Member-only story
- No society is free of pathological cruelty —a civilization is successful largely to the extent to which it diverts and diffuses its pathological tendencies.
- We are innocent to the fact that we have no culture — culture in the sense of the something fermenting, alive. We consume our ‘culture’ in the same way that we consume milk — which bears almost no resemblance to the milk people used to drink before pasteurization.
- The 20th century is largely a century in which people lost hope — and the result is the sterile, nihilistic, pointless, life of the 21st century. Cause and effect.
- It now takes tremendous willpower NOT to care about meaningless events. Kitsch is the rule, not the exception. But that has long been the case.
- The 19th century had Baudelaire; the 21st century had Benjamin. So who is — who will be — is the historian, or poet, of our present?
- The images we take on our phones proliferate like a tumor — we are choking out the life out of the mind.
- The cognitive capacity to deploy language is becoming so damaged, so degraded, that in the near-future, those who are merely competent language users will not only become poets, but priests (because who else can read Latin in a Dark Age?).
- The fetishist has long ago replaced the mystic in the order of things.
