Category: Society & Citizenship

Propaganda works by sanctifying a single value, such as faith, or patriotism. Anyone who questions it puts themselves outside the circle of respectable opinion. The sacred value is used to obscure the intentions of those who champion it. Today the value is freedom. Freedom is a word that powerful people use to shut down thought.

Freedom is used as the excuse for ripping down public protections on behalf of the very rich.

When we confront a system of propaganda, our first task is to decode it. This begins by interrogating its sacred value. Whenever we hear the word freedom, we should ask ourselves, “freedom for whom, at whose expense?”.

Source: The Problem With Freedom – George Monbiot

You don’t support something if you don’t care whether or not it happens.

if there’s no social progress funding, there’s no social progress. Passive support is no support at all.

if you want to be socially progressive, you have to stop looking at what you’re giving up and instead look at what you have and what others need. You can still live comfortably while helping others to live more comfortably and have more opportunity. If that doesn’t sound rewarding to you, that’s fine—you’re just not socially progressive.

Source: You can’t be socially progressive and economically conservative — Quartz

We have come to think of the world less as a social body and more as a collection of individual organs. … The idea of the body as a system is one we embrace. But, we have largely come to reject any idea of society as an integrated system to be carefully maintained. The problem is that society keeps on stubbornly behaving as a system, despite our new faith. … In killing the idea of the social body, presto, there were no more social problems for a leader to fix! Here, the citizen becomes entirely responsible for their own destitution or their own entrepreneurial success.

we will continue to suffer great political illness if we do not revive the idea of the integrated social body

We as individual organs are powerless to influence those big systems like the labor market that affect us so keenly. We do have the power, however, to behave as an organism: One that demands of its leaders to be seen as a social body, both worthy and needful of better and equal health. And there’s no One Weird Trick for a return to that solidarity.

Source: Our obsession with finding miracles cures for complicated problems is what gave us Trump — Quartz

We are sharded beings; the sum total of our various aspects as contained within our biological beings as well as the myriad of technologies that we use to extend our biological abilities.

Once we understand this, it follows that we must extend the protections of the self beyond our biological borders to encompass those technologies by which we extend our selves.

[the biological and digital aspects of human beings], of course, do not exist apart and are not truly separable when manipulation of one necessarily affects the other.

we must build the world we want to live in

Source: Aral Balkan — Encouraging individual sovereignty and a healthy commons

Taking in people who have no safe home isn’t about GDP growth; it’s about basic decency.

Welcoming refugees might not be an efficient means of growing national wealth. But it is a moral way to spend the national surplus. No country in the history of the world has ever been both so big and so rich—and, despite 9/11, no similar power in history has been so safe from external threats for so long.

But what good is this extraordinary wealth and fortune if it does not free America from the prison of scarcity, in which every single policy decision must be about maximizing national income? With its vast richness, the United States has earned something that is not quantifiable—the capacity to be merciful.

Source: Refugees and the Limits of Economic Logic – The Atlantic