Sublime

Pagan philosophers were big on eugenics, to use a term that became popular in the nineteenth century. They thought humans should be bred as carefully as we breed cattle. And they thought the children born of those carefully planned unions should be brought up primarily to be useful. Utility was the key factor in deciding whether a human being was w

a civilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that leads to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow old with confounding rapidity,

Liebe etwa ist ein Hormonzustand, der durch die Sirenengesänge, die er auslöst, den hohen Aufwand der Brutpflege von Homo sapiens sichern soll. Der Gefühlsrausch der Erotik solle die Eltern so anstrengender Jungtiere wie unserer bei der Stange halten. Analog habe auch das Ende der Liebe wieder einen Vorteil: Kontrollierter Partnerwechsel sichere ei

As soon as enough people in contemporary societies progress beyond adolescence, the entire consumer-driven economy and egocentric lifestyle will implode. The adolescent society is actually quite unstable due to its incongruence with the primary patterns of living systems. The industrial growth society is simply incompatible with collective human ma

The more rounded person morphed into the increasingly entitled individual as top-down paternalism replaced communal reciprocity. With the rise of Benthamite utilitarian technocracy and Rawlsian liberal legalism, the conception of citizens as ethical actors with obligations towards others was gradually abandoned in favour of the new notion of mere c

By the turn of the century, advertisers no longer assumed rationality on the part of their potential customers. Advertising became one part depth psychology, one part aesthetic theory. Reason had to move itself to other arenas.

For all kinds of social purposes he has the calculable orbit of the man in the caste or the servile state; but in the story of his own soul he is still pursuing, at great peril, his own adventure.

For the situation is this: our greatest peril lurks in the European drift towards egalitarianism, for it is this prospect which wearies us – we see today nothing which wishes to be greater, we surmise that everything is still, retreating, going backwards, regressing towards something more reserved, more inoffensive, more cunning, more comfortable,

The problem of the modern world, as also of the degradation of the environment, isn’t technology or a way of life or an ideology, but the ubiquity and rule of a certain kind of human….