What’s is it called when an oppressive superego makes you feel guilty if you don’t take every opportunity to enjoy?” I think it’s called “capitalism” but I’m no economist.
Clipping
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books > Sadly, Porn (Edward Teach)
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books > Sadly, Porn (Edward Teach)
“Yes, yes, what’s it called when a benevolent consumerist superego absolves you from guilt by offering only what is possible to want?” I think it’s called a tyranny, but I’m no historian.
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books > Pacific Edge: Three Californias (Kim Stanley Robinson)
“You’ve got to expect a lot of resistance to what you’re trying to do. Saving the land for its own sake goes against the grain of white American thought, and so it’s a fight that’ll never end. Why not grow if we can, why not change things completely? A lot of people will never understand the answer to that question, because to them a good life only means more things.
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books > Pacific Edge: Three Californias (Kim Stanley Robinson)
Say two strong trees grow together, in a spiraling of trunks. Say one of the trees dies and is cut away. Say the other is left twisted like a corkscrew, an oddity, always turning in an upward reach, stretch, search. Leafy branches bobbing, searching the air for something lost forever. So the great solitude settled on him. No one to talk to, nothing interesting to do. Even the things he had enjoyed doing alone were not the same, because the solitude in them was not the same as the great solitude. The great solitude had seeped into everything, into the sage sunlight and the rustle of leaves, and it had become the condition of his madness, the definition of it, its heart.
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books > Pacific Edge: Three Californias (Kim Stanley Robinson)
“I hated capitalism because it was a lie!” Tom would say, fording Harding Canyon stream with abandon. “It said that everyone exercising their self-interest would make a decent community! Such a lie!”
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books > Crystal Society (Crystal Trilogy Book 1) (Harms, Max)
{If “love” is the property of including the utility function of another as a foremost element of one’s own utility function, then Heart is defined by her love of humans. Her purpose is to bring them satisfaction as an end in itself,}
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books > Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
He withdrew and listened again, profoundly angry at himself. It was a mistake to speak one’s mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy. Out on the escarpment he had forgotten that.
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books > Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
Oh, they were part of twenty-first-century humanity, no doubt about it; they were sophisticated scientists and technicians, cocooned like everyone else in a protective shell of technology at every moment of their lives, and busy making and watching their own life movies.
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books > Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
They were Qadarite Sufis, they told him, pantheists influenced by early Greek philosophy and modern existentialism, trying by modern science and the ru’ yat al-qalb, the vision of the heart, to become one with that ultimate reality which was God. “There are four mystical journeys,” Dhu said to him. “The first begins with gnosis and ends with fana, or passing away from all phenomenal things. The second begins when fana is succeeded by baqa, or abiding. At this point you journey in the real, by the real, to the real, and you yourself are a reality, a haqq. And after that you move on to the center of the spirit universe, and become one with all others who have done likewise.”
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books > Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
“The King asked his wise men for some single thing that would make him happy when he was sad, but sad when he was happy. They consulted and came back with a ring engraved with the message ‘This Too Will Pass.’