Sublime

Someone is going to be paying the costs of environmental destruction regardless.

In his novel The Double, José Saramago includes an epigraph: “Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.”

The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang—well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived.

But there was a bigger picture that I didn’t quite see, and that was the all-out war on meaning that this new stage of progressive-cloaked capitalism represented. In the end, what mattered most about those campaigns was the boldness with which they were broadcasting that, from here on out, nothing means anything anymore: if MLK and Gandhi and Bob D

I never forget Thoreau’s advice: “I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. . . .”

If we are going to take responsibility for our products from birth to rebirth, and if we encourage our customers to send in their pants for repair, and if at the end of their lives we promise to recycle them into other valuable products, then the smartest thing we can do is make those pants last as long as possible because you really don’t want to

For Ehrenreich, this was all “part of a larger withdrawal into individual concerns after the briefly thrilling communal uplift some had experienced in the 1960s …

With the public terrified and distracted, power-hungry players were able to move in and ram through policies that benefited corporate elites without debate or consent—not unlike the brutal methods deployed by torturers who use isolation and stress to soften up and break their prisoners.

“He not busy being born is busy dying.”