamente intoxicadas de ilusões, de falácias, de piadas racistas, de perversidades, de pornografia. O Brasil é um país sem projeto, sem educação, sem futuro.

No future

The education is worsening 

getting weaker in Brazil. 

Country without history.

School is a failed system.

Compulsory miseducation

A major pressing problem of our society is the defective structure of the economy that advantages the upper middleclass and excludes the lower class. The school-people and PhD. sociologists loyally take over also this problem, in the war on poverty, the war against delinquency, retraining those made jobless, training the Peace Corps, and so forth. But as it turns out, just by taking over the problem, they themselves gobble up the budgets and confirm the defective structure of the economy.

Fundamentally, there is no right education except growing up into a worthwhile world. Indeed, our excessive concern with problems of education at present simply means that the grown-ups do not have such a world. The poor youth of America will not become equal by rising through the middle class, going to middle-class schools. Also the middle-class youth will not escape their increasing exploitation and anomie in such schools. A decent education aims at, prepares for, a more worthwhile future, with a different community spirit, different occupations, and more real utility than attaining status and salary.

The dangers of the highly technological and automated future are obvious: We might become a brainwashed society of idle and frivolous consumers. We might continue in a rat race of highly competitive, unnecessary busy-work with a meaninglessly expanding Gross National Product. In either case, there might still be an outcast group that must be suppressed. To countervail these dangers and make active, competent and initiating citizens who can produce a community culture and a noble recreation, we need a very different education than the schooling that we have been getting.

Education must foster independent thought and expression, rather than conformity. For example, to countervail the mass communications, we have an imperative social need, indeed a constitutional need to protect liberty, for many thousands of independent media: local newspapers; independent broadcasters, little magazines, little theatres; and these, under professional guidance, could provide remarkable occasions for the employment and education of adolescents of brains and talent. (I have elsewhere proposed a graduated tax on the audience-size of mass media, to provide a fund to underwrite such new independent ventures for a period, so that they can try to make their way.)

Finally, contemporary education must inevitably be heavily weighted towards the sciences. But this does not necessarily call for school training of a relatively few technicians, or few creative scientists (if such can indeed be trained in schools). Our aim must be to make a great number of citizens at home in a technological environment, not alienated from the machines we use, no ignorant as consumers, who can somewhat judge governmental scientific policy, who can enjoy the humanistic beauty of the sciences, and, above all, who can understand the morality of a scientific way of life.

Paul Goodman

1911 - 1972

Smoke rolling down street

Red Scabies on the Skin

Police Cars turn Garbage Corner — 

Was that a Shot! Backre or Cherry Bomb? 

Ah, it’s all right, take the mouth o,

it’s all over. 

Man Came a long way, 

Canoes thru Fire Engines, 

Big Cities’ power station Fumes

Executives with Country Houses — 

Waters drip thru Ceilings in the Slum — 

It’s all right, take the mouth o 

it’s all over —

Allen Ginsberg

1926 - 1997

Godard

Short of force

Because of the subordination of the political and ideological system to business interests, government policies that private power finds unwelcome will lead to capital flight, disinvestment, and social decline until business confidence is restored with the abandonment of the threat to privilege; these facts of life exert a decisive influence on the political system (with military force in reserve if matters get out of hand, supported or applied by the North American enforcer). To put the basic point crassly, unless the rich and powerful are satisfied, everyone will suffer, because they control the basic social levers, determining what will be produced and consumed, and what crumbs will filter down to their subjects. For the homeless in the streets, then, the primary objective is to ensure that the rich live happily in their mansions. This crucial factor, along with simple control over resources, severely limits the force on the side of the governed and diminishes Hume's paradox in a well-functioningcapitalist democracy in which the general public is scattered and isolated. Once popular organizations are dispersed or crushed and decision-making power is firmly in the hands of owners and managers, democratic forms are quite acceptable, even preferable as a device of legitimation of elite rule in a business-run "democracy." The pattern was followed by U.S. planners in reconstructing the industrial societies after World War II, and is standard in the Third World, though assuring stability of the desired kind is far more difficult there, except by state terror. Once a functioning social order is firmly established, an individual who must find a (relatively isolated) place within it in order to survive will tend to think its thoughts, adopt its assumptions about the inevitability of certain forms of authority, and in general, adapt to its ends. The costs of an alternative path or a challenge to power are high, the resources are lacking, and the prospects limited. These factors operate in slave and feudal societies - where their efficacy has duly impressed counterinsurgency theorists. In free societies, they manifest themselves in other ways. If their power to shape behavior begins to erode, other means must be sought to tame the rascal multitude. When force is on the side of the masters, they may rely on relatively crude means of manufacture of consent and need not overly concern themselves with the minds of the herd. The modalities of state terrorism that the United States has devised for its clients have commonly included at least a gesture towards "winning hearts and minds," though experts warn against undue sentimentality on this score, arguing that "all the dilemmas are practical and as neutral in an ethical sense as the laws of physics."

Noam Chomsky

Our picture of the universe

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on.” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know better? What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Can we go back in time? Recent breakthroughs in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies, suggest answers to some of these longstanding questions. Someday these answers may seem as obvious to us as the earth orbiting the sun – or perhaps as ridiculous as a tower of tortoises.

Stephen Hawking

1942 - 2018

The world that came in the mail

Our planet is indivisible. In North America we breathe oxygen generated in the Brazilian rain forest. Acid rain from polluting industries in the American Midwest destroys Canadian forests. Radioactivity from a Soviet nuclear accident compromises the economy and culture of Lapland. The burning of coal in China warms Argentina. Diseases rapidly spread to the farthest reaches of the planet and require a global medical effort to be eradicated. And, of course, nuclear war imperils everyone. Like it or not, we humans are bound up with our fellows and with the other plants and animals all over the world. Our lives are intertwined. If we are not graced with an instinctive knowledge of how to make our technologized world a safe and balanced ecosystem, we must figure out how to do it. We need more scientific research and more technological restraint. It is probably too much to hope that some Great Ecosystem Keeper in the sky will reach down and put right our environmental abuses. It is up to us. It should not be impossibly difficult. Birds - whose intelligence we tend to malign - know not to foul the nest. Shrimps with brains the size of lint know it. Algae know it. One-celled microorganisms know it. It is time for us to know it too.

Carl Sagan

1934 - 1996

Por que não me ufano

No Brasil, mesmo as pessoas "educadas" correm o risco de sucumbir as formas primitivas de idolatria. A classe dominante é um bom exemplo. Aqui se acredita ainda que símbolos e imagens são as próprias formas de entidades espirituais. Deus acima de tudo foi slogan presidencial, pasmem, em um país subdesenvolvido. Tal como o álcool e a prostituição, as formas de idolatria são toleradas e aprovadas. E todo tipo de picareta prospera.

O estímulo para fazer algo pelas crianças não é forte sequer nos pais. A sociedade está atrasando o contato dos brasileirinhos com as melhores obras da literatura universal, com as mentes mais brilhantes.

The doors of perception

 

We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education. This, of course, is not surprising. The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time. Equally unsurprising is the current attitude towards drink and smoke. In spite of the growing army of hopeless alcoholics, in spite of the hundreds of thousands of persons annually maimed or killed by drunken drivers, popular comedians still crack jokes about alcohol and its addicts. And in spite of the evidence linking cigarettes with lung cancer, practically everybody regards tobacco smoking as being hardly less normal and natural than eating. From the point of view of the rationalist utilitarian this may seem odd. For the historian, it is exactly what you would expect. A firm conviction of the material reality of Hell never prevented medieval Christians from doing what their ambition, lust or covetousness suggested. Lung cancer, traffic accidents and the millions of miserable and misery-creating alcoholics are facts even more certain than was, in Dante's day, the fact of the Inferno. But all such facts are remote and unsubstantial compared with the near, felt fact of a craving, here and now, for release or sedation, for a drink or a smoke.

Aldous Huxley

1894 - 1963

Short of force

State capitalist democracy has a certain tension with regard to the locus of power: in principle, the people rule, but effective power resides largely in private hands, with large-scale effects throughout the social order. One way to reduce the tension is to remove the public from the scene, except in form. The Reagan phenomenon offered a new way to achieve this fundamental goal of capitalist democracy. The office of chief executive was, in effect, eliminated in favor of a symbolic figure constructed by the public relations industry to perform certain ritual tasks: to appear on ceremonial occasions, to greet visitors, read government pronouncements, and so on. This is a major advance in the marginalization of the public.

Noam Chomsky

Por que não me ufano

“Marxist indoctrination”, the classic bogeyman 

of fascist politics.

O brasileiro conseguiu misturar ignorância e ostentação. Os formadores de opinião continuam levando o público na conversa de que a única coisa mais importante na vida é o dinheiro enquanto a finalidade do governo não é fazer o melhor para o país (onde estão as belas cidades?), mas apenas enriquecer os seus pares e assassinar qualquer opositor crítico.

Short of force

Fame, fortune, and respect await those who reveal the crimes of official enemies; those who undertake the vastly more important task of raising a mirror to their own societies can expect quite different treatment. George Orwell is famous for Animal Farm and 1984, which focus on the official enemy. Had he addressed the more interesting and significant question of thought control in relatively free and democratic societies, it would not have been appreciated, and instead of wide acclaim, hewould have faced silent dismissal or obloquy.

It is a mere truism that the state represents only one segment of the nexus of power. Control over investment, production, commerce, finance, conditions of work, and other crucial aspects of social policy lies in private hands. Unwillingness to adapt to this structure of authority and domination carries costs, ranging from state force to the costs of privation and struggle; even an individual of independent mind can hardly fail to compare these to the benefits, however meager, that accrue to submission. Meaningful choices are thus narrowly limited. Similar factors limit the range of ideas and opinion in obvious ways. Articulate expression is shaped by the same private powers that control the economy. It is largely dominated by major corporations that sell audiences to advertisers and naturally reflect the interests of the owners and their market. The ability to articulate and communicate one's views, concerns, and interests - or even to discover them - is thus narrowly constrained as well.

The libertarian conception is that the press should be independent, hence a counterbalance to centralized power of any form. In Jefferson's day, the powers that loomed large were the state, the church, and feudal structures. Shortly after, new forms of centralized power emerged in the world of corporate capitalism. A Jeffersonian would hold, then, that the press should be a counterbalance to state or corporate power, and critically, to the state-corporate nexus. 

The United States is near the limit in its safeguards for freedom from state coercion, and also in the poverty of its political life. There is essentially one political party, the business party, with two factions. Shifting coalitions of investors account for a large part of political history. Unions, or other popular organizations that might offer a way for the general public to play some role in influencing programs and policy choices, scarcely function apart from the narrowest realm. The ideological system is bounded by the consensus of the privileged. Elections are largely a ritual form. In congressional elections, virtually all incumbents are returned to office, a reflection of the vacuity of the political system and the choices it offers. There is scarcely a pretense that substantive issues are at stake in the presidential campaigns. Articulated programs are hardly more than a device to garner votes, and candidates adjust their messages to their audiences as public relations tacticians advise. Political commentators ponder such questions as whether Reagan will remember his lines, or whether Mondale looks too gloomy, or whether Dukakis can duck the slime flung at him by George Bush's speech writers. In the 1984 elections, the two political factions virtually exchanged traditional policies, the Republicans presenting themselves as the party of Keynesian growth and state intervention in the economy, the Democrats as the advocates of fiscal conservatism; few even noticed. Half the population does not bother to push the buttons, and those who take the trouble often consciously vote against their own interest. 

Noam Chomsky

Por que não me ufano

A fascist politician has no intention of addressing 

the root causes of economic hardship.

Amigo me envia uma reportagem do rapaz que foi assassinado com onze tiros nas costas por furtar um sabonete, pasmem, um sabonete.

Mira e veja os índices de criminalidade dos países de primeiro mundo com o subdesenvolvido e miserável Brasil para se ter uma ideia do genocídio nacional. Em 2020, na Suécia, 47 pessoas foram mortas por armas de fogo, na periferia do capitalismo foram 35.828.

Não seria difícil escolher entre construir uma boa sociedade, moderna, culta e com uma justa distribuição da riqueza (dá até para levar em conta a teoria do princípio da diferença do liberal John Rawls) e a perpetuação de uma sociedade medieval, miserável, inculta onde a desigualdade econômica é o ethos do Estado. Mas, como sintetizou Darcy Ribeiro, o Brasil está enfermo de desigualdade, brutalidade e perversidade, não tem jeito.

The bewildered herd and its shepherds

A properly functioning system of indoctrination has a variety of tasks, some rather delicate. One of its targets is the stupid and ignorant masses. They must be kept that way, diverted with emotionally potent oversimplifications, marginalized, and isolated. Ideally, each person should be alone in front of the TV screen watching sports, soap operas, or comedies, deprived of organizational structures that permit individuals lacking resources to discover what they think and believe in interaction with others, to formulate their own concerns and programs, and to act to realize them. They can then be permitted, even encouraged, to ratify the decisions of their betters in periodic elections. The rascal multitude are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.

For submissiveness to become a reliable trait, it must be entrenched in every realm. The public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products. Eduardo Galeano writes that "the majority must resign itself to the consumption of fantasy. Illusions of wealth are sold to the poor, illusions of freedom to the oppressed, dreams of victory to the defeated and of power to the weak". Nothing less will do.

The problem of indoctrination is a bit different for those expected to take part in serious decision-making and control: the business, state, and cultural managers, and articulate sectors generally. They must internalize the values of the system and share the necessary illusions that permit it to function in the interests of concentrated power and privilege -- or at least be cynical enough to pretend that they do, an art that not many can master. But they must also have a certain grasp of the realities of the world, or they will be unable to perform their tasks effectively. The elite media and educational systems must steer a course through these dilemmas, not an easy task, one plagued by internal contradictions. It is intriguing to see how it is faced, but that is beyond the scope of these remarks.

For the home front, a variety of techniques of manufacture of consent are required, geared to the intended audience and its ranking on the scale of significance. For those at the lowest rank, and for the insignificant peoples abroad, another device is available, what a leading turn-of-the-century American sociologist, Franklin Henry Giddings, called "consent without consent": "if in later years, [the colonized] see and admit that the disputed relation was for the highest interest, it may be reasonably held that authority has been imposed with the consent of the governed," as when a parent disciplines an uncomprehending child.

Noam Chomsky

Love and the English

Imaginary dialogue between the author and an average reader

(if he or she exists)

Reader: How have you selected the typical lovers of each age?

Author: There is no such thing as a "typical" or "average" lover in any age. Love is always unique. There are, of course, behaviour fashions followed by conformists, but every century has produced remarkable, one might say timeless lovers; the essence of love does not change - only the situations with which it has to grapple.

Reader: What prompted you to write about Love and the English in the first place?

Author: I was practically goaded into it while I was preparing Love and the French. A cultured Continental friend wrote to congratulate me upon the subject I had chosen, adding: "Of course, it would not have been possible to write a similar book on your countrymen. A magazine article would cover their amorous heritage, would it not?" What a challenge! Since then, I regret to say that I have found many people like yourself, here at home, whose doubts need to be dispelled.

Reader: Has the book been written, then, in a partisan spirit?

Author: I hope that my native sense of humour has prevented me from doing that. No - this book in defence of neglected love and forgotten lovers has been written for your pleasure and, incidentally, for mine; I have enjoyed writing it, and I hope that you will enjoy reading it. I need hardly point out that there are scores of omissions. Every one of the six chapters in this book could have easily been expanded into at least one volume, with contributions by a team of experts including a historian, a philosopher, a poet, a doctor, a sociologist...

Reader: The result would have been an encyclopaedia!

The soul of man under Socialism

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. 

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. 

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it.The people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.

Oscar Wilde

1854 - 1900

Um artista antifascista

A obra de Pablo Picasso inclui a barbárie de Guernica e a suavidade da pomba da paz. Desfigurou o humano em cortes geométricos e criou distorções estranhas e figuras de fluída graça.

Private healthcare

What these new bureaucratized forms of capitalism are really about is making state power an intrinsic element of the extraction of profit: you collude with government to create a regulatory regime that will guarantee widespread debt, then you use the court system to enforce it. There's a perfect synthesis of public and private power to guarantee a certain rate of profit to those who essentially fund the politicians.

David Graeber

1961 - 2020

Fritz Lang | 1927

Ano de 2026. Um futuro sombrio de dominação. Longas jornadas de trabalho: a ditadura do relógio (ver George Woodcock). Trabalhadores substituíveis como peças de uma engrenagem. Um clássico do expressionismo alemão.

Harrison Bergeron

Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

Kurt Vonnegut

1922 - 2007

The fragile art of existence

 

23 anos do falecimento de Evil Chuck Schuldiner o mentor e maestro das excelentes e furiosas bandas Death e Control Denied.

A livraria

Em The Bookshop, de Isabel Coixet, Emily Mortimer interpreta Florence Green, a persistente livreira que luta contra a preconceituosa população local para manter aberta sua livraria. Pense na atualidade do enredo principalmente se o telespectador levar em conta a geografia feudal e antiintelectual do Brasil.

Libraries

Libraries were very important to your intellectual development when you were a kid, weren't they?

I used to haunt the main public library in dowtown Philadelphia, which was extremely good. That's where I read all the offbeat anarchist and left-Marxist literature I'm always quoting. Those were days when people read, and used the libraries very extensively. Public services were richer in many ways back in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

I think that's one of the reasons why poor, even unemployed people living in slums seemed more hopeful back then. Maybe this is sentimentality, and it involves comparing a child's perceptions ans an adult's, but I think it's true.

Libraries were one of the factors. They weren't just for educated people - a lote of people used them. That's much less true now.

I'll tell you why I asked. Recently I went back to visit the public library I used when I was a kid, on 78th and York in New York. I hadn't been there in thirty-five years, and it's now in one of the richest districts in the country.

I discovered they had very few political books. When the librarian explained that branch libraries carry mostly bestsellers, I told him I'd be happy to donate some of our books.

He expressed mild interest and suggested I fill out a form. When I went over to the desk to get one, I found out that it costs 30$ to recommend a book you think the library should purchase!

It sounds similar to what you find in the publications industry in general, including bookstores. I travel a lot and often get stuck in some airport or other... because it's snowing in Chicago, say. I used to be able to find something I wanted to read in the airport bookstore - maybe a classic, maybe something current. Now it's almost impossible. (It's not just in the US, by the way. I was stuck at the airport in Naples not long ago and the bookstore there was awful too).

I think it's mostly just plain market pressures. Bestsellers move fast, and it costs money to keep books around that don't sell very quickly. Changes in the tax laws have exacerbated the problem, by making it more expensive for publishers to hold inventory, so books tend to get remaindered (sold off a cost and put out-of-print) much sooner.

I think political books are being harmed by this - if your go into the big chains, which pretty much dominate bookselling now, you certainly don't find many of them - but the same thing is true of most books. I don't think it's political censorship.

The right wing is promoting the idea of charging people to use the library.

That's part of the whole idea of redesigning society so that it just benefits the wealthy. Notice that they aren't calling for terminating the Pentagon. They're not crazy enough to believe it's defending us from the Martians or somebody, but they understand very clearly that it's a subsidy for the rich. So the Pentagon is fine, but libraries aren't.

Lexington, the Boston suburb where I live, is an upper-middle-class, professional town where people are willing and able to contribute to the library. I give money to it and use it, and benefit from the fact that it's quite good.

But I don't like the fact that zoning laws and inadequate public transportation virtually guarantee that only rich people can live in Lexington. In poorer neighborhoods, few people have enough money to contribute to the library, or time to use it, or knowledge of what to look for once they're there.

Let me tell you a dismal story. One of my daughters lived in a declining old mill town. It's not a horrible slum, but it's fading away. The town happens to have a rather nice public library - not a wonderful collection, but good things for children. It's nicely laid out, imaginatively designed, staffed by a couple of librarians.

I went with her kids on a Saturday afternoon, and nobody was there except a few children of local professional families. Where are the kids who ought to be there? I don't know, probably watching television, but going to the library just isn't the kind of thing they do.

It was the kind of thing you did if you were a working-class person fifty or sixty years ago. Emptying people's minds of the ability, or even the desire, to gain access to cultural resources - that's a tremendous victory for the system.

Noam Chomsky

Antiteatro

Em O teatro do Absurdo, de Martin Esslin, Ionesco nos dá uma ideia da dimensão do número cada vez maior de pessoas que ia aderindo a movimento fascista na Romênia. É notável a atualidade de sua argumentação:

Lembrei-me de que no curso de minha vida tenho ficado muito impressionado pelo que podemos chamar de correntes de opinião, sua rápida evolução, seu poder de contágio, que é o mesmo de uma epidemia de verdade. Repentinamente as pessoas se deixam invadir por uma nova religião, uma nova doutrina, um novo fanatismo. Em tais momentos testemunhamos uma verdadeira mutação mental.

Women

The time came to put Iris Duarte back on the plane. I felt no sadness while driving her to L.A. International. The sex had been fine; there had been laughter. I could hardly remember a more civilized time, neither of us making any demands, yet there had been warmth, it had not been without feeling, dead meat coupled with dead meat. I detested that type of swinging, the Los Angeles, Hollywood, Bel Air, Malibu, Laguna Beach kind of sex. Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part - a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each other. People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no gamble or humor in their game - it was corpse fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience down through the centuries. Some morals tended to keep people slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State. Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave alone.

Charles Bukowski

1920 - 1994

Caligari

The character of Caligari stands for an unlimited authority that idolizes power as such, and, to satisfy its lust for domination, rutlilessly violates all human rights and values. Functioning as a mere instrument, Cesare is not so much a guilty murderer as Caligari's innocent victim. This is how the authors themselves understood him. According to the pacifist-minded Janowitz, they had created Cesare with the dim design of portraying the common man who, under the pressure of compulsory military service, is drilled to kill and to be killed. The revolutionary meaning of the story reveals itself unmistakably at the end, with the disclosure of the psychiatrist as Caligari: reason overpowers unreasonable power, insane authority is symbolically abolished. Whether intentionally or not, Caligari exposes the soul wavering between tyranny and chaos, and facing a desperate situation: any escape from tyranny seems to throw it into a state of utter confusion. Quite logically, the film spreads an all-pervading atmosphere of horror. Like the Nazi world, that of Caligari overflows with sinister portents, acts of terror and outbursts of panic. The equation of horror and hopelessness comes to a climax in the final episode which pretends to re-establish normal life.

Siegfried Kracauer

1889 - 1966

Modernism in New York

Early one fall evening, I saw a lovely young woman in a glamorous redwine-colored suit, clearly returning from "Uptown" (a show? a grant? a job?) and climbing the long flights of stairs to her loft. In one arm she supported a big bag of groceries, with protruding French bread, while on the other, balanced delicately on her shoulder, was a great bundle of stretchers five feet long: a perfect expression, it seemed to me, of the modern sexuality and spirituality of our time. But just around the corner, alas, has lurked another archetypally modern figure, the real estate man, whose frantic speculations in the 1970s have made many fortunes in SoHo, and driven from their homes many artists who could not hope to afford the prices that their presence helped to create. Here, as in so many modern scenes, the ambiguities of development roll on.

Marshall Berman

1940 - 2013

Por que não me ufano

Cidadãos inteligentes estão sendo obrigados a ouvir ruídos que as pessoas muito pouco instruídas chamam de música. O projeto dos pobres e ricos subdesenvolvidos é reduzir a capacidade mental de qualquer um. Não sobrou um espaço, um ambiente silencioso onde as pessoas consigam falar de maneira inteligente e de forma educada. Família massa conseguiu destruir tudo disseminando como cultura letras que não enriquecem a linguagem dos colonizados.

Justiça

Todos nós sabemos que a ganância é um defeito moral, uma atitude má, um desejo excessivo e egoísta de obter ganhos e mesmo assim por que o povo fica satisfeito em premiar os maiores gananciosos? É tão difícil usar a inteligência para construir uma boa sociedade onde os princípios de justiça sejam a da equidade social e econômica, isto é, uma distribuição igualitária de renda e riqueza?

Tomem por exemplo a fortuna de Bill Gates (107,3 bilhões), ela é parte de um sistema que trabalha em benefício dos menos favorecidos? É justo esse patrimônio?

A distribuição de renda e oportunidades não devem ser fundamentadas em fatores arbitrários.

Por que não me ufano

O pensamento crítico deve revelar o cinismo da arena política dos subdesenvolvidos e expor a estupidez de todo o tipo de submissão. A tarefa do pensamento crítico é a de descrever a estrutura social e a de descobrir irregularidades, transgressões e as arbitrariedades de seus agentes nas estruturas públicas, sobretudo em uma periferia como o Brasil onde a corrupção e o nepotismo são práticas comuns.

No subdesenvolvido Brasil o dinheiro ainda é algo feudal, formador de guetos. O dinheiro não está a serviço da modernização, mas cria facções religiosas altamente desonestas que se infiltram nas edificações públicas para destruir qualquer projeto civilizacional.

Cats - A tribute to his life and legacy

Walter Chandoha

1920 - 2019

Por que não me ufano

Um caso ilustrativo de ignorância serve de alerta. Por exemplo, a ignorância do quão severo era o inverno russo levou a destruição o exército de Napoleão.

No Brasil, um misto de ignorância e perversidade (a pandemia Covid-19 foi tratada como uma "gripezinha" e o brasileiro que tomava banho no esgoto estava imune a tudo, note o raciocínio do "presidente da república") levou ao óbito mais de 700 mil pessoas. Remédio para vermes foi recomendado como se o brasileiro fosse um animal.

Em um sistema onde cada um é por si mesmo não pode surgir um "nós".

Force and opinion

The influential political scientist Harold Lasswell explained in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences that when elites lack the requisite force to compel obedience, social managers must turn to "a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda." He added the conventional justification: we must recognize the "ignorance and stupidity of the masses" and not succumb to "democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests."

Salvação cristã

A ideia de pastorear o rebanho aturdido é muito antiga. Remonta ao genocídio dos exploradores espanhóis que justificaram o seu terrorismo com as palavras do teólogo Francisco de Vitoria. Eles alegavam que "os nativos eram tão pouco capazes de se governar quanto os loucos, ou até as feras e os animais, considerando-se que seu alimento é não mais palatável e pouco melhor que o dos animais selvagens, e que sua estupidez é muito maior que a das crianças e loucos de outros países".

why I write

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, “I am going to produce a work of art.” I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

George Orwell

1903 - 1950

Deterring democracy

It is often not appreciated how profound and deeply-rooted is the contempt for democracy in the elite culture, and the fear it arouses.