Showing posts with label Consciousness-Raising. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Consciousness-Raising. Show all posts
13 May 2010
20 November 2009
The People Will Give Strength Unto Their Poet
engraved on the Gdansk monument is the defiant penultimate stanza of Czesław Milosz's poem,
"You Who Wronged"
"Do not feel safe.
The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date."
Czesław Miłosz in the Guardian 2001
Czesław Miłosz in Wikipedia
enslavement through consciousness
The Captive Mind via Wikipedia
The heart of his book, The Captive Mind, is a portrayal of four gifted Polish men who all capitulated, in some fashion, to the demands of a totalitarian state.
He highlights the processes which force, cajole and woo thinking men and women to believe self-evident lies.
The Captive Mind via Amazon.co.uk
While banned in Poland, The Captive Mind circulated underground there, Czesław Miłosz being among those authors whose name could not be mentioned even in order to denounce."
"You Who Wronged"
"Do not feel safe.
The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date."
Czesław Miłosz in the Guardian 2001
Czesław Miłosz in Wikipedia
enslavement through consciousness
The Captive Mind via Wikipedia
The heart of his book, The Captive Mind, is a portrayal of four gifted Polish men who all capitulated, in some fashion, to the demands of a totalitarian state.
He highlights the processes which force, cajole and woo thinking men and women to believe self-evident lies.
The Captive Mind via Amazon.co.uk
While banned in Poland, The Captive Mind circulated underground there, Czesław Miłosz being among those authors whose name could not be mentioned even in order to denounce."
16 November 2009
Comfortable Slavery and Society as a Work of Art
"We must each of us generate in ourselves, and try to generate in others, the instinctual need for a life without fear, without brutality, and without stupidity."
"The fact that today we cannot identify any specific class or any specific group as a revolutionary force, this fact is no excuse for not using any and every possibility and method to arrest the engines of repression in the individual."
"By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests."
"The question is no longer: how can the individual satisfy his own needs without hurting others, but rather: how can he satisfy his needs without hurting himself, without reproducing, through his aspirations and satisfactions, his dependence on an exploitative apparatus which, in satisfying his needs, perpetuates his servitude?"
http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/index.html
http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/soundvideo.htm
"The fact that today we cannot identify any specific class or any specific group as a revolutionary force, this fact is no excuse for not using any and every possibility and method to arrest the engines of repression in the individual."
"By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests."
"The question is no longer: how can the individual satisfy his own needs without hurting others, but rather: how can he satisfy his needs without hurting himself, without reproducing, through his aspirations and satisfactions, his dependence on an exploitative apparatus which, in satisfying his needs, perpetuates his servitude?"
http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/index.html
http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/soundvideo.htm
02 November 2009
THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS
ABSURDITY and REVOLUTION
"From a lucid appreciation of the absurdity of our life three consequences flow, which Camus calls Revolt, Freedom and Passion."
By 'Revolt' Camus means defiance in the face of the bleak truth about the human condition, hopeless but not resigned, lending to life a certain grandeur.
"We must imagine Sisyphus happy."
"Recognition of the absurdity frees us from habit and convention: we see all things anew, and are inwardly liberated."
"By 'passion' Camus means the resolve to live as intensely as possible, not so as to escape the sense of absurdity but so as to face it with absolute lucidity."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus
In "The Myth of Sisyphus" Albert Camus elevates Sisyphus to the status of The Absurd Hero.
"Absurdity is a feeling which arises from the confrontation of the world, which is irrational, with the hopeless but profound human desire to make sense of our condition. The appropriate response to this situation is to live in full consciousness of it."
"From a lucid appreciation of the absurdity of our life three consequences flow, which Camus calls Revolt, Freedom and Passion."
By 'Revolt' Camus means defiance in the face of the bleak truth about the human condition, hopeless but not resigned, lending to life a certain grandeur.
"We must imagine Sisyphus happy."
"Recognition of the absurdity frees us from habit and convention: we see all things anew, and are inwardly liberated."
"By 'passion' Camus means the resolve to live as intensely as possible, not so as to escape the sense of absurdity but so as to face it with absolute lucidity."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus
In "The Myth of Sisyphus" Albert Camus elevates Sisyphus to the status of The Absurd Hero.
"Absurdity is a feeling which arises from the confrontation of the world, which is irrational, with the hopeless but profound human desire to make sense of our condition. The appropriate response to this situation is to live in full consciousness of it."
24 October 2009
Roll Up Your Sleeves
The Perception Gap
"A dangerous gap exists between our personal experience, which is mainly happy, and our view of a society in decline."
"Progressives want the world to be a better place. We bemoan its current inequities and oppression - yet if we fail to celebrate the progress that human beings have made, and if we sound as though the future is a fearful place, we belie our own philosophy. Instead, we need to address a deficit in social optimism that threatens the credibility of our core narrative."
"My starting point is the need to forge a new collectivism. It is in working with others on a shared project of social advance that we can be reconnected to the sense of collective agency so missing from modern political discourse."
It is the attitude of the spectator that induces pessimism, the experience of the participant that brings hope.
"The old collectivism is dead or dying. Its characteristics - hierarchical, bureaucratic, paternalistic - are no longer suited to the challenges or the mood of the times. The institutions of the new collectivism must be devolved, pluralistic, egalitarian and, most of all, self-actualising."
"A dangerous gap exists between our personal experience, which is mainly happy, and our view of a society in decline."
"Progressives want the world to be a better place. We bemoan its current inequities and oppression - yet if we fail to celebrate the progress that human beings have made, and if we sound as though the future is a fearful place, we belie our own philosophy. Instead, we need to address a deficit in social optimism that threatens the credibility of our core narrative."
"My starting point is the need to forge a new collectivism. It is in working with others on a shared project of social advance that we can be reconnected to the sense of collective agency so missing from modern political discourse."
It is the attitude of the spectator that induces pessimism, the experience of the participant that brings hope.
"The old collectivism is dead or dying. Its characteristics - hierarchical, bureaucratic, paternalistic - are no longer suited to the challenges or the mood of the times. The institutions of the new collectivism must be devolved, pluralistic, egalitarian and, most of all, self-actualising."
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