Sublime

However, he continues, over the last 50 years the need for people to be “legible” and fit into a standard model of work has merely become “industrially preferable.” This puts government and institutional leaders in a position where they are incentivized to convince people that following rigid paths in their institutions is the correct path for

The sense of individual ingenuity provides the temporary conviction that one is on the winning side of the system, somehow coming out ahead; but in the end there is a generalized leveling of all users into interchangeable objects of the same mass dispossession of time and praxis.

there is no disorder to straighten out, no threat for the self to defend against.

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.

In these labors that are purported to be labors of self-creation, the exercises provided are actually most effective not for the creation of newly invented selves but rather for the maintenance of existing notions of the self and its relation to the social and political worlds.