I’m so patriotic, I think every British kid should have a chance to grow up to be our head of state.
The greatest trick the rich – and their cheerleaders on the right – ever pulled was convincing the world that class didn’t exist. Out here in the real world, it is more real and more rigid than it has been for a century.
The bombs held in current nuclear arsenals are seventy times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. If we don’t begin opposing the drift towards more and more of them, we will live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud for the rest of our lives – and millions may die there.
There is an emerging scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes more intense and more destructive. It turns out that Katrina fits into a pattern that scientists and greens have been trying to warn us about for a long time.
The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War.
All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do.
Your working assumption, when you meet a homophobe, should be that they are gay.
So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.
The US head of state grew up on food stamps. The British head of state grew up on the postage stamps.
It isn’t the drug that causes the harmful behavior – it’s the environment. An isolated rat will almost always become a junkie. A rat with a good life almost never will, no matter how many drugs you make available to him. As Bruce put it: he was realizing that addiction isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you – it’s the cage you live in.
Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people, he said – it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else. If you have lots of people around you – perhaps even a husband or wife, or a family, or a busy workplace – but you don’t share anything that matters with them, then you’ll still be lonely.
What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief – for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?
You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met.
The Internet was born into a world where many people had already lost their sense of connection to each other. The collapse had already been taking place for decades by then. The web arrived offering them a kind of parody of what they were losing – Facebook friends in place of neighbors, video games in place of meaningful work, status updates in place of status in the world. The comedian Marc Maron once wrote that “every status update is a just a variation on a single request: ‘Would someone please acknowledge me?
It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear. It is a logic that keeps recurring throughout human history, from the Crusades to the witch hunts to the present day.
Despair often happens, he had learned, when there is a “lack of balance between efforts and rewards.
More than 50 percent of Americans have breached the drug laws. Where a law is that widely broken, you can’t possibly enforce it against every lawbreaker. The legal system would collapse under the weight of it. So you go after the people who are least able to resist, to argue back, to appeal – the poorest and most disliked groups. In the United States, they are black and Hispanic people, with a smattering of poor whites.
Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti,26 who explained: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.
To end loneliness, you need other people – plus something else. You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you. You have to be in it together – and “it” can be anything that you both think has meaning and value.
The more you think life is about having stuff and superiority and showing it off, the more unhappy, and the more depressed and anxious, you will be.