ghostlylightdonut

[ghostlylightdonut]

There’s an ancient Hebrew proverb that says, “Life and death is in the power of the tongue.”

[ghostlylightdonut]

I was asking to be seen, and respected. I was asking to be known.

Sharon Stone

[ghostlylightdonut]

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process (s)he does not become a monster. For when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Nietzsche

[ghostlylightdonut]

My impression is this: in conditions of info-acceleration and hypercomplexity, as the conscious and rational will becomes unable to check and to adjust the trends, the trends themselves become self-reinforcing up to the point of final collapse. Look at the vicious circle: right-wing electoral victories and dictatorships of ignorance — Franco Berardi (The Uprising, page 12)

In conditions of social hypercomplexity, human beings tend to act as a swarm. When the infosphere is too dense and too fast for a conscious elaboration of information, people tend to conform to shared behavior. In a letter to John Seabrook, Bill Gates wrote 'the digital revolution is all about facilitation--creating the tools to make things easy.' In a broader sense, we may say that in the digital age, power is all about making things easy. — Franco Berardi (The Uprising, page 15)

In a swarm it is not impossible to say 'no.' It's irrelevant. You can express your refusal, your rebellion and your nonalignment, but this is not going to change the direction of the swarm, nor is it going to affect the way in which the swarm's brain is elaborating information. — Franco Berardi (The Uprising, page 16)

It is useless to preach a sermon to those who can only express their revolt in a violent way. The medic does not judge, but heals, and the task of the movement is to act as a medic, not as a judge. What we should be able to communicate to the rioters, the looters, the black bloc, and the cassseurs is a truth that we have to build together and to spread: that a collective mantra chanted by millions of people will tear down the walls of Jericho much better than a pickaxe or bomb. — Franco Berardi (The Uprising, page 133)

Similarly, in the sphere of communication, language is traded and valued as something that is performed. Effectiveness, not truth value, is the rule of language in the sphere of communication. Pragmatics, not hermeneutics, is the methodology for understanding social communication, particularly in the age of new media. — Franco Berardi (The Uprising, page 138)

Wikileaks has displayed the infinite potency of the collective networked intelligence. The unleashing of the creative force of the general intellect is the momentous event that Julian Assange has been able to orchestrate. I don't think that we really have to know the contents of all those cables and emails that Wikileaks disclosed. Actually, we already knew that diplomats are paid to lie, and that soldiers are paid for killing civilians. — Franco Berardi (The Uprising, page 142)

The ambiguity of the info-rhizomatic territory is crystal clear: info-technology is standardizing subjectivity and language, inscribing techno-linguistic interfaces which automize enunciation. — Franco Berardi (The Uprising, page 153)

Digital financial capitalism has created a closed reality which cannot be overcome with the techniques of politics, of conscious organized voluntary action, and of government. Only an act of language can give us the ability to see and to create a new human condition, where we now see only barbarism and violence. Only an act of language escaping the technical automatisms of financial capitalism will make possible the emergence of a new life form. The new form of life will be the social and instinctual body that the general intellect is deprived of inside the present condition of the financial dictatorship. — Franco Berardi (The Uprising, page 169)

[ghostlylightdonut]

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

T. S. Eliot, East Coker (No. 2 of Four Quartets).

[ghostlylightdonut]

The very idea of a national plan, which would be devised at the capital and would then reorder the periphery after its own image into quasi-military units obeying a single command, was profoundly centralizing. Each unit at the periphery was tied not so much to its neighboring settlement as to the command center in the capital; the lines of communication rather resembled the converging lines used to organize perspective in early Renaissance paintings. The convention of perspective […] centers everything in the eye of the beholder. It is like a beam from a lighthouse—only instead of travelling outward, appearances travel in. The conventions called those appearances reality. Perspective makes the single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges on the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed    

[ghostlylightdonut]

Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek - The Original Economics Rap Ba...

[ghostlylightdonut]

An expert is a man who has stopped thinking because 'he knows'.

Aphorism by Frank Lloyd Wright

[ghostlylightdonut]

Love is the very difficult understanding that something other than yourself is real.

Iris Murdoch

[ghostlylightdonut]

In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him — if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking — then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.

C.S. Lewis on suffering and what it means to have free will in a universe of fixed laws. (”Divine Omnipotence”. The Problem of Pain, 1940.)

[ghostlylightdonut]

We march through the world armed with intuition and rationality to conquer the unknown, the two in near-constant friction in a culture that frames them as opposing forces. We turn to science and the scientific method as the ultimate bastion of rationality in our quest for Truth. But science isn’t merely reason, science is culture. It’s a poetic and practical sensemaking mechanism for the universe and our place in it, the totality of whose machinery is greater than the sum of its logical parts.

Maria Popova

[ghostlylightdonut]

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble.    If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.    On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.    Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future. And it is precisely the mix of these two modes of thought that is central to the success of science.

Carl Sagan

[ghostlylightdonut]

Carl wanted us to see ourselves not as the failed clay of a disappointed Creator but as starstuff, made of atoms forged in the fiery hearts of distant stars. To him we were “starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of 10 billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.” For him science was, in part, a kind of “informed worship.” No single step in the pursuit of enlightenment should ever be considered sacred; only the search was.

Ann Druyan, on late husband Carl Sagan.

[ghostlylightdonut]

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

Albert Einstein

[ghostlylightdonut]

Yet I know that I am Poet! I pass you my Poem. A poem doesn’t do everything for you. You are supposed to go on with your thinking. You are supposed to enrich the other person’s poem with your extensions, your uniquely personal understandings, thus making the poem serve you. I pass you my Poem! — to tell you we are all vulnerable — the midget, the Mighty, the richest, the poor. Men, women, children, and trees. I am vulnerable. Hector Pieterson was vulnerable. My Poem is life, and not finished. It shall never be finished. My Poem is life, and can grow. Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can. I give you what I have. You don’t get all your questions answered in this world. How many answers shall be found in the developing world of my Poem? I don’t know. Nevertheless I put my Poem, which is my life, into your hands, where it will do the best it can. I am not a tight-faced Poet. I am tired of little tight-faced poets sitting down to shape perfect unimportant pieces. Poems that cough lightly — catch back a sneeze. This is the time for Big Poems, roaring up out of sleaze, poems from ice, from vomit, and from tainted blood. This is the time for stiff or viscous poems. Big, and Big.

“Winnie” by Gwendolyn Brooks, 1988

[ghostlylightdonut]

Western epistemology has assumed that the prized relationship between individual and world is one of distance. [...] But if the clinical yield of depth psychology has taught anything at all it is that this distance and separation has a toll: the more and more common clinical themes of abandonment, isolation, meaninglessness come to mind. The methodology that supports depth psychology recalls and invokes a primal way of attending to the world. It is not based on the way subject and object are distinct, but attends to the ways and means by which subject and object, in any given moment, interpenetrate.

KURAS, M. (1992). Intimacies of the Impersonal. The Journal of Analytical Psychology, 37(4).

[ghostlylightdonut]

— Polarity Management —

It’s not a problem to be solved; it’s a polarity to be managed.

“We want to be humanized, desperately, at the very same time that we are creating a society that is way too often dehumanizing and data is a part of that...”

Esther Perel