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- Ethical systems are deployments of power. They are like the spies an army sends ahead to survey the enemy populace.
- There was communism in the Americas before Europeans arrived: the communism of the food-forest, hunter-gatherer society. Ironically, idealizing, utopian-seeking society builders arrived, and immediately destroyed the thing they were looking for.
- What we call Mind is a gradual accumulation of attention; without attention, there is no mind — just random neuronal activity. Schizophrenia. Smartphone culture is schizophrenic culture, I think — or verging on it.
- Political affiliation is largely a question of what consciousness you want to inhabit. If it’s guilt, you’re a liberal; pride, a conservative.
- American exceptionalism is a belief system invented to assuage America’s guilty consciousness.
- People need politics because they don’t have philosophy.
- Our social personas are idealized projections of our material selves. And we can’t help but prefer them to our material selves. This leaves not only to a deep sense of disappointment, but to a distinct sense of splitting; an incoherent soul.
