Sublime

With such awareness, the subliminal life, private and social, has been hoicked up into full view, with the result that we have “social consciousness” presented to us as a cause of guilt-feelings. Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather than categories, and of total social involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual se

This function is never more vital than when an elite group is doing something unprecedented and thus by its very nature is threatening to people who are more comfortable with what has been than with what might be.

cultures: all societies must resolve a small set of questions about how to order society, the most important being how to balance the needs of individuals and groups.

too—but the (perhaps temporary) dominance of our species over the globe today is witness to the augmentation of human reason—applied to local, not global, concerns—that has been made possible by these social artifacts.

But from the standpoint of modern sociology we feel that man is necessarily a social thing, if only for the reason that no individual can come into being without a father and a mother—and this is already society.

Would you characterize this media analysis as a “conspiracy theory” at all? It’s precisely the opposite of conspiracy theory, actually—in fact, in general this analysis tends to downplay the role of individuals: they’re just replaceable pieces.

By the fact of his living he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove.

see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.