“How can you say to your neighbor, ‘Go outside,’ while you are still extremely logged on? You hypocrite, first log off, and then you will see clearly to not be mad online.” - Matthew 7:4-5
“The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for romance is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.”
A coworker of mine found this truly bizarre presentation on the “30 year vision” of a huge multinational corporation, and it honestly reads like some kind of absurdist vaporwave shitpost. If you’d like to see the entire thing in all its original glory, you can find it here.
I don’t enjoy nihilistic proclamations but I always remember Bowden’s words on the stultified condition of humanity in the context of modernity.
We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless.
We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breastfeed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life. And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life.
We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us.
Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
(via beyonslayed)
Everything takes place in a fiery penumbra, its meaning subtly withdrawn. The earth lies prey to some incomprehensible wrong. Something silent, fugitive, exasperating, exalting.
A new study finds that believing in meritocracy can lead disadvantaged adolescents of color to act out and engage in risky behavior.
Brighton Park is a predominantly Latino community on the southwest side of Chicago. It’s a neighborhood threatened by poverty, gang violence, ICE raids, and isolation—in a city where income, race, and zip code can determine access to jobs, schools, healthy food, and essential services. It is against this backdrop that the Chicago teacher Xian Franzinger Barrett arrived at the neighborhood’s elementary school in 2014.
Recognizing the vast economic and racial inequalities his students faced, he chose what some might consider a radical approach for his writing and social-studies classes, weaving in concepts such as racism, classism, oppression, and prejudice. Barrett said it was vital to reject the oft-perpetuated narrative that society is fair and equal to address students’ questions and concerns about their current conditions. And Brighton Elementary’s seventh- and eighth-graders quickly put the lessons to work—confronting the school board over inequitable funding, fighting to install a playground, and creating a classroom library focused on black and Latino authors.
“Students who are told that things are fair implode pretty quickly in middle school as self-doubt hits them,” he said, “and they begin to blame themselves for problems they can’t control.”
Barrett’s personal observation is validated by a newly published study in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development that finds traditionally marginalized youth who grew up believing in the American ideal that hard work and perseverance naturally lead to success show a decline in self-esteem and an increase in risky behaviors during their middle-school years. The research is considered the first evidence linking preteens’ emotional and behavioral outcomes to their belief in meritocracy, the widely held assertion that individual merit is always rewarded.
“If you’re in an advantaged position in society, believing the system is fair and that everyone could just get ahead if they just tried hard enough doesn’t create any conflict for you … [you] can feel good about how [you] made it,” said Erin Godfrey, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School. But for those marginalized by the system—economically, racially, and ethnically—believing the system is fair puts them in conflict with themselves and can have negative consequences.
“If the system is fair, why am I seeing that everybody who has brown skin is in this kind of job? You’re having to think about that … like you’re not as good, or your social group isn’t as good,” Godfrey said. “That’s the piece … that I was trying to really get at [by studying] these kids.”
The findings build upon a body of literature on “system justification”—a social-psychology theory that believes humans tend to defend, bolster, or rationalize the status quo and see overarching social, economic, and political systems as good, fair, and legitimate. System justification is a distinctively American notion, Godfrey said, built on myths used to justify inequities, like “If you just work hard enough you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps … it’s just a matter of motivation and talent and grit.” Yet, as she and her colleagues discovered, these beliefs can be a liability for disadvantaged adolescents once their identity as a member of a marginalized group begins to gel—and once they become keenly aware of how institutional discrimination disadvantages them and their group.
“If you’re [inclined] to believe that … the system is fair, then you’re maybe going to accept stereotypes about you more easily.”
One of the biggest lies taught in American schools is that the USA is “meritocracy.” BULLSHIT!! The United States is a plutocracy that masquerades as a republic. Certain people are given advantages depending on their race, wealth, and personal connections. Everyone else are left to fight over what scraps are left over after the white ruling class take their cut of the loot. It’s been that way since this country was still a backwater British colony.
The same author has, according to my professor, alluded to being criticized by his colleagues for making the cover of the book four tastefully presented puppies because they thought it wasn’t serious enough
“What makes a subject difficult to understand – if it is significant, important – is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.”
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“Bir konuyu anlaşılması zor kılan, eğer o önemli bir konuysa, onun muğlak noktalarıyla ilgili gerekli olan açıklamalar değildir; daha ziyade, o konunun anlaşılması ve birçok insanın görmek istediği şey arasındaki karşıtlıktır. Bu yüzden, apaçık olan şeyler bile anlaşılması en zor şeylere dönüşebilir. Üstesinden gelinmesi gereken anlama yetisinden kaynaklanan zorluklar değildir, fakat iradenin yol açtığı zorluklardır.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951, Ch. 9 (1993)
For the present, final edition of Speak, Memory I have not only introduced basic changes and copious additions into the initial English text, but have availed myself of the corrections I made while turning it into Russian. This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a diabolical task, but some consolation was given me by the thought that such multiple metamorphosis, familiar to butterflies, had not been tried by any human before.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisted (p. xi-ii)
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