Our society is besieged by a series of interconnected crises. Millions of people around the world know this and are crying out for change, for a different way of living, for justice, peace and freedom.
Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn’t be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out. That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today’s war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
Cognitive dissonance in Psychology
The psychological tension that occurs when one holds mutually exclusive beliefs or attitudes and that often motivates people to modify their thoughts or behaviors in order to reduce the tension.
Anxiety that results from simultaneously holding contradictory or incompatible attitudes, beliefs, or the like, as when one likes a person but disapproves of one of his or her habits.
Motivated Ignorance in Politics
Eureka! Eureka! (I have found it!)
— Archimedes
Having played with fire, one knows inner forms, inner function.
— Kijima Hajime
Under relentless popular pressure the Ethiopian Prime-Minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, has been forced to resign, and other members of the government are expected to follow. The ruling party responded with panic, and instead of entering into talks with opposition groups, imposed another State of Emergency – this follows on from the previous one, which lasted ten months (from October 2016), and achieved nothing. It is another mistake in a long line of errors by the government, who will do anything, it seems, to hang on to power.
Who would study and describe the living, starts /By driving the spirits out of the parts: /In the palm of his hand he holds all the sections, /Lacks nothing, except the spirit’s connections.
— Mephistopheles warning to the student in Goethe’s Faust
And how far would you like to go in?” he asked and the three kings all looked at each other. “Not too far but just far enough so’s we can say that we’ve been there.
— Liner notes to Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album
It really is a shame, and it is tiring, but it is actually nothing new: there is now total disarray amongst those countless ‘progressive’ and ‘semi-left’ Western intellectuals, publications, movements and political parties.
Cowardice, bloated egos, lack of discipline and intellectual pettiness are often to blame, but that is not all.
Radical: Derived from the Latin radix, which literally means the root or base. In political terms it means penetrating beyond conventional explanations and getting at the root cause of a problem.
The Pacifica Radio Network nearly went into bankruptcy this month. The immediate cause was a court order to pay the Empire State Building $1,800,000, more cash than Pacifica had. As bad as that may be, it’s really a symptom of deeper problems in the network. It goes back a long way.
