Quotes

For an individual beginning on the initiatory journey, the crisis may come as a powerful vision, dreams, or a deep (and often disturbing) feeling to find out what is beyond the limits of normal life.

I mean, what I’m trying to say is, sometimes a negative review of a highly-praised cultural product from the first world—the kind that enjoys wide distribution and robust marketing—is a necessary intervention by readers at the margins, at the borders, from other places and spaces.

Every 36 hours in the United States one Black woman, man or child is killed by police, and by a smaller number of security guards and self-appointed vigilantes. These are the startling findings of a new and now updated report on Extrajudicial Killings of Black People released July 9, 2012 and updated July 16, 2012.

For the true magician there is no very clear line between what lies inside the mind and what lies outside it. If you desire something, it will become substance. If you despise it, you will see it destroyed. A master magician is not much different from a child or a madman in that respect. It takes a very clear head and a very strong will to operate once you are in that place. And you will find out very quickly whether or not you have that clarity and that strength

We live in a society of victimization, where people are much more comfortable being victimized than actually standing up for themselves.

Economic historians have argued that Egypt was well-placed to undertake rapid economic development at the same time that the U.S. was. Both had rich agriculture, including cotton, the fuel of the early industrial revolution — though unlike Egypt, the U.S. had to develop cotton production and a work force by conquest, extermination, and slavery, with consequences that are evident right now in the reservations for the survivors and the prisons that have rapidly expanded since the Reagan years to house the superfluous population left by deindustrialization.

I should say that when people talk about capitalism it’s a bit of a joke. There’s no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. That’s right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. That’s very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World.

It is not storms, not thunder and lightning, not rain and cloud that remain as images in the psyche, but the fantasies caused by the affects they arouse. I once experienced a violent earthquake, and my first, immediate feeling was that I no longer stood on the solid and familiar earth, but on the skin of a gigantic animal that was heaving under my feet. It was this image that impressed itself on me, not the physical fact. Mans curses against devastating thunderstorms, his terror of the unchained elements – these affects anthropomorphize the passion of nature, and the purely physical element becomes an angry god.

Since Mitt Romney and other conservatives are so enamored of claiming that the country’s economic problems are somehow the result of “debt” and “deficits”, it would be nice if a journalist or debate moderator were to ask bluntly:

“In what specific way has the deficit harmed the American economy over the last four years? Can you name a specific business that has been directly affected by it, and how? Also, do you believe that the Bush Administration’s deficit spending after the Clinton surplus was the cause of the near economic collapse of 2008? How did the Bush Administration’s deficit spending directly cause the economic slowdown?”

Part of the reason conservatives get away with such extremist rhetoric is that the press doesn’t even display the rigor of a high school teacher asking basic questions of her class. Conservative economic policy is babbling, incoherent and hypocritical nonsense when held up to even the slightest scrutiny. All it would take to expose that is a few simple questions, directly and consistently asked.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.