Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader argues that most oppressive systems of power, including classical Western colonialism and proponents of globalization, all use the idea of social harmony as a control mechanism. There is a vast difference, Nader points out, between social harmony and harmony ideology, between positivity and being genuinely positi
... See moreChris Hedges • Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
“Now we’re in an age where you can simply reinforce your own viewpoints. And it’s hard to have a discussion of the facts when you’re dealing with two separate sets of facts—two sets of talking points that came down from on high. With the Internet, all of us were going to be content producers, but it’s become an echo chamber.”
George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
When a culture chooses to believe anything that is not human can be property—a “resource” to burn, bulldoze, bastardize, pimp, torture, enslave, exterminate—this leads to the aggressive destruction of entire ecosystems, including old-growth forests, grasslands, wetlands, deserts, waterways, and other essential habitat. This destruction is speeding
... See moreJulie Holland • How Psychedelics Can Help Save the World: Visionary and Indigenous Voices Speak Out
In liberating ourselves by locking out transcendence, the price we paid was sealing ourselves in a cell. We thought we were our own liberators; turns out we might be our own jailers.
James K. A. Smith • On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts
The problems we face are structural. The old America is not coming back. Our financial system was taken hostage and looted by bankers, brokers, and speculators who told us that the old means of making capital by producing and manufacturing were outdated. They assured us money could be made out of money. They insisted that financial markets could be
... See moreChris Hedges • Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
Thus, I will seek to show that the Idea of freedom demands that we overcome the social form of wage labor. While the social form of wage labor bears the democratic promise of freedom and equality within itself, the dynamic of wage labor ultimately makes it impossible to achieve and sustain an actual democratic state, which would enable everyone to
... See moreMartin Hägglund • This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from reality. We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. Most of us
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