Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
In reducing it to a possession, citizenship-as-status taints the essence of Citizenship. This in turn creates the space for abuse of fundamental human rights and dignities, dehumanising those who do not have it.
Jon Alexander • Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us
Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University, wrote that a self-regulating market turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried the free market’s assumption that nature and human beings are ob
... See moreChris Hedges • Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
Positive psychology, like celebrity culture, the relentless drive to consume, and the diversionary appeals of mass entertainment, feeds off the unhappiness that comes from isolation and the loss of community. The corporate teaching that we can find happiness through conformity to corporate culture is a cruel trick, for it is corporate culture that
... See moreChris Hedges • Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
The more we sever ourselves from a literate, print-based world, a world of complexity and nuance, a world of ideas, for one informed by comforting, reassuring images, fantasies, slogans, celebrities, and a lust for violence, the more we are destined to implode. As the collapse continues and our suffering mounts, we yearn, like World Wrestling Enter
... See moreChris Hedges • Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
A populace deprived of the ability to separate lies from truth, that has become hostage to the fictional semblance of reality put forth by pseudo-events, is no longer capable of sustaining a free society.
Chris Hedges • Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
Inequality destroys the sense of shared citizenship, and with it self-government.
George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
To admit this is to admit the limits of state power and its legitimacy. Better to marginalize activists—to portray them as rabble on the fringe who are dangerous the way violent criminals are dangerous. Thus is the true danger to the status quo made into another “safe fear.” Thus are both the power and the legitimacy of the margins denied. Denied b
... See moreRebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut; that, in fact, we have no way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were.
Neil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
The sex those in the porn industry claim to promote is as fake, absurd, and unattainable as the façade of the Luxor casino and hotel. Porn is not about love or eroticism. It is about power and money. It is a transaction. It is based on the conversion of women into objects. They are assigned a monetary value and sexually exploited for profit. Most p
... See more