Quotes

In Britain between 1998 and 2009, there were at least 333 deaths in police custody, 87 of them after restraint by officers. Not a single officer was convicted. Of all the more and less unsubtle ways young Londoners — those not from Chelsea, from Bloomsbury; those not rich — are told that they are not terribly important, none are as overt or as cruel as this.

Standing so straight on a raised dais, in so immaculate a uniform that he looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the Metropolitan Police Service’s new commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, tells the conference in an avuncular voice about his plan for “total policing.” He is enthusiastic but nebulous. Details are vague. He enthuses about large forces zooming into small areas and clamping down on minor infractions. He mentions uninsured vehicles.

Helen Shaw, co-director of Inquest, an organization dedicated to the investigation of contentious deaths in official custody, has a different understanding. She suspects that total policing will mean “a much more aggressive police presence, a stance that’s more aggressive, and more about fear.” Indeed, Hogan-Howe says he wants “to put fear into the heart of criminals.” Shaw is more stark: “We think we’ll see more deaths.”

The police have not had a good couple of years. Constituencies not traditionally antipathetic have been shocked by its fervent enthusiasm for “kettling,” corralling demonstrators tightly without charge, food, water or release, for hours. The brutal policing of student protests on Dec. 9, 2010, left one young man, Alfie Meadows, in the hospital with brain injuries. At that same protest, the police hauled Jody McIntyre, a 20-year-old with cerebral palsy, from his wheelchair, dragging him across the ground. At a demonstration on April 1 the previous year, an unresisting and uninvolved newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, was hit by the police and died shortly after. And then Mark Duggan, about whom each rumor initially leaked — that he shot first, that he shot at all — was shown one by one to be untrue.

The “corporatization of America” during the past century has been an attack on democracy—and on markets, part of the shift from something resembling “capitalism” to the highly administered markets of the modern state/corporate era. A current variant is called “minimizing the state,” that is, transferring decision-making power from the public arena to somewhere else: “to the people” in the rhetoric of power; to private tyrannies, in the real world.

Invent your own mythology or be slave to another man’s.

Let you alone! That’s all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be left alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, something real?

a number of new studies suggest that, in certain key ways, people with that much money are not like the rest of us at all. As a mounting body of research is showing, wealth can actually change how we think and behave—and not for the better. Rich people have a harder time connecting with others, showing less empathy to the extent of dehumanizing those who are different from them. They are less charitable and generous. They are less likely to help someone in trouble. And they are more likely to defend an unfair status quo. If you think you’d behave differently in their place, meanwhile, you’re probably wrong: These aren’t just inherited traits, but developed ones. Money, in other words, changes who you are.

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect’s name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science. Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn’t matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein’s long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect’s findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

The only deterrent to our despair is the awareness of our death, the key to the sorcerer’s scheme of things. The awareness of our death is the only thing that can give us the strength to withstand the duress and pain of our lives and our fears of the unknown. Volition alone is the deciding factor; in other words, one has to make up one’s mind to bring that awareness to bear witness to one’s acts.
We are human creatures. Who knows what’s waiting for us or what kind of power we may have.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster’; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different.