Quotes from 2013

As much as we complain about other people, there is nothing worse for mental health than a social desert. The more connected we are to family and community, the less likely we are to experience heart attacks, strokes, cancer and depression. Connected people sleep better at night. They live longer. They consistently report being happier.

Nothing remained the same for ever. Every niche-clinging individual or species that stubbornly refused change invited extinction. Adaptability was the key to survival. The world was being revived, not remade or restored, and change was the engine of revival.

The security state isn’t a person, it’s people. There’s so many of them and they’ve been given leave to take so many liberties that they’ve managed to become the environment. Like a demented terraforming project, they’re sucking down our communications and we’re breathing their air. This is an ecological disaster and it demands an ecological response. We shouldn’t be protecting ourselves. We should be protecting each other.

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

Accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

Since you always lived inside your own head, you were much better at seeing the truth about others than you ever were at seeing yourself. So you navigated your life with the help of others who held up mirrors for you. People praised your good qualities and criticized your bad habits, and these perspectives—often surprising to you—helped you to guide your life. So poorly did you know yourself that you were always surprised at how you looked in photographs or how you sounded on voice mail. In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others. And now that you’ve left the Earth, you are stored in scattered heads around the globe.

In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world—hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability. But technology and incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up.

Fleming saw the House of Rumour as the image of an intelligence service; we can know it now as an ancient vision of the internet. The haunt of credulity, rash error, empty joy and unreasoning fear. The world whispers stories to itself. This is what conspire means: to breathe with.

The slow flow of corporate will carried me through long weeks of no thought. Lacking a will of my own, I hosted the urges of the organization. This happens very easily. You start by controlling your desires, then deferring gratification and before you know it you’ve lost the ability to want altogether. Other people want for you. Friends, employers, wives, children. I was a vessel for other people’s longing.

At last, however, we have begun to see that true sanity has nothing at all to do with norms or averages. This redefinition emerged only when some got around to asking the simplest of questions. “What are the most common traits of nearly all forms of mental illness?” The answer? Nearly all sufferers lack:

Flexibility—to be able to change your opinion or course of action, if shown clear evidence you were wrong.

Satiability—the ability to feel satisfaction if you actually get what you said you wanted, and to transfer your strivings to other goals.

Extrapolation—an ability to realistically assess the possible consequences of your actions and to empathize, or guess how another person might think or feel.

This answer crosses all boundaries of culture, age, and language. When a person is adaptable and satiable, capable of realistic planning and empathizing with his fellow beings, those problems that remain turn out to be mostly physiochemical or behavioral.

I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you’re just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it’s not about you. It’s what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. ‘Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs’ – oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not.

The Culture itself represents an elegant absorption of, and therefore displacement of, one whole department of religious yearning. It offers, in effect, a completely secular version of heaven. With its sentient ships as omniscient as any pantheon of gods, and a lot more obliging and benign, and its vision of human nature uncramped from disease and hunger and oppression, and its rationalised equivalent to transcendence, it gives its inhabitants (and you as you read the books) all the pie in the sky they could possibly want; but transformed by being made wholly material, by being brought within the reach of human aspiration.

Now you can relive the thrill of the time you went from your house to a coffee shop to your job to a sandwich place to the grocery store to your house to a friend’s house to a bar and then back to your house.

I think efficiency in production processes is key to successful sonic exploration and expression. If one has to do extensive, non-essential computer programming and program navigating in the midst of a creative process in sound, it will definitely retard the sonic exploration process and absorb creative energy. This is because you are doing two distinct technical procedures simultaneously: programming the machine and sculpting a sound. Software as well as hardware should have all the basic system errors fully removed or dramatically reduced before the technology is put to market.

Slowly, agonizingly, humans learned how the universe worked, abandoning most of the fanciful beliefs they carried through their long, dark loneliness. This included belief in—

- the divine right of egotistical kings, - the mental incapacity of women, - the idea that a wise state knows all, - the idea that the individual is always right, - the sick-sweet addiction that transforms a doctrine from a mere model of the world into something sacred, worth killing for.

Here comes the Royal Family now. The automobile has now stopped….

Oh, there’s the King – he’s stepping out, followed by her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, nattily attired in a silver coat. Mr. King is now shaking hands with the King and introducing Mr. Queen to the King and Queen and then Mrs. Queen to the Queen and King. They are now proceeding up the steps to the well-decorated City Hall, the King and Mr. King together with the Queen being escorted by Mrs. Queen. The King has now stopped and said something to Mrs. Queen and goes to Mrs. Queen and the Queen and Mr. King and the Queen laughed jovially. The King leaves Mr. King and goes to Mrs. Queen, and the Queen and Mr. King follow behind…

The measure of (mental) health is flexibility (not comparison to some ‘norm’), the freedom to learn from experience … to be influenced by reasonable arguments … and the appeal to the emotions … and especially the freedom to cease when sated. The essence of illness is the freezing of behavior into unalterable and insatiable patterns.

Home is not the place you come from. That place is gone, if it ever existed at all. Home is the place you go to and like enough to stay, the place you ratify with your presence.

‘Like’ is the placeholder emotion. Don’t give the world more shit people ‘like’.

All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people’s pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn funeral are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.

Via notes.husk.org.

Never before have human beings so benefited from membership in a sagacious, scientific, and increasingly virtuous civilization. Wisdom flowers and spreads… even as does silliness. Like the absurd assertion (repeated ad nauseam by left and right) that wisdom hasn’t grown! A damnable outright lie. This is a bona fide renaissance, threatening to make everything better, in all ways. A renaissance that must find every potentially lethal error and hence, ironically, benefits from endless criticism. Helpful, vigorous criticism — but not chic-cynical despair.

In some people, a hedonic gratification pattern can be achieved simply by entering certain frames of mind. For example, the cyclical jolt from gambling can be a genuine addiction, requiring as much effort to break as cocaine or kicx. Habitual thrill seekers, video game potatoes, and Wall Street “wizards” have all been shown to follow similar patterns. Once aboard the roller-coaster, they cannot let go. One mild version can be seen in those riveted to spectator sports… and then there are the indignation junkies. People who regularly get high off self-righteousness and sanctimony. You know the kind—we all do.

There were times when she wanted to say: Get down on your knees! Be grateful! A billion people living on a dollar a day, as many who can’t find clean drinking water, you live in a country where there is a promise to feed, clothe, shelter and doctor you, from the moment of your birth to the moment of your death, for free, where the state won’t come and beat or imprison you or conscript you, where the life expectancy is one of the longest in the world, where the government does not lie to you about Aids, where the music is not bad and the only bad thing is the climate, and you find it in yourself to complain about parking? Woe, woe! Down on your knees in gratitude that you can even notice this minor irritation! Praise God for the fact that you resent getting this ticket, instead of rending your clothes with grief because you lost another child to dysentery or malaria! Sing hosannas when you fill out the little green form in the envelope stuck to your windshield! For you, you of the deservedly punished five-minute overstay, you of the misinterpreted residents’ bay area, you of the ignored Loading Only sign, are of all people who have lived the most fortunate!

Londoners treat the underground not as a stage set, a place where we’re on display, but as a neutral space, one in which we don’t overtly direct our attention at each other. People sneak glances at each other, of course they do, but the operative word is “sneak”. They don’t look openly, in the way they would elsewhere. The main focus of people’s attention is inward. They go into themselves. Or they go into the world of whatever entertainment they’re carrying.

The person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control.