Dagens citat: Glenn Greenwald.

"One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does."

Dagens citat: David Graeber om institutionaliseret håbløshed.

"Hopelessness isn't natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and police and military intelligence apparatus, propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as they create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy.Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important, to exponents of the "free market," even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain, for instance, what happened in the former Soviet Union, where one would have imagined the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and KGB and rebuilding the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around? This is just one extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, this apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and as a result, it's dragging the entire capitalist system down with it, and possibly, the earth itself."

David Graeber - Hope in Common.

Herbert Schiller on Corporate Media.

“The media are mutually and continually reinforcing. Since they operate according to commercial rules, rely on advertising, and are tied tightly to the corporate economy, both in their own structure and in their relationships with sponsors, the media constitutes an industry, not an aggregation of independent, freewheeling informational entrepreneurs, each offering a highly individualistic product. By need and by design, the images and messages they purvey, are, with few exceptions, constructed to achieve similar objectives, which are, simply put, profitability and the affirmation and maintenance of the private-ownership consumer society.”

- Herbert Schiller: "The Mind Managers" p. 22. (Beacon Press 1973).

Professor Herman E. Daly on economic growth.

“Exactly what is growing? One thing is the GDP, the annual marketed flow of final goods and services. But there is also the throughput – the metabolic flow of useful matter and energy from environmental sources, through the economic subsystem (production and consumption), and back to environmental sinks as waste. Economists have focused on GDP and, until recently, neglected throughput. But throughput is the relevant magnitude for answering the question about how big the economy is – namely how big is the economy's metabolic flow relative to the natural cycles that regenerate the economy's ressource depletion and absorb its waste emissions, as well as providing countless other natural services? The answer is that the economic subsystem is now a very large relative to the ecosystem that sustains it. How big can the economy possibly be before it overwhelms and destroys the ecosystem in the short run? We have decided apparantly to do an experiment to answer this question empirically! How big should the economy be, what is its optimum scale relative to the ecosystem? If we were true economists we would stop the throughput growth before the extra environmental and social costs that it causes exceeds the extra production benefits that it produces.”

- Professor of economics Herman E. Daly.

[source: Tim Jackson: "Prosperity Without Growth", Earthscan 2009]

Citatcentralen - Rolling Stones journalist Matt Taibbi om USA og Palin.

Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV -and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

Dagens Citat: Søren Kierkegaard

"Af alle tyrannier er en folkeregering den kvalfuldeste, den åndløseste, ubetinget alt storts og ophøjets undergang. En tyran er dog menneske eller et enkelt menneske. Han har dog ordentligvis én tanke selvom det er den urimeligste. Man kan nu overveje med sig selv om det er umagen værd for den tanke at lade sig slå ihjel, om det således kolliderer med ens egne tanker, eller om det ikke er umagen værd. Og så indretter man sig og lever.
Men i en folkeregering: hvem er herskeren? Et X eller det evindelige pjat: hvad der i ethvert øjeblik er eller har majoriteten - den afsindigste af alle bestemmelser. Når man ved, hvorledes det går til med at få majoritet og hvorledes den kan fluktuere, at så dette nonsens er det regerende!
En tyran er dog kun én; man kan altså, hvis det så synes én, indrette sig på at undgå ham, leve fjernt fra ham o.s.v. Men hvor skal jeg i en folkeregering undfly tyrannen? Ethvert menneske er jo, i en vis forstand, tyrannen; det er blot han skaffer et opløb: en majoritet.
En tyran som enkelt menneske er da så ophøjet, én så fjern at man for ham kan få lov til at leve privat som man vil. Det kan i al evighed ikke falde en kejser ind at bryde sig om mig, hvordan jeg lever, hvad tid jeg står op, hvad jeg læser o.s.v. - ordentligvis ved han slet ikke af, at jeg er til. Men i en folkeregering er jo »ligemanden« det herskende. Ham beskæftiger sligt, om mit skæg er som hans, om jeg tager i Dyrehaven på samme tider som han, om jeg er ganske som ham og de andre. Og hvis ikke, ja da er det en forbrydelse - en politisk forbrydelse, en statsforbrydelse!
En folkeregering ville i maksimum skaffe nogle martyrer, af hvilke den har fortjeneste som Josephs brødre af Joseph.
At leve under en sådan regering er det mest dannende for evigheden, men den største kval så længe det står på. Kun én længsel kan man have, hin sokratiske: at dø og at være død. Thi Sokrates, han har døjet i denne åndløshed, at numerus er regeringen, at vi ikke alle er lige for Gud (thi hvad bryder man sig om Gud i en folkeregering!) men alle lige for tallet! Og tallet er just det onde, som det også i Åbenbaringens Bog bruges således prægnant. En folkeregering er det sande billede på helvede. Thi selvom man skulle holde dens kval ud, det var dog en lise, hvis man fik lov til at være ene, men det kvalfulde er netop, at »de andre« tyranniserer én."
Dagbogsoptegnelse fra 1848, her efter A. Egelund Møller: Søren Kierkegaard om politik, Kbh. 1975 s.139f.

Dagens Citat: Cristopher Lasch

"The best defences against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted ... that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness. Love and work enable us to explore a small corner of the world and come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.... We find it more and more difficult to a achieve a sense of continuity, permanence or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom."

Fra "The Culture of Narcissism".

Dagens Citat: Chomsky om undertrykkelse

Most oppression succeeds because its legitimacy is internalized. That’s true of the most extreme cases. Take, say, slavery. It wasn’t easy to revolt if you were a slave, by any means. But if you look over the history of slavery, it was in some sense recognized as just the way things are. We’ll do the best we can under this regime. Another example, also contemporary (it’s estimated that there are some 26 million slaves in the world), is women’s rights. There the oppression is extensively internalized and accepted as legitimate and proper. It’s still true today, but it’s been true throughout history.

Dagens citat: George Berkeley om filosofi

Philosophy is just the study of wisdom and truth, so one might reasonably expect that those who have spent most time and care on it would enjoy a greater calm and serenity of mind, know things more clearly and certainly, and be less disturbed with doubts and difficulties than other men. But what we find is quite different, namely that the illiterate majority of people, who walk the high road of plain common sense and are governed by the dictates of nature, are mostly comfortable and undisturbed. To them nothing that is familiar appears hard to explain or to understand. They don’t complain of any lack of certainty in their senses, and are in no danger of becoming sceptics. But as soon as we depart from sense and instinct to follow the light of a higher principle - that is, to reason, meditate, and reflect on the nature of things - a thousand doubts spring up in our minds concerning things that we previously seemed to understand fully. We encounter many prejudices and errors of the senses; and when we try to correct these by reason, we are gradually drawn into crude paradoxes, difficulties, and inconsistencies, which multiply and grow upon us as our thoughts progress; until finally, having wandered through many intricate mazes, we find ourselves back where we started or - which is worse - we sit down in a forlorn scepticism.

- George Berkeley “Principles of Human Knowledge” udgivet i 1710.

Dagens Citat: John Stuart Mill

“A government cannot have too much of the kind of activity which does not impede, but aids and stimulates, individual exertion and development. The mischief begins when, instead of calling forth the activity and powers of individuals and bodies, it substitutes its own activity for theirs; when, instead of informing, advising, and, upon occasion, denouncing, it makes them work in fetters, or bids them stand aside and does their work instead of them. The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill, or that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for benefial purposes – will find that with small men no great things can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”

- John Stuart Mill ‘On Liberty’.

Dagens citat: Emerson om transcendens

“A man is a facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul whose organ he is, if he would let it appear through his action, will make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect. It is genius; when it breathes through his will it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love. And the blindness of the intellect begins when it would be something of itself. The weakness of the will begins when the individual would be something of himself. All reform aims in some one particular to let the soul have its way through us...”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Læs mere om Emerson.