Peter Rudd
Tricks and dodges and law used by the rich to make society in their image and to use the poor to do it, when, in another way there is more than enough to go around.
“…when I consider any social system that prevails in the modern world, I can’t, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interests under the pretext of organizing society. They think up all sorts of tricks and dodges, first for keeping safe their ill-gotten gains, and then for exploiting the poor by buying their labour as cheaply as possible. Once the rich have decided that these tricks and dodges shall be officially recognized by society – which includes the poor as well as the rich – they acquire the force of law. Thus an unscrupulous minority is led by its insatiable greed to monopolize what would have been enough to supply the needs of the whole population…”
Thomas More, Utopia, 1516
Filed under: brave new world | Tags: economy, erich fromm, life, markets, work
Photo: Lise Sarfati
Modern people are commodities; disconnected from self, others and nature; their virtual only focus is exchange of personhood with other persons on the market. Life is subsumed in these market processes: packaging and moving personhood as a product, negotiating exchanges and consuming.
What of life, real life? What other goals, principles satisfactions?
Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his “personality package” with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.
Erich Fromm
Filed under: departure lounge | Tags: elections, Kiefer Sutherland, politics, The Story of Mouseland, Tommy Douglas
Filed under: brave new world, chronotopes | Tags: Are You Lost?, Moby, Steve Cutts
Filed under: the sweet life, unseen world | Tags: beauty, Diotima, lust, morality
Why Socrates believed that sexual desire is the first step towards righteousness
Can sexual desire lead us to something that transcends the physical act? Socrates seemed to think so. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates recalls the words of his apparent teacher of erotics, the priestess Diotima of Mantinea, who instructed him that lust was the first rung on a ladder leading upwards towards an appreciation of the form of beauty itself and, further, to morality and virtue.
Video by BBC Radio 4 and The Open University
Script: Nigel Warburton
Animator: Andrew Park
from Aeon magazine
coromandal 