Kenny Smith Quotes About Culture
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Bourgeois society, rife with an atomism or monadism of secluded egos, is profoundly uncomfortable with topics of domination just because of the rift between how it sees itself (Kantian autonomism) and how it actually exists (pathetic prole-culture).
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I have always been spurred on by my not finding expressed anywhere the kinds of perspectives that I thought these issues most perspicuously needed and deserved; but that is just another way of saying that Americans have overwhelmingly expunged from their public understanding the strongest and most clarifying resources out of ancient and traditional European cultures. By far we prefer our familiar and user-friendly parochialisms, and there is no percentage in trying to pry these pachydermal plates apart.
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What passes for education, culture or maturity in most minds is merely how individuals want to think of themselves, a contrived egocentric self-concept, not actual and effective principles and values. This is what is known in the cliche as the "veneer" of civilization.
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Kafka's writings often display an insidious power to describe a wholly secular and "factical" world in which the eerie or "unheimlich" elements gang up behind or beneath the ego's awareness and immerse it in a waking dream of something Other, an alien world-order similar to ancient irrationalist cultures (in transition from primitivism to civilized mythos-culture).
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Like the priestly cult of the Middle Ages, the modern priestly cult of "scientific" psychotherapists exist overwhelmingly to stultify or blunt a too-acute insight into the powers benumbed in our personalities by our prevailing culture.
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I am caught in a terrific bind of characterologically and rationally needing to think in the most comprehensive terms possible, forming a continuous system of argument with a gradient that runs from concrete to abstract, and unfortunately being caught also in a culture in which hardly anyone seems capable of applying himself to understand such a demanding form of argumentation.
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Nietzsche is absolutely correct, even more correct today than when he wrote it in Thus Spake Zarathustra: I looked all about me for human beings but all I saw were fragments, deformed creatures with too much eye or too much ear. This is what the modern culture of specialized intellect-the kind of one-sidedness that banausic utilitarianism alone can value-works so hard to produce.
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But for the Jews this moral-spiritual issue raises the same societal problem it does for the Greeks: how can a man have the "right" to make himself spiritually or rationally destitute or retarded when this corrupts the whole quality of the culture that we all together need and depend on? If anyone wants a cloistered and closed-minded life, an anti-aristic life, let him either go off and live among the wolves-or else join the community of like-minded idiots that (alas) compose and define the basic terms of modern society.
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A vital part of philosophizing is learning to trust one's own intuitivist intelligence, getting one's center of gravity back between one's feet. In our culture-so outer-directed, "objective" or extraverted-this is already heresy. This is self-mastering thinking, centered in what has been well-tested as certainties: autarkia or self-rule.
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Myth is the practical metabolism of our soulish life, the logic of our obsessions and oversights for which we have no language or code. Myth is the "morality" that the ineffable puts upon us, our unaccountable imperatives, our inexplicably selective clarity and obscurity, the mortal one-sidedness of our talents and wits, the passion and apathy that make such a transient passage through our hapless minds; that weave a pattern of fatality others will see before we do. Myth is distinctively human or sublime higher-order instinct, the "reason" in culture that reason knows not of.
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Ultimately the most profound problems with psychotherapy have always been that instead of possessing any contrarian or transcendent values to enable it to produce insights countervailing against our dysfunctional and incoherent and humanly destructive culture, its "therapists" have been virtually all shills or agents for this culture, trying to accommodate their patients to a fundamentally unhealthy and insane way of life.
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Instant enlightenment. A quintessential modernism, culture and religion accommodated to the age of fast food and bumper stickers. But psyche and spirit are not so exempt from the natural domain that they can simply produce self-change instantaneously, on demand. Wisdom precipitates through a notoriously slow apparatus of retorts and flasks, and it has to find receptive ground only in a properly seasoned mind.
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Human cultures are all experiments in trying to find a form that will fit the matter of our immediacy; but it is absolutely not the case that all such experiments are of equal merit or value. Some cultures - and modernity is patently one - have managed to transmute consciousness into the "disease" that Nietzsche called it, the self-affliction of a self-centeredness that has purged itself of all vestiges of wisdom and value.
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The ideological are individuals ultimately swamped by the complexities of modern life and political and economic relations; they have deliberately attached themselves to some caricatural maven like Falwell or Limbaugh who speaks to their manipulable pathos. The gulf between such individuals' education or intellectual competence or information and the actual issues of our times is simply too great. They were bred to be culture-media for false consciousness, junkies who crawl on their bellies across broken glass for another hit of "clarifying wisdom" from some ideological Pope.
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The anorexic is the fuse nakedly exposed to the direct power of modern media, a psyche whose wiring has no insulation. The anorexic is an analog to the ideologue, who is likewise devoid of common sense, independent ego, culture, intuitive intelligence, etc.: all the ideologue has to orient himself by is the formalist or abstractivist directives inlaid in modern mass-culture. Both are forms of the True Believer, minds in whom factors of self-active life are reduced to negligibility and pathos reigns.
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So successful has the ideological-political-cultural purge been executed that it is hard indeed to find vigorous liberals, and no energetic, coherent and cogent leftists at all can find expression in our controlled media and educational systems. Forget about wholesale culture- or civilization-critics like Marxists. Universities have to be purged of any "radicalism" that can see through to the roots of issues and pathologies, for the same reasons that workers have to have nascent unions aborted among them and contrarian newspapers and media have to be starved of advertising.
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