Management cannot solve problems. Nor can it stir creativity of any sort. It can only manage what it is given. If asked to do more, it will deform whatever is put into its hands.
Happy Hour: a depressing comment on the rest of the day and a victory for the most limited Dionysian view of human nature.
Our belief in salvation through the market is very much in the Utopian tradition. The economists and managers are the servants of God. Like the medieval scholastics, their only job is to uncover the divine plan. They could never create or stop it. At most they might aspire to small alterations.
People cannot do what they cannot think, and they cannot think what they cannot say.
If the technocratic class often invokes technology, it is because these inanimate objects can take on a trajectory of their own and so cover for the manager’s inability to give leadership.
The undoubted sign of a society well under control or in decline is that language has ceased to be a means of communication and has become instead a shield for those who master it.
McDonald’s is the ultimate symbol of passive conformity.
In all earlier civilizations, it should be remembered, commerce was treated as a narrow activity and by no means the senior sector in society.
As an inclusive quality, imagination is thus our primary force for progress, whatever progress is.
Myrmecophaga jubata: The anteater. The existence of this predator demonstrates that thinking 71 percent of the time, as ants do, won’t prevent you from being eaten. Thinking less than that, as humans do, will almost guarantee it.
If allowed to run free of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which is after all not a natural state.
An individual who stands out, or disagrees or takes risks is a danger to such systems and is effortlessly and, unconsciously sidelined.
A Big Mac – the communion wafer of consumption.
We must discover how to ask simple questions of ourselves.
Educating the masses was intended only to improve the relationship between the top and the bottom of society. Not for changing the nature of the relationship.
The Unconscious Civilisation There is a certain terrifying dignity to the big ideologies. With the stroke of an intellectual argument the planet is put in its place. Only the bravest or the most foolish of individuals would not become passive before such awe inspiring destinies.
The Age of Reason has turned out to be the Age of Structure; a time when, in the absence of purpose, the drive for power as a value in itself has become the principal indicator of social approval. And the winning of power has become the measure of social merit.
I have a theory of statistics: if you can double them or halve them and they still work, they are really good statistics.
In the humanist ideal, the mainstream is where interesting debate, the generating of new ideas and creativity take place. In rational society this mainstream is considered uncontrollable and is therefore made marginal. The centre ground is occupied instead by structures and courtiers.
There is no need to search for global solutions, apart from an absolute necessity to destroy the idea that such things exist.