Lovelessness

The brazilian have trashing 

the beauty of the nature

as if it had no value at all.

Lovelessness

We living a culture
that treats both 

people 

and planet
like so much garbage.

Por que não me ufano

Não se pode confiar em instituições que têm em sua folha de pagamento demagogos e figuras vis e ignorantes.

Corporate dystopia

Political and economic agenda that benefits such a narrow portion of the population.

Capitalism

Manufacturing false hierarchies
in order to enforce a brutal class system.

Freedom and Government

The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.

Does the principle of toleration require us to tolerate those who advocate intolerance?

Bertrand Russel

1872 - 1970

Crítica

Tem maioridade aquele que fala por si mesmo, porque antes pensou por si mesmo e não apenas porque repete e memoriza; tem maioridade aquele que não é tutelado. Isso se manifesta na capacidade de resistência contra as opiniões impostas e, juntamente a isso, contra as instituições vigentes, contra tudo o que existe e que se justifica pura e simplesmente pelo fato de existir. Tal resistência, enquanto capacidade de discernir o que é conhecimento e o que é aceito apenas por convenção ou por coação autoritária, é uma crítica, cujo conceito já desponta do grego krino, que é diferenciar.

Theodor Adorno

1903 - 1969

Rest in power

Everything is dark.

Introduction

Ideas are like fish.

If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallowwater. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.

Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.

I look for a certain kind of fish that is important to me, one that can translate to cinema. But there are all kinds of fish swimming down there. There are fish for business, fish for sports. There are fish for everything.

Everything, anything that is a thing, comes up from thedeepest level. Modern physics calls that level the Unified Field. The more your consciousness — your awareness — is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source, and the bigger the fish you can catch.

The grabber-in-chief

The overarching task before us is not to rank our various issues — identity versus economics, race versus gender — and for one to vanquish all the others in some sort of oppression cage match. It is to understand in our bones how these forms of oppression intersect and prop each other up, creating the complex scaffolding that allowed a kleptocratic thug to grab the world’s most powerful job as if it were a hostess at a strip club.

The organic universe

When we look closely at a comet, there is a tiny nucleus, the solid body that constitutes the comet everywhere except when it's very close to the Sun. The icy nucleus is typically a few kilometers across-but when it comes close to the Sun, the icy nucleus outgasses mainly water vapor and produces the coma and a long and lovely tail.

What's happened to that stuff over the last 4.6 billion years?

The Earth formed from the collapse of lumps of matter of the sort condensing from the solar nebula. Therefore in its final stages of formation, it was collecting objects that collided at high velocity and produced a set of catastrophic events, including the melting of much of the surface. This, it turns out, was not a good environment for the origin of life, as you might have suspected. But after a while, when the final sweeping up of the debris in the solar system was more or less completed, water delivered from the outside or outgassed from the inside started forming on the surface, filling in the ancient impact craters. And a trickle of material was still falling in from space. At the same time, electrical discharges and ultraviolet light from the Sun and other energy sources produced in digenous organic matter.

Death

A escrita pôs em cena
uma população de mortos.

Modern political theories

Who is to say what role is fitting for me, or appropriate to my nature? If I’m not free to choose my social role for myself, I might well be forced into a role against my will. So the notion of fit can easily slide into slavery, if those in power decide that a certain group is somehow suited for a subordinate role.

História da sensibilidade

The challenge is to do the right thing to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way

O que enxerga e o que ouve o terceiro mundista provam que os seus sentidos recuaram. Uma história do amor não pode ser escrita pelos carentes de esmero.

As pessoas não têm a mesma sensibilidade: uns toleram o que outros não toleram. Uns foram condicionados e outros instruídos.

Mesmo vivendo em uma mesma sociedade os indivíduos não são contemporâneos. Não receberam a mesma cultura, e não podem ter os mesmos sentimentos. A morte do pensamento e o sequestro da capacidade de aprender são as características mais evidentes dos provincianos.

Há pouquíssimo incentivo para a vida da mente. O brasileiro nasce com o dom para conversa fiada e não desenvolve sua consciência com o passar dos anos.

Learning by doing

Being steeped in virtuous behavior helps us acquire the disposition to act virtuously.

Who has known the ocean?

Neither you nor I, with our earthbound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere.

Rachel Carson

1907 - 1964

Thinking like a planet

 

Buckminster Fuller popularized “spaceship earth,” which presents the planet as a kind of desperate life raft.

Literary politics

Em meados dos anos 1970, EUA, emergiram novas editoras, pequenas casas editoriais, cujos editores eram amantes de livros e não proprietários de editoras comerciais que visavam apenas lucrar com o que estava na moda. Os editores alternativos tomavam suas decisões por amor estético, político e crítico.

Os estadunidenses conseguiram formar uma sociedade letrada, bem diferente da realidade brasileira. Na América existem muito mais livrarias preocupadas em vender literatura de qualidade do que na periferia iletrada do capitalismo.

O homem medíocre gosta somente de bunda, praias lotadas, confusão e barulho, boteco, falação de merda (e isso não tem fim) e é facilmente usado pela elite do atraso e, sobretudo, é potencialmente fascista. Esse homem se contentou com a estrutura subdesenvolvida das cidades brasileiras.

Nesse contexto, fica difícil ensinar filosofia, formar leitores e construir uma sociedade letrada. No Brasil, o antiintelectualismo evangélico triunfou. A mistificação e a ganância sobrepõem o intelecto e a gentileza. A alienação e o conformismo são ótimos travesseiros que engendram sonhos antimodernos.

Por que não me ufano

A audiência para a melhor literatura continua diminuindo na periferia do capitalismo.

The book of disquiet

Today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. Today the right to live and triumph is awarded on virtually the same basis as admission into an insane asylum: an inability to think, amorality, and nervous excitability.

Bernardo Soares

Hitler and psychological factors in his life

 

There were other important circumstances in Adolf Hitler's life wich were influential and found their fulfillment in totalitarian systems.

A. He was born from a peasant stock, by tradition prepared to carry a heavy load of work, with persistency.

B. He was baptized in the catholic church, an institution well know to have totalitarian orientations, and wich up to this day in principle proclains authority over all the catholics in the world. Having absorbed that totalitarian orientation from childhood up, which applies also to Mussolini, Stalin, etc., it was simple for those so trained to switch to state totalitarianism, where such leaders could find a "lebensraum" for themselves as individuals, thus enhancing their own "egos", and incidentally filling their pockets. No one who has actually studied the public appearences of various totalitarian "fuhrers" can miss the utter similary between their reactions and the reactions of the mobs to them. They act like little "gods on wheels", and the mobs react with unreasoned, blind, fanatical subjection, wich the fuhrers and their aides know how to manufacture.

C. Hitler was born into Austrian bureaucracy, one the most inefficient, dishonest, hypocritical, etc., bureaucracies in the world, permeated with the Hapsburg motto, "Divide et impera". The older Schicklgruber wanted his son also to become a Hapsburg bureaucrat. Schicklgruber, Jr. had a natural repulsion for them, and so deliberatery boycotted any education, to disqualify himself for such a fate. This lack of education ostracized him from the class of so-called "intelligentsia", to wich Hapsburg bureaucrat eventually belonged. Through living necessities he had to become a plin labour hand, yet because of his paranoia tendences, delusions of grandeur based on unhealthy worship of historical "heroes", etc., he was also not acceptable to the plains workers, who are generally sane and do not look at life as a wagnerian opera. So in reality he found that he was not acceptable anywhere, belonged nowhere, a misfit everywhere, until he adhered to totalitarianism as a "religion" which he and his closet associated modified to suit Prussian character, selected by them as a standard of german perfection, to be imposed on the rest of the world.

D. When he joined the German army with its orderly efficiency, etc, he found an ideal for himself as an escape from Hapsburg decadence. No matter how he hated the Hapsburg polite perfidy, he was too much of an Austrian not to utilize to the limit the Hapsburg methods. Ultimately through this combination of methods he "out-prussianed" the Prussians, who particular arrogant, brutal methods were never approved and often disliked throughout the world and even in Germany.

I give these data as partial explanations of how through life and other circumstances the whole life of Hitler, as well as his political program, was based on hate, revenge and destruction of what he feared and hated as a person, driven by his delusions of persecution and grandeur. It was only natural in his "chosen people", obviously there is no place in this world for two or more "chosen people". The absurdity of hitler's ignorant antropological theories has been definitely established by science and history, and in fact are not taken seriously by many of the informed nazi leaders them selves.

Some uch analysis of a few of the more important factors in Hitler's life indicates how it is "mental" illness developed, involving "inferiority" and "persecution" complexes, etc. And explains why for his own comfort he surrounded himself personality with mostly psychopathological people, although their psychiatric classifications may be different.

Very soon psychiatric treatises will be written on the "Jehovah complex" of Schicklgruber, Jr., etc. Perhaps the following quotations will ilutrate how the "Jehovah", as recorded in exodus 19 and 20, is being copied today:

"Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be mine own possession from among all peoples: for all the earth is mine: and ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. These are the words which thou shart speak unto the children of Israel [Nazis]".

Or, "I am Jehovah thy god, who brought thee... out of the house od bondage [England].

Or, "for I Jehovah thy god am a jealous god, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that hate me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments."

Or, "An altar of Earth thou shalt make unto, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt-offerings, and thy peace-offerings,thy heep, and thine oxen: in every place where I record my name I come to ee and I ill less thee."

These suggestions re em only to indicate how psychiatrists can help future historians.

Crítica

Há uma distinção, que muitas vezes se perde nas discussões atuais, entre o artístico e o popular. O pop, o popular, simplesmente, é a arte para milhões. E as artes sonoras, visuais e literárias têm todas os seus gêneros populares. Essencialmente todas as formas populares são mais diretas em sua comunicação, mais universalmente acessíveis, menos inovadoras na forma, menos complexas em ideias, mais recheadas de clichês, mais conducentes à produção colaborativa, mais subservientes tanto às manias reconhecidamente transitórias como às convenções da mídia. Assim como os jornais e as revistas são feitos para serem rapidamente jogados fora, também pelo seu formato e intenção, o mesmo se passa com os posters e os discos de música pop.

O artístico, ao contrário do popular (a arte ao contrário do pop), não está limitado pelas exigências do mercado massificado, ou por convenções estruturais estabelecidas, ou por materiais disponíveis. Por isso, o popular tenta igualar (ou imitar) a liberdade criativa da arte. E não vice-versa. Tudo o que é popular é também, por definição, dirigido, não para alguns poucos, como é mais o caso da arte mais séria, mas para a grande maioria. Por isso, o popular, quanto mais sucedido, é muito mais comercial do que o artístico. A mídia essencialmente popular para quem escreve é o jornal, explicitamente criado para ser lido hoje e jogado fora amanhã. E muito do que aparece escrito nos livrinhos de bolso, de grandes tiragens e de baixo preço, é também, similarmente, literatura popular. A obra de grande arte será apreciado por alguns poucos.

Pode-se ensinar a escrever?

Existe uma tecnologia definida em relação ao uso negativo das palavras que causam confusão, que criam e agravam conflitos e que minimizam os oponentes. Isto é o oposto do que um escritor faz. Naquele caso as palavras, quanto mais abstratas e as declarações, quanto mais desimportantes, melhor. Esta tecnologia tem sido desenvolvida na mass media por Hearts e outros, refinada em Life e Time, e levada mais adiante ainda pela CIA e por periódicos subsidiados como Encounter.

William Burroughs

1914 - 1997

The dispossessed

Abbenay was poisonless: a bare city, bright, the colors light and hard, the air pure. It was quiet. You could see it all, laid out as plain as spilt salt.

Nothing was hidden.

Shevek passed a glassworks, the workman dipping up a great molten blob as casually as a cook serves soup.

The activity going on in each place was facinating, and mostly out in full view. No doors were locked few shut. There were no disguises and no advertisements.

The alien grass was soft underfoot. It was like walking on living flesh.

It was customary to start conversation with a stranger by offering your name as a kind of handle for him to take hold of. There where not many other handles to ofter. There was no rank, no terms of rank, no conventional repectful forms of address.

What’s the ugliest part of your body?

What's the ugliest

Part of your body?

What's the ugliest

Part of your body?

Some say your nose

Some say your toes

(I think it's your mind)

But I think it's your mind

(Your mind)

I think it's your mind

All your children are poor

Unfortunate victims of

Systems beyond their control

A plague upon your ignorance e the gray

Despair of your ugly life

Where did Annie go

When she went to town?

Who are all those creeps

That she brings around?

All your children are poor

Unfortunate victims of lies you believe

A plague upo your ignorance that keeps

The young from the truth they deserve

Frank Zappa

1940 - 1993

Again Aristotle

Who will enact wise policies, 

making everyone better off?

Por que não me ufano

No Brasil, não há mais necessidade de demonstrar excelência cívica para merecer o reconhecimento político e ser influente. Promover uma vida boa (novamente Aristóteles) não está na agenda política.

Por que não me ufano

In a mass democratic society, it helps to look good 

on television, and to speak in short, superficial sound bites

A política deveria ser o debate racional sobre fatos e acontecimentos. Isso seria o básico. Mas ela está cumprindo essa tarefa?

O que acontece quando o cidadão não sabe o que se passa no interior do Estado, as razões que movem os seus representantes, o volume de capital que é transferido, o lobby nos saguões dos palácios?

Mesmo em uma democracia capitalista (eu prefiro o termo plutocracia) os cidadãos estariam discutindo os seus problemas reais e suas soluções. E não se hostilizando mutuamente. E não apenas a solução, mas buscando construir uma boa sociedade, qualidade de vida, etc.

Somente os oligarcas devem comandar? Mas a política não envolve apenas proteção da propriedade ou promoção da prosperidade econômica. E muito pouco ela serve apenas para dar à maioria o direito de decidir.

Afinal, qual é o propósito da "comunidade política" nacional?

Harrison Bergeron

Citizens of above average intelligence were required to wear mental handicap radios in their ears. Every twenty seconds or so, a government transmitter would send out a sharp noise to prevent them "from taking unfair advantage of their brains".

A theory of justice

The difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be. Those who have been favored by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out. The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well. No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society. But it does not follow that one should eliminate these distinctions. There is another way to deal with them. The basic structure of society can be arranged so that these contingencies work for the good of the least fortunate.

John Rawls

1921 - 2002

Por que não me ufano

A consciência que norteia o parlamento brasileiro não é o da dignidade, mas o da provocação, gritaria e troca de acusações e difamações. Essa é a tradição da classe dominante, transformar a arena política numa rinha de galinhas para apenas perpetuar seus privilégios e servir de distração e representação para a massa de ignorantes histéricos.

Definition of poetry

It's a whistle blown ripe in a trice,
It's the cracking of ice in a gale,
It's a night that turns green leaves to ice,
It's a duel of two nightingales.

It is sweet-peas run gloriously wild,
It's the world's twinking tears in the pod,
It is Figaro like hot hail hurled
From the flutes on the wet flower bed.

It is all that the night hopes to find
On the bottom of deep bathing pools,
It's the star carried to the fish-pond
In your hands, wet and trembling and cool.

This close air is as flat as the boards
In the pond. The sky's flat on its face.
It would be fun if these stars guffawed -
But the universe is a dull place.

Boris Pasternak

1890 - 1960

Letter

I not only love, not only admire, not only adore your music, I have been and am still falling in love with it. I could write a book more than 300 pages long about it.

Marcel Proust to Gabriel Fauré

1897

Assisted suicide

 

Jack Kevorkian administrava drogas letais a pacientes terminais que desejavam morrer. O "doutor da morte" como era conhecido ajudou 130 pessoas a darem um fim ao sofrimento. No estado de origem de Dr. Death, o suicídio assistido é ilegal. Pegou oito anos de prisão.

Mas a sua ideia levantou uma questão: não seria injusto proibir o suicídio se a vida pertence à própria pessoa e ela deveria ser livre para desistir dela mesmo sob um acordo com o profissional clínico que lhe disponha a ajudar?

Por que não me ufano

O Brasil está sendo planejado como uma comunidade supremamente violenta, mas também supremamente burra. A exaltação cega da comunidade não exclui a perpetuação da miséria, mas a reforça e inevitavelmente leva a ela.

Sem uma perspectiva história, o indivíduo fica sem compreender o poder político-religioso envolto e prepara o caminho para uma aceitação distraída da propaganda de todos os tipos de sentimentos alienantes e destrutivos.

A desigualdade corroeu a virtude cívica e a política nacional não é conduzida com base no respeito mútuo.

Consensual cannibalism

In 2001, a strange encounter took place in the German village of Rotenburg. Bernd-Jurgen Brandes, a forty-three-year-old software engineer, responded to an Internet ad seeking someone willing to be killed and eaten. The ad had been posted by Armin Meiwes, forty-two, a computer technician. Meiwes was offering no monetary compensation, only the experience itself. Some two hundred people replied to the ad. Four traveled to Meiwes’s farmhouse for an interview, but decided they were not interested. But when Brandes met with Meiwes and considered his proposal over coffee, he gave his consent. Meiwes proceeded to kill his guest, carve up the corpse, and store it in plastic bags in his freezer. By the time he was arrested, the “Cannibal of Rotenburg” had consumed over forty pounds of his willing victim, cooking some of him in olive oil and garlic.

When Meiwes was brought to trial, the lurid case fascinated the public and confounded the court. Germany has no law against cannibalism. The perpetrator could not be convicted of murder, the defense maintained, because the victim was a willing participant in his own death. Meiwes’s lawyer argued that his client could be guilty only of “killing on request,” a form of assisted suicide that carries a maximum five-year sentence. The court attempted to resolve the conundrum by convicting Meiwes of manslaughter and sentencing him to eight and a half years in prison.But two years later, an appeals court overturned the conviction as too lenient, and sentenced Meiwes to life in prison. In a bizarre denouement to the sordid tale, the cannibal killer has reportedly become a vegetarian in prison, on the grounds that factory farming is inhumane.

Cannibalism between consenting adults poses the ultimate test for the libertarian principle of selfownership and the idea of justice that follows from it. It is an extreme form of assisted suicide. Since it has nothing to do with relieving the pain of a terminally ill patient, it can be justified only on the grounds that we own our bodies and lives, and may do with them what we please. If the libertarian claim is right, banning consensual cannibalism is unjust, a violation of the right to liberty. The state may no more punish Armin Meiwes than it may tax Bill Gates and Michael Jordan to help the poor.

Justice

Who determine whether the initial holdings that gave rise to today’s economic positions were themselves just or ill-gotten?

How can we know to what extent today’s distribution of income and wealth reflects illegitimate seizures of land or other assets through force, theft, or fraud generations ago?

Redress past wrongs or sake of bringing about greater economic equality? Or both?

Fascinating fascism

Praise of Vertov's films always presupposes the knowledge that he was all attractive person and an intelligent and original artist-thinker, eventually crushed by the dictator ship which he served. And most of the contemporary audience for Vertov (as for Eisenstein and Pudovkin) assumes that the film propagandists in the early years of the Soviet Union were illustrating a noble ideal, however much it was betrayed in practice. But praise of Riefenstahl has no such recourse, since nobody, not even her rehabilitators, has managed to make Riefenstahl seem even likable; and she is no thinker at all.

Susan Sontag

1933 - 2004

Vida intelectual

Em 1949, no campus de Berkeley, Susan Sontag conheceu a belíssima Harriet Sohmers com quem manteve um relacionamento duradouro. Na Universidade de Chicago, Sontag se apaixonou pelas aulas do filósofo Kenneth Burke, dois anos depois, se casaria com Philip Rieff.

Conditioned

In Brazil, 

there is a general fascination 

among the young with illusion, 

with the irrational.

Perpetual misery

Never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously politicized in Brazil. The rituals of domination and enslavement being more and more practiced.

Under the sign of Saturn

 

The work of memory collapse time.

Memory, the staging of the past, turns the flow of events into tableaux.

The disconsolate chronicle of world history.

Benjamin's recurrent themes are, characteristically, means of spatializing the world: for example, his notion of ideas and experiences as ruins. To understand somethings is to understand is topography, to know to chair it.

The self is a text - it has to be deciphered. (Hence, this is an apt temperament for intelectuals.) The self is a project, something to the built. (Hence, this is an apt temperament for artists.)

Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.

The ethical task of the modern writer is to of shallow inwardness, the consoling notion of the universally human, dilettantish creativity, and empty phrases.

On Paul Goodman

The first book I ever read of Paul Goodman - I was seventeen - was a collection of stories called The Break-up of Our Camp, published by New Directions. Within a year I had read everything he'd published, and from then on started keeping up. There is no living American writer for whom I have felt the same simple curiosity to read as quickly as possible anything he wrote, on any subject. That I mostly agreed with what he thought was not the main reason; there are other writers I agree with to whom I am not so loyal. It was that voice of his that seduced me - that direct, cranky, egotistical, generous American voice.

Paul Goodman's voice is the real thing. There has not been such a convincing, genuine, singular voice in our language since D. H. Lawrence. Paul Goodman's voice touched everything he wrote about with intensi ty, interest, and his own terribly appealing sureness and awkwardness. What he wrote was a nervy mixture of syntactical stiffness and verbal felicity; he was capable of writing sentences of a wonderful purity of style and vivacity of language, and also capable of wri ting so sloppily and clumsily that one imagined he must be doing it on purpose. But it never mattered. It was his voice, that is to say, his intelligence and the poetry of his intelligence incarnated, which kept me a loyal and passionate addict. For twenty years he has been to me quite simply the most important American writer. He was our Sartre, our Cocteau.I gained energy from reading Paul Goodman.

He was one of that small company of writers, living and dead, who established for me the value of being a writer and from whose work I drew the standards by which I measured my own.

Susan Sontag

1972

A History of American Atheism

Princeton University

The village atheist came to be seen as a necessary secularist critic of America’s dominant Protestant faith, a freethinking nonconformist in a country that demanded all too much public piety. The village atheist was scorned by many as a blaspheming subversive and admired by others as a courageous defender of intellectual independence and church-state separation.

I wanted to retell the history of secularism in the United States from the ground up with a focus squarely on the folks who proclaimed themselves atheists, infidels, unbelievers, and freethinkers. I wanted to reconsider these dissenters as an irreligious minority, not the bearers of a triumphant secularism that redefines the entire age, but a much tinier, more embattled group who had to fight long and hard for equal liberty and civic acceptance in American culture.

Leigh Eric Schmidt

Yes, again!

Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heardthe voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction).

The most hated woman

Na história de Madalyn O'Hair, grupos religiosos conseguiram converter o filho mais velho da militante do ateísmo e usaram-no como bucha de canhão para inventar difamações para atacá-la. A religião é criminosa, ela consegue manipular um jovem para degradar a própria família. 

Madalyn ganhou notoriedade nacional ao processar a direção de uma escola por forçar seu filho a rezar. Em 1963, O'Hair fundou a American Atheists. Em 1995, a advogada foi brutalmente assassinada.

I, etcetera

I said earlier that the task of the writer is to pay attention to the world, but obviously I think that the task of the writer, as I conceive of it for myself, is also to be in an aggressive and adversarial relationship to falsehoods of all kinds... and, once again, knowing perfectly well that this is an endless task, since you’re never going to end falsehood or false consciousness or systems of interpretation. But there should always be some people in any generation who are attacking these things, and that’s what disturbs me so much about most places in the world where the only criticism of society comes from the state itself. I think there should always be freelance people who, however quixotic it may be, are trying to lop off a couple of more heads, trying to destroy hallucination and falsehood and demagogy — and making things more complicated, because there’s an inevitable drift towards making things more simple. But for me, the most awful thing would be to feel that I’d agree with the things I’ve already said and written — that is what would make me most uncomfortable because that would mean that I had stopped thinking.

Susan Sontag | 1979

The anthropic principle

A sense of cosmic specialness is no guarantee of good stewardship. But it does helpfully focus attention on what we are doing to this special planet. You don’t need to invoke some imagined law of the universe — that all civilizations are kamikaze ones—to explain the wreckage. You need look only at the choices we have made, collectively; and, collectively, we are at present choosing to wreck it.

Will we stop? “Thinking like a planet” is so alien to the perspectives of modern life—so far from thinking like a neoliberal subject in a ruthless competitive system—that the phrase sounds at first lifted from kindergarten.

Interview

Someone once told me that you used to read a book a day.

I read an enormous amount and, in large part, quiet mindlessly. I love to read the way people love to watch television, and I kind of nod out over it. If I'm depressed I pick up a book and I feel better.

Do you write sitting on a chair and at a desk?

I tend to write first drafts lying on a bed, stretched out. Then, as soon as I have something to type out, I go to a desk and a wooden chair, and from then on it’s all at the typewriter. How do you write?

At a desk with a fairly hard chair and lots of things scattered around.

But don’t you think you'd write differently if you were all naked and wrapped in velvet? [laughing] There are all these stories about Goethe, or maybe it was Schiller, who used to write with his feet in warm water. And Wagner, who only composed in silk robes with incense and perfume in the room.

Was there a particular book that you read when you were young that made you want to become a writer?

The book that made me want to become a writer was Martin Eden by Jack London — and it had a suicide at the end! I read it when I was thirteen. I couldn’t possibly have the same thrill reading that novel today — Jack London isn’t a satisfying enough writer for an adult person living now.

Verdadeiramente falso

F for Fake, de Orson Welles | 1973

It's time for an introduction. 

Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction 

this is a film about trickery and fraud... about lies.

Orson W.

A obra de arte 

na era de sua reprodutibilidade técnica

Um documentário sobre a natureza do mundo:

um mundo de falsários.

The common law

Until lately the best thing that I was able to think of in favor of civilization, apart from blind acceptance of the order of the universe, was that it made possible the artist, the poet, the philosopher, and the man of science. But I think that is not the greatest thing. Now I believe that the greatest thing is a matter that comes directly home to us all. When it is said that we are too much occupied with the means of living to live, I answer that the chief Worth of civilization is just that it makes the means of living more complex; that it calls for great and combined intellectual efforts, instead of simple, uncoordinated ones, in order that the crowd may be fed and clothed and housed and moved from place to place. Because more complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and richer life. They mean more life. Life is a end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it. I will add but a word. We are all very near despair.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

1841 - 1935

The uninhabitable earth

Decades of climate denial and disinformation have made global warming not merely an ecological crisis but an incredibly high-stakes wager on the legitimacy and validity of science and the scientific method itself.

The question of how bad things will get its not actually a test of the science, it is a bet on human activity.

Critical path

 

My definition of the word believe means to accept an explanation of physical phenomena without any experiential evidence. At the outset of my resolve not only to do my own thinking but to keep that thinking concerned only with directly experienced evidence, I resolved to abandon completely all that I ever had been taught to believe. Experience had demonstrated to me that most people had an authority-trusting sense that persuaded them to believingly accept the dogma and legends of one religious group or another and to join that group’s formalized worship of God.

Buckminster Fuller

1895 - 1983

Por que não me ufano

O que se convencionou chamar de cultura no Brasil não deixa de ser uma manufatura por atacado para o mercado. Muita coisa hoje situada na "sociedade" não passa de meros objetos de consumo (corpos também são objetos assim como ideias) ou simplesmente lixo cultural. A má qualidade da cultura de massa em conjunto fabrica músicas ruins e vulgares, letras que insistem em não enriquecer o cidadão muito pouco instruído e completamente precarizado pela exploração capitalista, podcast cujos roteiros são conversas vazias e sem nenhuma estratégia voltada para construir uma boa sociedade. A cultura de massa é um empreendimento comercial, sua obrigação primordial não é se preocupar com o bem comum, erguer uma sociedade justa, conscientizar os seus espectadores, mas gerar lucro para seus acionistas e promover todo tipo de retardo mental.

On language

Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn't talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their consciences. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the consciences of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

Utopia

 

Louis Sébastien Mercier foi um militante do Iluminismo e defensor da palavra escrita como agente do progresso. Publicou em 1771 uma obra futurística intitulada de L'an 2440.

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.