Month: February 2013
[Demonstrations are not designed to make people like the people who are demonstrating. Demonstrations are designed to be inconvenient. They’re designed to be in the way, so that we can stop ignoring something we’ve grown too comfortable with.] — Rachel Maddow
A friendly reminder that I’m not trying to be pleasant.
FIGURES OF NORSE MYTHOLOGY: NORNS
The Norns are female beings who control the destinies of gods and mortals. The most important of these beings are Urd (Fate), Skuld (Being), and Verdandi (Necessity). They guard the well Urðarbrunnr, located beneath Yggdrasil in Asgard, keeping the World Tree healthy by pouring water and mud from the well on its roots. In other myths, there is a Norn present at every birth, and she has control over how the newborn’s life with unfold.
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But “uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too… . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.
Aldous Huxley – from Brave New World (via akashagnosis)
