The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.
The true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.
War is not about flag-waving and patriotism. War is about killing and death.
It is one of the great ironies of corporate control that the corporate state needs the abilities of intellectuals to maintain power, yet outside of this role it refuses to permit intellectuals to think or function independently.
I don’t fight fascists because I’ll win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.
There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.
We on the left have forgotten that the question is not how do you get good people to rule, most people who rule are mediocre at best and usually venal. The question is how do we make those in power frightened of us and not be seduced by formal political processes.
The arts often realize human truths well before other branches of human endeavor.
We live in imaginary, virtual worlds created by corporations that profit from our deception.
The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.
The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
There are no impediments now to corporations. None. And what they want is for us to give up. They want us to become passive. They want us to become tacitly complicit in our own destruction.
The more we retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world.
The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.
Battling evil, cruelty, and injustice allows us to retain our identity, a sense of meaning, and ultimately our freedom.
As the economy unravels, as hundreds of millions of Americans confront the fact that things will not get better, life for those targeted by this culture of hate will become increasingly difficult. Rational debate will prove useless.
Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.
I’m not saying we’re going to win. I am saying rebellion becomes a way to protect your own dignity. Corporations are, theologically speaking, institutions of death. They commodify everything – the natural world, human beings – that they exploit until exhaustion or collapse. They know no limits.
War is addictive. Indeed, it is the most potent narcotic unleashed by mankind.
War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view.