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- Stress reduces us to a state of spiritual insolvency — a kind of breakdown of cognitive muscle. Stress is a trauma injury. The basic stress of modern life prefigures schizophrenia — it is a form of schizophrenia; a constant splitting off, a constant dividing, of selves.
- What is a real existential threat? Very little. So why are so many insignificant things treated like they are life or death?
- Marx: “To give people courage, we must treat them to be alarmed by themselves.”
- There are many hidden links between Kant and Marx; between revolutionary romantics and rationalists. Revolutionary romanticism is actually a direct outgrowth of the rational construction of the individual as a moral agent. Only once the individual was philosophically separated from the masses, from the tribe, could their exploitation be recognized.
- Can we think a reality in which everyone has a colorful life — in which no one is consigned to drabness, emptiness, total significance?
- Fascism is a kind of celebration of the colorless life: it is the transcendence of the colorless life into the life of The Leader. A strongman like Trump mythically absorbs in the insignificance of his followers — which is why Trump only has followers, not mere voters. Those who voted for Trump without following him have already dumped him; already been turned off. But those who submitted to Trump at one of his rallies — they are bound to him for life.
- Wallace Stevens: “Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.”
