The New Romantics

The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.

It is a mistake and a misreading of nature to think that you, a living creature, will be flourishing all the days of your life.

“People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.”

So this is what’s happened to the world: optimization trumps human preference. The people who want to win the argument are effectively prepared to ignore human truths to preserve the integrity of the artificial model.

"The Chinese say you need three things for paintings: the hand, the eye and the heart,” says the painter David Hockney. “I think that remark is very, very good. Two won’t do. A good eye and heart is not enough, neither is a good hand and eye.”

Do we need to practice being human again?

Simone Weil, writing in Oppression and Liberty (published posthumously in 1955):

“Never has the individual been so completely delivered up to a blind collectivity, and never have men been less capable, not only of subordinating their actions to their thoughts, but even of thinking.

I do not want to be in the business of manipulating your split-second attention.

“Your homework is to stop canceling each other, find out about punk, and get laidwhile you’re at it,” I told them. “Punk isn’t a hairstyle; it’s getting your friends together to make useful stories outside approved systems. And it’s still happening right now, all over the world.” MAGA has adopted an authoritarian style of punk that disdains what... See more