Quotes

Well, our economic system “works,” it just works in the interests of the masters, and I’d like to see one that works in the interests of the general population. And that will only happen when they are the “principal archi-tects” of policy, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase. I mean, as long as power is narrowly concentrated, whether in the economic or the political system, you know who’s going to benefit from the policies-you don’t have to be a genius to figure that out. That’s why democracy would be a good thing for the general public.

But of course, achieving real democracy will require that the whole system of corporate capitalism be completely dismantled-because it’s radically anti-democratic. And that can’t be done by a stroke of the pen, you know: you have to build up alternative popular institutions, which could
allow control over society’s investment decisions to be moved into the hands of working people and communities. That’s a long job, it requires building up an entire cultural and institutional basis for the changes, it’s not something that’s just going to happen on its own. There are people who have written about what such a system might look like-kind of a “participatory economy,” it’s sometimes called.
But sure, that’s the way to go, I think.

In our society, real power does not happen to lie in the political system, it lies in the private economy: that’s where the decisions are made about what’s produced, how much is produced, what’s consumed, where investment takes place, who has jobs, who controls the resources, and so on and so forth. And as long as that remains the case, changes inside the political system can make some difference—I don’t want to say it’s zero—but the differences are going to be very slight.

We often don’t rely on the market where powerful interests would be damaged. Our actual economic policy is a mixture of protectionist, interventionist, free market and liberal measures. And it’s directed primarily to the needs of those who implement social policy, who are mostly the wealthy and the powerful.

There is no specific word in English for a “male mistress”, a man in the same relationship to a woman as a mistress is to a man, except for the more general term “lover”, which does not carry the same implications. “Paramour” is sometimes used, but this term can apply to either partner in an illicit relationship, so it is not exclusively male. In 18th- and 19th-century Venice, the terms cicisbeo and cavalier servente were used to describe a man who was the professed gallant and lover of a married woman. Another word that has been used for a male mistress is gigolo, though this carries connotations of payment and prostitution. Since the late 20th century, the terms “Pool boy,” “Fitness trainer” or “Tennis instructor,” were each used to designated males in the role, with the implication of lower social status, youth, and physical fitness leading to a financial relationship to the wealthier married woman.

The world does not reward honesty and independence, it rewards obedience and service. It’s a world of concentrated power, and those who have power are not going to reward people who question that power.

From a comparative perspective, the United States is unusual if not unique in its lack of restraints on freedom of expression. It is also unusual in the range and effectiveness of the methods employed to restrain freedom of thought. The two phenomena are related. Liberal democratic theorists have long observed that in a society where the voice of the people is heard, elite groups must ensure that that voice says the right things. The less the state is able to employ violence in defense of the interests of elite groups that effectively dominate it, the
more it becomes necessary to devise techniques of “manufacture of consent,” in the words of Walter Lippmann over 60 years ago, or “engineering of consent,” the phrase preferred by Edward Bernays, one of the founding fathers of the American Public Relations industry.

If mothers do work to equal that of a woman working full-time in an office, then why is it so bad if the State chooses to help single mothers out by means such as food stamps, welfare, WICK, and other programs of that type? It strikes me that there is a horrendous contradiction between the public support that insists that we must be all for stay-at-home moms and the classic anti-welfare line that typecasts every single mom who receives assistance as someone who is morally corrupt and simply attempting to rip off the moral and hard-working taxpayer.
Frankly, it is only possible to pull off the contradiction by typecasting welfare recipients as either being black, drug-using, and riding a Cadillac or white and trash. But, this mysteriously means that we laud the stay-at-home mom while at the same time trying to do away with programs that allow single women to be stay-at-home moms. In fact, in the current climate, it means that the true stay-at-home mom is either upper middle-class or rich. Or, they are in a family that has chosen voluntary poverty (or at least a very lower middle class) in order to make sure that the mom gets to stay at home.
Think about it, if being a stay-at-home mom is a full-time job, then why is it so wrong to help out such a mom financially?

The advantages of treating magic as an art seem at first glance to be considerable. For one thing, there are no entrenched and vested interests capable of mounting an objection to magic’s inclusion in the canon, even if they entertained objections in the first place, which is hardly likely. This is patently far from the case with either science or religion, which are by their very natures almost honour-bound to see that magic is reviled and ridiculed, marginalized and left to rust there on history’s scrap-heap with the Flat Earth, water-memory and phlogiston. Art, as a category, represents a fertile and hospitable environment where magic’s energy could be directed to its growth and progress as a field, rather than channelled into futile struggles for acceptance, or burned uselessly away by marking time to the repeated rituals of a previous century. Another benefit, of course, lies in art’s numinosity, its very lack of hard-edged definition and therefore its flexibility. The questions “what exactly are we doing and why are doing it”, questions of ‘method’ and of ‘aim’, take on a different light when asked in terms of art. Art’s only aim can be to lucidly express the human mind and heart and soul in all their countless variations, thus to further human culture’s artful understanding of the universe and of itself, its growth towards the light. Art’s method is whatever can be even distantly imagined. These parameters of purpose and procedure are sufficiently elastic, surely, to allow inclusion of magic’s most radical or most conservative agendas? Vital and progressive occultism, beautifully expressed, that has no obligation to explain or justify itself. Each thought, each line, each image made exquisite for no other purpose than that they be offerings worthy of the gods, of art, of magic itself. The Art for The Art’s sake.

We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one’s own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one’s ultimate interpretation of the facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one’s subjective principles. As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth. ~Carl Jung

“It’s difficult to get someone to understand something when keeping their job depends on them not understanding it”.