Willingness to be puzzled by what seem to be obvious truths is the first step towards gaining understanding of how the world works.
Neoliberalism works best when there is formal electoral democracy, but when the population is diverted from the information, access, and public forums necessary for meaningful participation in decision making.
The people who are known are riding the crest of some wave. Now, you can ride the crest of the wave and try to use it to get power, which is the standard thing, or you can ride the crest of the wave because you’re helping people that way, which is another thing. But the point is, it’s the wave that matters.
If American opinion has been uninformed, misinformed and prejudiced, the missionaries are largely to blame. Interpreting history in terms of the advance of Christianity, they have given an inadequate, distorted, and occasionally a grotesque picture of Moslems and Islam.
The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story – hard to understand and even harder to solve.
So someone can ask me what reflects my interpretation of the way things are, and I can tell them where they can get material that looks at the world the way I think it ought to be looked at-but then they have to decide whether or not that’s accurate. Ultimately it’s your own mind that has to be the arbiter: you’ve got to rely on your own common sense and intelligence, you can’t rely on anyone else for the truth.
Education doesn’t determine how you earn, education determines how you spend.
For the majority, real incomes have pretty much stagnated, sometimes declined. Benefits have also declined and work hours have gone up, and so on. It’s not Third World misery, but it’s not what it ought to be in a rich society, the richest in the world, in fact, with plenty of wealth around, which people can see, just not in their pockets.
Yes, it’s simple, really. If you’re riding a bicycle and you don’t want to fall off, you have to keep going – fast.
If you want to traumatize people, treason trials are an extreme way – if there are spies running around in our midst, then we’re really in trouble, we’d better just listen to the government and stop thinking.
Like, we can have big discussions about what society ought to look like in the future, which is fine, but that doesn’t affect what happens to people in their lives right now, except extremely indirectly. What happens to people in their daily lives usually depends on small, difficult, tactical assessments about where to put your time and energy.
Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.
People are called intellectuals because they’re privileged. It’s not because they’re smart or they know a lot. There are plenty of people who know more and are smarter but aren’t intellectuals because they don’t have the privilege. The people called intellectuals are privileged. They have resources and opportunities, and enough freedom has been won so that they state does not have an unrestrained capacity to repress.
The “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower. What that means is the spectrum has shifted so far to the right that what the population wants, and what was once mainstream, now looks radical and extremist.
Settler colonialism is a conceptual fine-tuning on the theories and histories of colonialism. Settler movements that sought a new life and identity in already inhabited countries were not unique to Palestine.
From anti-semite to self-hating jew, all in one day.
There’s plenty of challenging, gratifying, interesting, productive workaround for people to do, and there are plenty of people who want to do it – they simply aren’t being allowed that opportunity under the current economic system.
If people cannot rise to the level of applying to ourselves the same standards we apply to others they have no right to talk about right and wrong.
If you’ve ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices – that’s what advertising is.
Don’t forget, part of the whole intellectual vocation is creating a niche for yourself, and if everybody can understand what you’re talking about, you’ve sort of lost, because then what makes you special? What makes you special has got to be something that you had to work really had to understand, and you mastered it, and all those guys out there don’t understand it, and then that becomes the basis for your privilege and your power.
If you decide not to make use of the opportunities you have, not to live your life in a way that’s constructive and helpful, you end up looking back and asking, ’why did I bother living?