Frankfurt Quotes

I don’t take my life seriously, but I do take what I do – in my life – seriously -

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world." [Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future. [Address in the Assembly Hall at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, June 26 1963]

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.

We work in the city of Würzburg, which is between Frankfurt and Nürnberg. Eric and I are in military intelligence.

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstance require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.

No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.

We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?" [Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the nature of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself. But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

He was hissed on the streets of Frankfurt, stones were thrown, a group of workmen jeered him and called out that he ought to have been burned with the Jews.

Political correctness is a war on noticing.

Heidi loudly wailed, "Oh I want to go home. What the poor snowhopper will do without me? Grandmother is waiting for me everyday. Poor Thistlefinch gets blows if Peter gets no cheese, and I must see the sun again when he says good-night to the mountains. How the eagle would screech if he saw all the people here in Frankfurt.

Wisdom too often never comes, so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.

After all, every use of language without exception has some, if not all, of the characteristic features of lies.

And this fucking frankfurter… I swallowed the fucking bratwurst bitch, sauerkraut shit, German pieceofshit Chocolate Cake insults, which were all throwing a party in my mouth. They each begged me to let them come out and play.

Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to stay in their hotels and fuck one another

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late. (Justice Frankfurter)

Once, [Rabbi Chanoch] Teller was traveling with 16 of his [18] offspring ... while changing planes in Frankfurt, Teller noticed a German woman gaping. 'Are all of these your children?' the woman asked. 'From one wife?' 'Yes, God has blessed me with all these children,' the rabbi replied. 'Haven't you heard about the population problem?'the woman sniffed. 'How many more children do you want to have?' Rabbi Teller paused and looked the woman in the eye: 'About 6 million,' he said.

She had a window seat from Oslo, and for the longest time, she just watched the magnificence of the changing colors of the winter sky as the sun was just rising on the flight to Frankfurt.

Morality can provide at most only a severely limited and insufficient answer to the question of how a person should live.

[E]very man hath liberty to write, but few ability. Heretofore learning was graced by judicious scholars, but now noble sciences are vilified by base and illiterate scribblers, that either write for vain-glory, need, to get money, or as Parasites to flatter and collogue with some great men, they put out trifles, rubbish and trash. Among so many thousand Authors you shall scarce find one by reading of whom you shall be any whit better, but rather much worse; by which he is rather infected than any way perfected… What a catalogue of new books this year, all his age (I say) have our Frankfurt Marts, our domestic Marts, brought out. Twice a year we stretch out wits out and set them to sale; after great toil we attain nothing…What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast Chaos and confusion of Books, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning. For my part I am one of the number—one of the many—I do not deny it...

What's your name?" "Cleo," said Cleo. He nodded. "Approriate." "How so?" "Cleopatra, the original undoer of men." "But I am just Cleo. What's your name?" "Frank," said Frank. "Short for?" "Short for nothing. What of earth would Frank be short for?" "I don't know," Cleo smiled. "Frankfurter, frankincense, Frankenstein...." "Frankenstein sounds about right. Creator of monsters." "You make monsters?" "Sort of," said Frank. "I make ads.

It was not surprising that after the war Dostoevsky was linked to Kierkegaard as a prophet of social resignation.

Monopoly Capitalism, Zionism, Communism, Nazism & Fascism: ALL came out of the Rothschild Offices in Frankfurt, Germany.

A bald man made an attempt on Constant's life with a hot dog. Stabbed at the window glass with it. Splayed the bun. Broke the frankfurter. Left a sickly sunburst of mustard and relish.

Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.

Civilizations... cannot flourish if they are beset with troublesome infections of mistaken beliefs.

Wir können, was wir sehen, noch nicht glauben. Was wir schon glauben, nicht aussprechen.

Meine Wissenschaft gibt mir Wachträume, die andere nicht einmal im Schlafen haben." Peter Handke: Langsame Heimkehr. Erzählung. Frankfurt am Main 1994, S. 63.

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.

If God had let me come at once, as I prayed, then everything would have been different, I should only have had a little bread to bring to grandmother, and I should not have been able to read, which is such a comfort to her; but God has arranged it all so much better than I knew how to; everything has happened just as the other grandmother said it would. Oh, how glad I am that God did not let me have at once all I prayed and wept for! And now I shall always pray to God as she told me, and always thank Him, and when He does not do anything I ask for I shall think to myself, It's just like it was in Frankfurt: God, I am sure, is going to do something better still. So we will pray every day, won't we, grandfather, and never forget Him again, or else He may forget us.

The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

There are significant relationships, of course, between wanting things and caring about them..The notion of caring is in large part constructed out of the notion of desire. Caring about something may be, in the end, nothing more than a certain complex mode of wanting it. However, simply attributing desire to a person does not in itself convey that the person cares about the object he desires.

From black-rimmed plates they ate turtle soup and eaten Russian rye bread, ripe Turkish olives, caviar, salted mullet-roe, smoked Frankfurt black puddings, game in gravies the colour of liquorice and boot-blacking truffled sauces, chocolate caramel creams, plum puddings, nectarines, preserved fruits, mulberries and heart-cherries; from dark coloured glasses they drank the wines of Limagne and Rousillon, of Tenedoes, Val de Peñas and Oporto, and, after the coffee and the walnut cordial they enjoyed kvass, porters and stouts.

Oh, how glad I am that God did not let me have at once all I prayed and wept for! And now I shall always pray to God as she told me, and always thank Him, and when He does not do anything I ask for I shall think to myself, It's just like it was in Frankfurt: God, I am sure, is going to do something better still. So we will pray every day, won't we, grandfather, and never forget Him again, or else He may forget us

I submitted entirely to the dog and, as a man with no gift for dancing, I had the feeling that I was able to dance for the first time in my life, secure and without inhibition. Occasionally, we kissed, the dog and I. Woke up feeling extremely satisfied.

I watched the shadow of our plane hastening below us across hedges and fences, rows of poplars and canals … Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine, from the thousands of hoists and winches that once worked the South African diamond mines to the floors of today's stock and commodity exchanges, through which the global tides of information flow without cease. If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea.

To establish and to sustain an advanced culture, we need to avoid being debilitated either by error or by ignorance. We need to know—and, of course, we must also understand how to make productive use of—a great many truths.

However, it must not be assumed that bullshit always and necessarily has pretentiousness as its motive.

Realist ist heute, wer auf dem Boden der Tatsachen steht - ein Boden, der in den Plänen dieser gleichen Realisten bereits verseucht ist.

Gardner led practices with the assistance of the fitness coach and one of the other assistants while the infamous frankfurter did what he always did: a whole bunch of nothing.

Leave it, I think to myself, like I'm a dog with something in its jaws: a squirrel, a frankfurter, a pair of underpants, a grief habit. Leave it.

Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris's then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian W

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.

Is truth something that in fact we do—and should—especially care about? Or is the love of truth, as professed by so many distinguished thinkers and writers, itself merely another example of bullshit?

...he was the proud owner of a quite colossal member, which on the many awestruck occasions it had been exposed to public view had been compared variously to a giant frankfurter, an overfed python, a length of led piping, the trunk of a rogue elephant, a barrage balloon, an airport-sized Toblerone and a roll of wet wallpaper.

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs.

Genuine travelers travel not to overcome distance but to discover distance. It is not distance that makes travel necessary, but travel that makes distance possible. Distance is not determined by the measurable length between objects, but by the actual differences between them. The motels around the airports in Chicago and Atlanta are so little different from the motels around the airports of Tokyo and Frankfurt that all essential distances dissolve in likeness. What is truly separated is distinct; it is unlike. "The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes" (Proust).

The Revolution won't happen with guns, rather it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.

We no longer live in a world where nations and nationalism are of key significance, but in a globalised market where we are, ostensibly, free to choose – but, if the Frankfurt School’s diagnosis is right, free only to choose what is always the same, free only to choose what spiritually diminishes us, keeps us obligingly submissive to an oppressive system.

We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights.

Once while Edith was visiting the cathedral of Frankfurt, a woman with a market basket entered and knelt down in one of the pews to pray briefly. This was something entirely new to her, leaving as deep an impression as the university lectures.

I looked at it out there. The figures that held my attention, as always (I too had an office at Buna, and spent many hours in front of its window), the figures that held my attention were not the men in stripes, as they queued or scurried in lines or entangled one another in a kind of centipedal scrum, moving at an unnatural speed, like extras in a silent film, moving faster than their strength or build could bear, as if in obedience to a frantic crank swivelled by a furious hand; the figures that held my attention were not the Kapos who screamed at the prisoners, nor the SS noncoms who screamed at the Kapos, nor the overalled company foremen who screamed at the SS noncoms. No. What held my eye were the figures in city business suits, designers, engineers, administrators from IG Farben plants in Frankfurt, Leverkusen, Ludwigshafen, with leather-bound notebooks and retractable yellow measuring tapes, daintily picking their way past the bodies of the wounded, the unconscious, and the dead.

In Hamburg sind alle Mädchen barbourgrün, in Berlin ziehen sie sich betont schlecht an, damit sie so aussehen wie Künstler, und in München haben die Mädchen wegen dem Föhn so ein seltsames inneres Leuchten. Aber in Frankfurt, da sind die Mädchen einfach lässig.

Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the expression of the institutionalized medium of reason, that’s all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, unprincipled, undisciplined feeling.” Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1962

Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris's then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. His birth took place during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune

Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a particular point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to have that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth. On the other hand, a person who takes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, so far as is required, to fake the context as well. This freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the 'bullshit artist'.

Books can change one's life.. as "tools" for the tradesmen, motivate the mind to achieve the impossible, mould one's Character, personality. I was inspired by the reading of Henries Charriere's Papillon, when I was a Teenager. The inspiration lead me to take an overland expedition from Colombo (Sri Lanka) to Frankfurt (Germany), sharpened my knowledge of Countries and Nations. Unforgettable experience !! Thanks to Henries Charriere's Papillon.(less)

One mustn't refuse the unusual, if it is offered to one.

From the point of view of morality, it is not important that everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.

[E]in Werk, und sei es eines der Verzweiflung, kann immer nur den Optimismus, den Glauben ans Leben zur letzten Substanz haben.

Scheint es Dir abwegig, zu glauben, dass "das Denken", hätten Frauen seit über zweitausend Jahren an ihm mitgedacht, heute ein andres Leben führen würde?

The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality, reducing everyone’s concrete life to a universe of speculation.

bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor Emeritus, Yale University (From his book, On Bullshit)

The Delta agent saw my itinerary and said, 'You’re flying to Jakarta via Atlanta, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur? You must have really pissed off your travel agent.

The Frankfurt, however, did not give her latitude or longitude, and after waiting 20 minutes asked the operator of the Titanic, “What is the matter?” To this the Titanic replied that he was a fool (pp.

Dieses ganze Naturschuttgebiet zwischen Fernsehturm und Frankfurter Tor bildet eine architektonische Rotfront rund um den alten Alexanderplatz herum mit dem Centrum Warenhaus drauf, später Malaria-Kaufrausch.

One of the prerogatives of American citizenship is the right to criticize public men and measures, and that means not only informed and responsible criticism but the freedom to speak foolishly and without moderation.

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more extensive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled — whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others — to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.

Yale philosopher Harry Frankfurt writes, “One of the salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.

Lunch: frankfurters with scrambled eggs, grilled tomatoes and a slight touch of garlic, then shop treacle tart squeezed with lemon juice and covered with yoghurt and thick cream. I drank some of the cider just to spite it.

We may seek to distance ourselves from bullshit, but we are more likely to turn away from it with an impatient or irritated shrug than with the sense of violation or outrage that lies often inspire. The problem of understanding why our attitude towards bullshit is generally more benign than our attitude toward lying is an important one...

An hour later he stood in the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof and scanned the massive board of destinations, a hundred or more cities there for his choosing. He could take a train north to Malmo or south to Athens. West to Dublin or east to Moscow.

When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker’s mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. […] In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication.

Ich spüre das Unwissen immer wieder als eine Not; und daraus entsteht dann der ziellose Wissensdrang, aus dem keine Idee wird, weil er eben keinen 'Gegenstand' hat, mit dem er 'übereinstimmen' könnte. - Aber dann gibt vielleicht ein einzelnes Ding etwas zu verstehen und setzt so den 'Geist des Anfangs'; und es kann ernst werden mit dem Studieren, das doch bei aller sonstigen Beschäftigung eine Sehnsucht geblieben war." Peter Handke: Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire. Frankfurt am Main 1984, S. 28.

To the horror of those who can genuinely claim to have suffered from its effects, alienation has proved a highly profitable commodity in the cultural marketplace. Modernist art with its dissonances and torments, to take one example, has become the staple diet of an increasingly voracious army of culture consumers who know good investments when they see them. The avant-garde, if indeed the term can still be used, has become an honored ornament of our cultural life, less to be feared than feted. The philosophy of existentialism, to cite another case, which scarcely a generation ago seemed like a breath of fresh air, has now degenerated into a set of easily manipulated clichés and sadly hollow gestures. This decline occurred, it should be noted, not because analytic philosophers exposed the meaninglessness of its categories, but rather as a result of our culture’s uncanny ability to absorb and defuse even its most uncompromising opponents.

Heidi said, “I have been thinking all day what a happy thing it is that God does not give us what we ask for, even when we pray and pray and pray, if He knows there is something better for us; have you felt like that?” “Why do you ask me that to-night all of a sudden?” asked Clara. “Because I prayed so hard when I was in Frankfurt that I might go home at once, and because I was not allowed to I thought God had forgotten me. And now you see, if I had come away at first when I wanted to, you would never have come here, and would never have got well.” Clara had in her turn become thoughtful. “But, Heidi,” she began again, “in that case we ought never to pray for anything, as God always intends something better for us than we know or wish for.” “You must not think it is like that, Clara,” replied Heidi eagerly. “We must go on praying for everything, for everything, so that God may know we do not forget that it all comes from Him. If we forget God, then He lets us go our own way and we get into trouble; grandmamma told me so. And if He does not give us what we ask for we must not think that He has not heard us and leave off praying, but we must still pray and say, I am sure, dear God, that Thou art keeping something better for me, and I will not be unhappy, for I know that Thou wilt make everything right in the end.” “How did you learn all that?” asked Clara. “Grandmamma explained it to me first of all, and then when it all happened just as she said, I knew it myself, and I think, Clara,” she went on, as she sat up in bed, “we ought certainly to thank God to-night that you can walk now, and that He has made us so happy.” “Yes, Heidi, I am sure you are right, and I am glad you reminded me; I almost forgot my prayers for very joy.” Both children said their prayers, and each thanked God in her own way for the blessing He had bestowed on Clara, who had for so long lain weak and ill.

If one Googles “critical theory,” the first thing that pops up is a boxed definition that states: “crit-i-cal the-o-ry, noun, a philosophical approach to culture, and especially to literature, that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it. The term is applied particularly to the work of the Frankfurt School.”630 That is precisely correct. Note the words “culture” and “Frankfurt School.” Modern critical theory has grown out of that early Freudian-Marxism of the Frankfurt School.

Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial — notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

At Spichernstrasse the train halted to conduct an exchange of bodies. Out on the platform a street musician played a teary Slavic melody on an accordion. Wing tips gleaming, my hair still damp, I was flipping through the Frankfurter Allgemeine when she rolled her unthinkable bicycle in.

There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed.

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. —HARRY G. FRANKFURT

The American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt famously differentiates between lies and bullshit. Lies, he claims, are untruths deliberately intended to deceive. Bullshit, on the other hand, comes about when someone has no real interest in whether or not something they are saying is true or false at all.

The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who - with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth - dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right.

Is the bullshitter by his very nature a mindless slob? Is his product necessarily messy or unrefined? The word shit does, to be sure, suggest this. Excrement is not designed or crafted at all; it is merely emitted or dumped. It may have a more or less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any case certainly not wrought.

Like the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, postmodernism seeks to institutionalize dishonesty as a legitimate school of thought. The idea of truth as the ultimate goal of the intellectual is discarded. In its place, scholars are asked to pursue political objectives--so long as those political objectives are the 'correct' ones. Postmodernism is not fringe within the community of scholars. It is central. This tells us a great deal about the life of the mind today. Peruse any university course catalogue, and you find names like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes. Scour the footnotes of scholarly books and journals and a similar story unfolds. With the primacy of philosophies--postmodernism, Critical Theory, and even the right-leaning Straussianism--that exalt dishonesty in the service of supposedly noble causes, is it at all surprising that liars like Alfred Kinsey, Rigoberta Menchu, Alger Hiss, and Margaret Sanger have achieved a venerated status among the intellectuals?

Today, as in the past, we ought to remind ourselves that the true natural law is not a mere congeries of appetites, and that it is not from the vagrant musings of the hour's judges that the natural law derives its high authority. . . . The Catholic tradition of natural law, to borrow a phrase from Sir Ernest Barker, holds that "law--in the sense of last resort--is somehow above lawmaking." This understanding, in effect, still prevails among many Americans, not all of them Catholics. They agree with Justice Frankfurter that natural law is "what sensible and right-minded men do every day." Yet often the public's apprehension of the teachings of natural law is much decayed, in part because of the total secularization of instruction in public schools. . . . Human nature is not vulpine nature, leonine nature, or serpentine nature. Natural law is bound up with the concept of the dignity of man, and with the experience of humankind ever since the beginning of social community.

After that, they got hot dogs at a frankfurter stand and walked down the wharf. At Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe they saw shrunken heads and Egyptian mummies and cheap souvenirs. (Meg didn’t point out the eight-foot-long petrified whale penis that hung suspended from the ceiling; she could just imagine what Ali would tell her friends.)

‎Gelähmt schon vom Morgengrauen, treibt ein Bündel Elend, im Augenblick des Auslaufs gekentert sein Schiff mit dem Namen 'Abenteuer des Tages', in den Wassern des Vormittags, kommt zum Bewußtsein nicht einmal der Stille des Mittags und liegt, von der Zwischenzeit zu schweigen, am Ende, an eben der Stelle, von welcher unser Held 'in aller Herrgottsfrühe' eigentlich hätte aufbrechen sollen, fest in der Nacht - und auch die Wörter und Bilder, sein Scheitern am Tag weiterzugeben, gibt es nicht, es sei denn die schalgewordenen und ausgeschöpften Allegorien wie gerade eben." Peter Handke: Versuch über den geglückten Tag. Ein Wintertagtraum. Frankfurt am Main 1991, S. 32.

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “antirealist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity.

If my father hadn’t come to America about 35 years ago, I’d be starving in Poland . . .   I’d be sobbing in France . . .   I’d be stealing in Greece . . .   I’d be shivering in Belgrade . . .   I’d be slaving in Frankfurt . . .   I’d be hiding in Prague . . .   I’d be buried in Russia.   But here he was, alive and walking on his own two feet.

Corey was hanging out down by the port one afternoon with Karl and Jacques when a bus-load of american tourists drove by, and in a moment of clarity Corey suddenly perceived Karl in the light of reality rather than through the kaleidoscope of fashion: the tourists were staring open-mouthed through the bus windows, ice creams held in mid-air, gawping at the apparition that was Karl. Jacques was driving the mobylette and Karl sat behind riding side-saddle dressed in hot pants, long strands of pearls and dark glasses; he was wielding a raw frankfurter straight from the packet in one hand and a bottle of coca-cola in the other. I remember thinking "I am with this total freak," says Corey.

The Rothschilds have been closely involved with the global elite since the inception of this group. The oldest known Rothschild went by the name of Uri Feibesch who lived in the early sixteenth century. His great great great grandson was Moses Bauer, who lived in the early eighteenth century. A well-known ancestor of this banking family was Mayer Amschel Bauer, an asset manager in Frankfurt am Main. Among other things he represented the money and assets of sovereign Wilhelm von Hessen. He became very rich, because he attended to the conveyance of the capital that belonged to this sovereign during the French Revolution. Mayer Amschel Bauer chose, without exception, women from very influential families that belonged to the global elite, for his sons. In the same way, his daughters married prominent bankers who also belonged to the global elite. All these families acted in the same way as the royal families: they married amongst themselves. Bauer’s sons were known as the “five Frankfurter”: they became bankers of five European countries.

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled — whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others — to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.

Michael Delaney used to be fat. Not puppy-padding fat—bursting-frankfurts-in-a-boiling-pot fat. He remembered gym class and swimming lessons. All of the thin guys who could be divided into one of two groups: those who looked but did not comment and those who looked and commented, with enthusiasm... Fat kids are like alcoholics; they always have excuses.

Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness.

Usaha manusia rasional adalah tidak rasional".

Morality, as I understand it, has to do particularly with how we ought to conduct ourselves in our relations with others.

So far as freedom is concerned, it is of course true that freedom is commonly understood to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility.

The most constructive way of resolving conflicts is to avoid them.

All these Ministers insist on coming in and having kittens all over the place.

Once the tyranny of literalness is rejected, all relevant considerations for giving a rational content to the words become operative.

But once people learn to love destruction for its own sake, evil leadership gets its chance.

Instead of wasting his time in Frankfurt and Tokyo, the finance minster should focus on Indian housewives and help them balance their budgets by reducing inflation and the fiscal deficit. Unfortunately, our housewives do not have access to the Nashik note printing press like our FM. The solution to India’s problems lie inside, not in wooing FII and FDI inflows.

Justice Frankfurter told me, when I had been attacked in an editorial, there were two kinds of pain in public life. One was the deep continuing pain of serious emotional blows. The other, the pain of immediate controversy, was like a toothache. It was terrible, but once fixed, you forgot it ever existed. You have already known the first kind. This is the second.

But there is a way of despising the dandelion which is not that of the dreary pessimist, but of the more offensive optimist. It can be done in various ways; one of which is saying, "You can get much better dandelions at Selfridge's," or "You can get much cheaper dandelions at Woolworth's." Another way is to observe with a casual drawl, "Of course nobody but Gamboli in Vienna really understands dandelions," or saying that nobody would put up with the old-fashioned dandelion since the super-dandelion has been grown in the Frankfurt Palm Garden; or merely sneering at the stinginess of providing dandelions, when all the best hostesses give you an orchid for your buttonhole and a bouquet of rare exotics to take away with you. These are all methods of undervaluing the thing by comparison; for it is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them. Instead of saying, like the old religious poet, "What is man that Thou carest for him, or the son of man that Thou regardest him?" we are to say like the discontented cabman, "What's this?" or like the bad-tempered Major in the club, "Is this a chop fit for a gentleman?" Now I not only dislike this attitude quite as much as the Swinburnian pessimistic attitude, but I think it comes to very much the same thing; to the actual loss of appetite for the chop or the dish of dandelion-tea. And the name of it is Presumption and the name of its twin brother is Despair. This is the principle I was maintaining when I seemed an optimist to Mr. Max Beerbohm; and this is the principle I am still maintaining when I should undoubtedly seem a pessimist to Mr. Gordon Selfridge. The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

Brecht’s ‘basic laxity’ was one reason why, apart from his satellites and those tied to him by party bonds, he was generally unpopular with other writers. He was much despised by the academic writers of the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Horkheimer, etc.) as a ‘vulgar Marxist’. Adorno said that Brecht spent hours every day putting dirt under his fingernails so he looked like a worker.

He got carried away as he developed his idea: 'The aesthetic quality of towns is essential. If, as has been said, every landscape is a frame of mind, then it is even more true of a townscape. The way the inhabitants think and feel corresponds to the town they live in. An analogous phenomenon can be observed in certain women who, during their pregnancy, surround themselves with harmonious objects, calm statues, bright gardens, delicate curios, so that their child-to-be, under their influence, will be beautiful. In the same way one cannot imagine a genius coming from other than a magnificent town. Goethe was born in Frankfurt, a noble city where the Main flows between venerable palaces, between walls where the ancient heart of Germany lives on. Hoffmann explains Nuremberg - his soul performs acrobatics on the gables like a gnome on the decorated face of an old German clock. In France there is Rouen, with its rich accumulation of architectural monuments, its. cathedral like an oasis of stone, which produced Corneille and then Flaubert, two pure geniuses shaking hands across the centuries. There is no doubt about it, beautiful towns make beautiful souls.

What a world it was nowadays, he thought. Everything used the whole time to arouse emotion. Discipline? Restraint? None of those things counted for anything any more. Nothing mattered but to feel.

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he consider his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

It is in this sense that Pascal’s statement is unconnected to a concern with truth: she is not concerned with the truth-value of what she says. That is why she cannot be regarded as lying; for she does not presume that she knows the truth, and therefore she cannot be deliberately promulgating a proposition that she presumes to be false. Her statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.

It is especially critical that you avoid processed meats such as frankfurters, bologna, salami, lunch meat, beef jerky, smoked fish, bacon, sausage, ham, pepperoni, SPAM and others that are preserved with nitrites. Why? Because this chemical is a potent anti-immunity, cancer-causing chemical. When possible, reach for meats that are nitrite-free, which does include certain brands of hot dogs, bacon, sausage and ham among others.

Since 1939 he had lived expecting war any moment. The Nazis were far more real to him than to most Americans he met, and far more frightening. He did not share the mirth of his acquaintances at Hitler the ex-paperhanger who made funny faces and ridiculous speeches as his legions goose-stepped and fell on their faces. He had seen them in the streets of Heidelberg and Berlin and Frankfurt. They were drunk with violence and power.

The cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk insists on what he calls “enlightened false consciousness” in which an individual or a group intentionally and ironically cultivates a state of consciousness they know to be false because it is advantageous to do so.35 Frankfurt school theorist Max Horkheimer argues for a similar idea: the bourgeoise embraces ideology out of cunning and a will to dominate, not because they are duped by it.36

Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism, and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as they’d called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old-school American academia.

Táblákat kellene állítani a kortárs regények elé: ideköltözni tilos, letelepedni tilos, itt berendezkedni tilos. Aki szilárd talajt akar a lába alá, annak sokkal több kell, mint amit az irodalom és művészet valaha is nyújthat.

Here, too, are some freaks who did harm in their own way. They have names not like Mao and Che and Fidel and the other usual suspects who the world already knows too well, but names like Crowley, Duranty, Hay, Reich, Benjamin, Alinsky, Millett, the Frankfurt School—more elusive targets off the radar, and who the world should know more about, at the least because they serve as subtle (or not so subtle) markers and cautionary tales of the consequences of these ideas.

To be sure, the Frankfurt School of the 1930s was certainly not issuing joint statements calling for, say, same-sex marriage—such would have been considered pure madness in any day before our own. Nonetheless, this cabal’s comprehensive push for untethered, unhinged sexual openness with no cultural boundaries or religious restrictions cracked the door for almost anything down the road. When God and tradition and ancient norms are said to no longer exist, anything and everything is permissible.

Isn't that a beautiful tale, grandfather," said Heidi, as the latter continued to sit without speaking, for she had expected him to express pleasure and astonishment. "You are right, Heidi; it is a beautiful tale," he replied, but he looked so grave as he said it that Heidi grew silent herself and sat looking quietly at her pictures. Presently she pushed her book gently in front of him and said, "See how happy he is there," and she pointed with her finger to the figure of the returned prodigal, who was standing by his father clad in fresh raiment as one of his own sons again. A few hours later, as Heidi lay fast asleep in her bed, the grandfather went up the ladder and put his lamp down near her bed so that the light fell on the sleeping child. Her hands were still folded as if she had fallen asleep saying her prayers, an expression of peace and trust lay on the little face, and something in it seemed to appeal to the grandfather, for he stood a long time gazing down at her without speaking. At last he too folded his hands, and with bowed head said in a low voice, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee and am not worthy to be called thy son." And two large tears rolled down the old man's cheeks. Early the next morning he stood in front of his hut and gazed quietly around him. The fresh bright morning sun lay on mountain and valley. The sound of a few early bells rang up from the valley, and the birds were singing their morning song in the fir trees. He stepped back into the hut and called up, "Come along, Heidi! the sun is up! Put on your best frock, for we are going to church together!" Heidi was not long getting ready; it was such an unusual summons from her grandfather that she must make haste. She put on her smart Frankfurt dress and soon went down, but when she saw her grandfather she stood still, gazing at him in astonishment. "Why, grandfather!" she exclaimed, "I never saw you look like that before! and the coat with the silver buttons! Oh, you do look nice in your Sunday coat!" The old man smiled and replied, "And you too; now come along!" He took Heidi's hand in his and together they walked down the mountain side. The bells were ringing in every direction now, sounding louder and fuller as they neared the valley, and Heidi listened to them with delight. "Hark at them, grandfather! it's like a great festival!" The congregation had already assembled and the singing had begun when Heidi and her grandfather entered the church at Dorfli and sat down at the back. But before the hymn was over every one was nudging his neighbor and whispering, "Do you see? Alm-Uncle is in church!" Soon everybody in the church knew of Alm-Uncle's presence, and the women kept on turning round to look and quite lost their place in the singing. But everybody became more attentive when the sermon began, for the preacher spoke with such warmth and thankfulness that those present felt the effect of his words, as if some great joy had come to them all.

In 1942 the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski gave eye witness testimony to the Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter of the clearing of the Warsaw Ghetto and the systematic murder of Polish Jews in the Belzec concentration camp. Listening to him, Frankfurter, himself a Jew, and one of the outstanding legal minds of his generation, replied, "I must be frank. I am unable to believe him." He added: "I did not say this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe him. There is a difference.

كيف يمكننا إطلاقا أن نقول أمرا عن الشيء من دون أن نكون مطلعين بشكل كاف على نوع الحقيقة التي تخصه؟ يمكن حالا أن نرد على ذالك بسؤال: كيف يمكننا أن نعرف أمرا ما عن الحقيقة الحقة حول الشيء إذا لم نعرف الشيء ذاته، حتى نحسم في شأن الحقيقة التي يمكن و يجب أن تخصه؟

When working out energetically, people frequently feel more completely and more vividly alive than they do before exercising, when they are less fully and less directly aware of their own capacities, when they are less brimming with a sense of their own vitality.

On September 11, it was government that failed. Law enforcement agencies didn't detect the plot. The FBI had reports that said young men on the terrorist watch list were going from flight school to flight school, trying to find an instructor who would teach them how to fly a commercial jet. But the FBI never acted on it. The INS let the hijackers in. Three of them had expired visas. Months after the attack, the government issued visas to two dead hijackers. The solution to such government incompetence is to give the government more power? Congress could have done what Amsterdam, Belfast, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, London, Paris, and Rome did: set tough standards and let private companies compete to meet them. Many of those cities switched to private companies because they realized government-run security wasn't working very well. Private-sector competition keeps the screeners alert because the airport can fire them. No one can fire the government; that's a reason government agencies gradually deteriorate. There's no competition.

The heirs of Gramsci, like the ideological progeny of Marx and Lenin and the Frankfurt School, insisted on the need to question everything, including moral absolutes and the Judeo-Christian basis of Western civilization. They needed to frame seemingly benign conventions as systematic injustices that must be exposed. This is where we got professors fulminating against everything from “the patriarchy” to “white imperialism” to “transphobia.” By the twenty-first century, even biological sex was no longer considered a settled issue.

Roosevelt had returned from Hyde Park troubled that Felix Frankfurter and Bohr had somehow breached Manhattan Project security, Bush and perhaps Conant had talked to Bohr and the two administrators had submitted to Stimson at his request a more detailed proposal incorporating Bohr’s ideas. In doing so they had explicitly recommended that the United States sacrifice some portion of its national sovereignty in exchange for effective international control, understanding as they did so that they would have to answer vigorous opposition:

In the 1920s and early 1930s there was no doubt which newspaper in Germany had the widest national and international reputation. The Frankfurt Newspaper (Frankfurter Zeitung) was renowned the world over for its thorough and objective reporting, its fair-minded opinion columns and its high intellectual standards. If there was one German newspaper to which foreigners who wished to know what was going on in the country turned, this was it. Although its readership was not large, it was highly educated and included many key formers of opinion.

McCormack and Richard Tauber are singing by the bed There's a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head There's devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands You need one more drop of poison and you'll dream of foreign lands When you pissed yourself in Frankfurt and got syph down in Cologne And you heard the rattling death trains as you lay there all alone Frank Ryan brought you whiskey in a brothel in Madrid And you decked some fucking blackshirt who was cursing all the Yids At the sick bed of Cuchulainn we'll kneel and say a prayer And the ghosts are rattling at the door and the Devil's in the chair And in the Euston tavern you screamed it was your shout But they wouldn't give you service so you kicked the windows out They took you out into the street and kicked you in the brains So you walked back in through a bolted door and did it all again At the sick bed of Cuchulainn we'll kneel and say a prayer And the ghosts are rattling at the door and the Devil's in the chair You remember that foul evening when you heard the banshees howl There was lousy drunken bastards singing Billy in the Bowl They took you up to midnight mass and left you in the lurch So you dropped a button in the plate and spewed up in the church Now you'll sing a song of liberty for blacks and Paks and Jocks And they'll take you from this dump you're in and stick you in a box Then they'll take you to Cloughprior and shove you in the ground But you'll stick your head back out and shout "We'll have another round" At the gravesite of Cuchulainn we'll kneel around and pray And God is in his heaven, and Billy's down by the bay "The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn

Shortly before my departure in January 1969, I happened to be at a party in New York, where I was introduced to Mark Rudd, the fiery leader of the Columbia student uprising who was soon to embark on the desperate, self-destructive adventure that was called the Weather Underground.

We cannot think of ourselves as creatures whose rationality endows us with an especially significant advantage over others—indeed, we cannot think of ourselves as rational creatures at all—unless we think of ourselves as creatures who recognize that facts, and true statements about the facts, are indispensable in providing us with reasons for believing (or for not believing) various things and for taking (or for not taking) various actions. If we have no respect for the distinction between true and false, we may as well kiss our much-vaunted “rationality” good-bye.

Just before noon, they were standing at a Schnell-Imbiss wagon in Kreuzberg, both with tinned beers, Frank with a Bulette or bunless hamburger, cold but cooked meat that one could hold in one’s fingers and dip into mustard. A Turk standing with beer and a frankfurter next to them wore the last word in casual summer gear: no top at all, hairy abdomen bulging over short green shorts not only worn out but eaten nearly to pieces perhaps by a dog. His dirty feet were in sandals. Frank looked this chap up and down with an unfazed eye, and said: “I think Berlin is quite big. Not cramped at all.

The Frankfurt School’s studies combined Marxist analysis with Freudian psychoanalysis to form the basis of what became known as “Critical Theory” – the destructive criticism of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, ethno-centrism and conservatism. Critical Theory repeats over and over a mantra of alleged Western evils: racism, sexism, colonialism, nationalism, homophobia, fascism, xenophobia, imperialism and, of course, religious bigotry (only applied to Christianity).

There were many key figures from the Frankfurt School: Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Franz Neumann, the Soviet spy Richard Sorge, Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, and others. The school began in 1923 as the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. It is also sometimes called Goethe University, fittingly and frighteningly enough. Karl Marx would have been proud. The Frankfurt School in the 1930s would pick up and relocate to the United States, as its members (most if not all of them Jews) fled Hitler’s atrocious Final Solution.584

Perhaps we may be, for a time, blissfully ignorant or happily deceived, and in those ways, despite all of the difficulties that endanger us, we may temporarily avoid being especially upset or disturbed. In the end, however, our ignorance and our false beliefs are likely just to make our circumstances worse.

In the real world of globalised finance, where investment portfolios for the major centres are combined, where the markets (stock, bond, money, real estate, government securities, forex and commodities) tick almost round-the-clock from Tokyo Monday morning to New York Friday 5 pm, via London, Frankfurt, etc, in between (and the digital books are passed at the appropriate times), tracking such practices as “round tripping” – discovering the real footprints – is going to be exceedingly difficult. It would be better to focus on tracing the footprints of the black incomes where they are generated, i e, in India itself.

How often, I thought to myself, had I lain thus in a hotel room, in Vienna or Frankfurt or Brussels, with my hand clasped under my head, listening not to the stillness, as in Venice, but to the roar of the traffic, with a mounting sense of panic. That, then, I thought on such occasions, is the new ocean. Ceaselessly, in great surges, the waves roll in over the length and breadth of our cities, rising higher and higher, breaking in a kind of frenzy when the roar reaches its peak and then discharging across the stones and the asphalt even as the next onrush is being released from where it was held by the traffic lights.

The point is rather that, so far as Wittgenstein can see, Pascal offers a description of a certain state of affairs without genuinely submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes. Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying.

Understanding media alone will not bring about a better world (the Kingdom of God?), but ought to be the foundation of good works that may bring it about: constructing an environment of truly free-flowing and uninhibited information, to be sure, but also reaffirming and supporting the structures of thought that allow us to identify error and falsehood, and empowering us to label bullshit as bullshit, as Harry Frankfurt suggests. The global village, with its “rich and creative mix” full of “creative diversity” can be the perfect venue to put bullshit on an equal footing with truth. I see nothing in this situation that is either constructive or Catholic.

What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.

At Berkeley the Free Speech Movement arose simultaneously with the hippie world of drugs. At first it was politically neither left nor right, but rather a call for the freedom to express any political views on Sproul Plaza. Then soon the Free Speech Movement became the Dirty Speech Movement, in which freedom was seen as shouting four-letter words into a mike. Soon after, it became the platform for the political New Left which followed the teaching of Herbert Marcuse (1898–). Marcuse was a German professor of philosophy related to the neo-Marxist teaching of the “Frankfurt School,” along with Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), Max Horkheimer (1895–) and Jürgen Habermas (1929–).

John Dewey. ‘The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also

One could take this connection further and draw a parallel between Satanism and the so-called “critical theory” pioneered by the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School sought to dispel a traditional/Christian understanding of society and instead desired to set society free from the constraints of historical Western culture. As Max Horkheimer noted, the goal of critical theory is “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.”628 These “circumstances” are the traditional Western institutions and moral norms that have held together the Judeo-Christian world for millennia. For culture-focused Marxists, these institutions had to be dismantled. Literally speaking, to hell with them.

Nuestra misión actual es, antes bien, asegurar que en el futuro no vuelva a perderse la capacidad para la teoría y para la acción que nace de esta [...] Debemos luchar para que la humanidad no quede desmoralizada para siempre por los terribles acontecimientos del presente, para que la fe en un futuro feliz de la sociedad, en un futuro de paz y digno del hombre, no desaparezca de la tierra.

You’re a grown-up, these days. You don’t wear a kamikaze pilot’s rising sun headband and a tee-shirt that screams DEBUG THIS! and you don’t spend your weekends competing in extreme programming slams at a windy campsite near Frankfurt, but it’s generally difficult for you to use any machine that doesn’t have at least one compiler installed: In fact, you had to stick Python on your phone before you even opened its address book because not being able to brainwash it left you feeling handicapped, like you were a passenger instead of a pilot. In another age you would have been a railway mechanic or a grease monkey crawling over the spark plugs of a DC-3. This is what you are, and the sad fact is, they can put the code monkey in a suit but they can’t take the code out of the monkey.

The prerequisites of the German economic miracle were not only the enormous sums invested in the country under the Marshall Plan, the outbreak of the Cold War, and the scrapping of outdated industrial complexes-an operation performed with brutal efficiency by the bomber squadrons-but also something less often acknowledged: the unquestioning work ethic learned in a totalitarian society, the logistical capacity for improvisation shown by an economy under constant threat, experience in the use of "foreign labor forces," and the lifting of the heavy burden of history that went up in flames between 1942 and 1945 along with the centuries-old buildings accommodating homes and businesses in Nuremberg and Cologne, in Frankfurt, Aachen, Brunswick, and Wurzberg, a historical burden ultimately regretted by only a few.

Large language models do not “write.” They generate syntax. They do not think, feel, or experience anything. They are fundamentally incapable of judging truth, accuracy, or veracity. Any actions that look like the exercise of judgment are illusory. While the term hallucination has come to mean outputs from LLMs that are incorrect or untrue, it is arguably more accurate to say that from the point of view of the LLM, everything is a hallucination, as it has no reference points from which to judge its own production. ChatGPT is fundamentally a “bullshitter” as defined by Harry Frankfurt in his classic treatise on the term (On Bullshit), something “unconnected to concern for the truth.” It’s not that ChatGPT makes stuff up. It has no capacity for discerning something true from something not true. Truth is irrelevant to its operations.

So many noble ideas flowing about. But then, you see, whom have you got to work out the ideas with? After all, only the same human beings you’ve always had. You can create a third world now, or so everyone thinks, but the third world will have the same people in it as the first world or the second world or whatever names you like to call things. And when you have the same human beings running things, they’ll run them the same way.

Kako pak čovjek zna koji je to trenutak u kojemu mu je odlučiti hoće li uzvodno ili nizvodno, kako zna gdje je Huča plitka, a gdje duboka? I kad kocka, zna da je pokušao i da je na kocki dobio, ili izgubio, svejedno, jer takvi barem znaju da su stranu birali kad su umjesto zadnjeg pića u “Vrilu“ uplatili tiket lutrije, a ne kad su kupovali cigarete kod sisate trafikantice. Takvi znaju da su svoj put izabrali kad su kupili autobusnu kartu za Split, Beograd, Frankfurt, ili ubili susjeda, brata, jebiga, ili predsjednika države, ili pročitali knjigu koja će im promijeniti život, ili otkrili lijek za nekakvu boleštinu, ili upoznali trenera iz Sarajeva, ili menadžera iz Beograda ili s lovom za listić lutrije popili još jedno piće u “Vrilu“. Sva su takva raskršća u životu obilježena i sve u su takve odluke važne, i one dobre i one pogrešne, svaka je neponovljiva i velika poput cijele čovjekove sudbine.

That is why she cannot be regarded as lying; for she does not presume that she knows the truth, and therefore she cannot be deliberately promulgating a proposition that she presumes to be false: Her statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true, not, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth - this indifference to how things really are - that I regard as the essence of bullshit.

The world is an estranged and untrue world so long as man does not destroy its dead objectivity and recognize himself and his own life 'behind' the fixed form of things and laws. When he finally wins this self-consciousness, he is on his way not only to the truth of himself, but also of his world. And with the recognition goes the doing. He will try to put this truth into action, and make the world what it essentially is, namely, the fulfillment of man's self-consciousness.

A politikusok mindig túl sokat képzelnek magukról, amikor úgy gondolják – s ez nemcsak a mi korunkra és nemcsak Németországra áll –, hogy a kortárs irodalom háborgatja dicséretes szándékaikat. (…) Amikor a politikusok meg a társadalom megbántva vagy fenyegetve érzik magukat, akkor nem látják, hogy mindig sokkal többről van szó, mint róluk. Ők még csak ürügyet sem, alkalmat is csak ritkán szolgáltatnak, modellnek szinte soha nem alkalmasak: az irodalom túlmegy rajtuk és elmegy mellettük.

I track pieces of Nazi-stolen art,” she said, after a moment. “And what I’ve noticed is just how far each object travels. Take Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet. It was painted in 1880 in Auvers-sur-Oise about a month before Van Gogh committed suicide. The work changed hands four times—from Van Gogh’s brother to his brother’s widow to two independent collectors—before it was acquired by the Städel in Frankfurt. When Nazis plundered the museum in 1937, it was seized by Hermann Göring, who auctioned it off to a German collector. But here’s where things get interesting: that collector sold it to Siegfried Kramarsky, a Jewish banker who fled the Holocaust for New York in 1938. It’s remarkable, isn’t it? That the painting wound up, after all that, in Jewish hands, and directly from a Göring associate?” Mira fingered her headphones. She seemed suddenly shy. “I suppose I think we need God for the same reason we need art.” “Because it’s nice to look at?” “No.” Mira smiled. “Because it shows us what’s possible.

i der Ankunft nach einer Reise oder beim Erreichen jeder Art von Ziel verleugnet man gern die deprimierende Tatsächlichkeit durch ein diffuses: »Da wären wir also.« Nach erfolgreicher Absolvierung einer Aufgabe heißt es wenig überzeugt. »Das hätten wir also.« Nicht nur die Erreichung des Zieles oder dessen Sinnhaftigkeit wird damit in Frage gestellt, sondern auch die Identität des resümierenden Subjekts. Einmal hat mir ein wohlmeinender Frankfurter Zeitungsredakteur ein da wären wir aus dem Text hinaus redigiert, vielmehr Richtung Wirklichkeit verdreht, mit dem Hinweis: »Sie SIND doch da, wozu Konjunktiv?« Unerklärbare Abgründe zwischen verwandten Kulturen. Wäre Descartes aus meiner Gegend gekom-men, hätten wir heute weltweit: »Ich denke, also wäre ich.« Die Untertitel für den ersten Schrei jedes Neugeborenen hießen: »Da wäre ich also.« Vielleicht kam mir das nur in den Sinn, weil ich in dem Gebäude, in dem meine Mutter starb, geboren wurde. Zuerst hat sie meinen Bruder hier zur Welt gebracht, vier Jahre später mich, jetzt starb sie hier. Da wären wir also wieder einmal.

The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who — with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth - dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right.

It is the very impersonal quality of urban life, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious feeling. For in the village of old, religion was a natural extension of the daily traditions and routine of life among the extended family; but migrations to the city brought Muslims into the anonymity of slum existence, and to keep the family together and the young from drifting into crime, religion has had to be reinvented in starker, more ideological form. In this way states weaken, or at least have to yield somewhat, to new and sometimes extreme kinds of nationalism and religiosity advanced by urbanization. Thus, new communities take hold that transcend traditional geography, even as they make for spatial patterns of their own. Great changes in history often happen obscurely.10 A Eurasia and North Africa of vast, urban concentrations, overlapping missile ranges, and sensational global media will be one of constantly enraged crowds, fed by rumors and half-truths transported at the speed of light by satellite channels across the rimlands and heartland expanse, from one Third World city to another. Conversely, the crowd, empowered by social media like Twitter and Facebook, will also be fed by the very truth that autocratic rulers have denied it. The crowd will be key in a new era where the relief map will be darkened by densely packed megacities—the crowd being a large group of people who abandon their individuality in favor of an intoxicating collective symbol. Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-born Spanish Jew and Nobel laureate in literature, became so transfixed and terrified at the mob violence over inflation that seized Frankfurt and Vienna between the two world wars that he devoted much of his life to studying the human herd in all its manifestations. The signal insight of his book Crowds and Power, published in 1960, was that we all yearn to be inside some sort of crowd, for in a crowd—or a mob, for that matter—there is shelter from danger and, by inference, from loneliness. Nationalism, extremism, the yearning for democracy are all the products of crowd formations and thus manifestations of seeking to escape from loneliness. It is loneliness, alleviated by Twitter and Facebook, that ultimately leads to the breakdown of traditional authority and the erection of new kinds.

As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial — notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

When a honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

I feel heavy as lead as I walk aimlessly around the neglected ruins, I linger at the Fuhrer’s podium in silent respect for the loss of the world’s greatest leader, the God-Man and ultimate leader, Adolf Hitler, Mein Fuhrer. betrayed, betrayed again he was, how many times can he be betrayed, how many times did they try to kill him, to stop him anyway they could? And yet, still, out of God’s love he extended his hands to his folk, a treasonous people, an unworthy people, not just the Germans but all Europeans and all of this world, and has not the world got what it deserved for this treason? For the disloyalty? When they betrayed the rightful leader of freedom and instead chose the enemy to serve as slaves? And of all people, the Europeans have betrayed their own most of all and for that they have lost all sovereignty and dignity, and the only one who could have secured it for them, who sacrificed his own earthly life for the future of his folk – Adolf Hitler, is denigrated more than the Devil himself! Europe has scorned her greatest Son! Europe, without hesitation, sold all her children down the river, and for what? Less than trinkets and blankets… They sold their generations and civilization, all for worthless ECB Frankfurt Confetti!

Gleich ob man über Neufundland fliegt oder bei Einbruch der Nacht über das von Boston bis Philadelphia reichende Lichtergewimmel, über die wie Perlmutt schimmernden Wüsten Arabiens, über das Ruhrgebiet oder den Frankfurter Raum, es ist immer, als gäbe es keine Menschen, als gäbe es nur das, was sie geschaffen haben und worin sie sich verbergen. Man sieht ihre Wohnstätten und die Wege, die sie verbinden, man sieht den Rauch, der aufsteigt aus ihren Behausungen und Produktionsstätten, man sieht die Fahrzeuge, in denen sie sitzen, aber die Menschen selber sieht man nicht. Und doch sind sie überall anwesend auf dem Antlitz der Erde, breiten sich stündlich weiter aus, bewegen sich durch die Waben hochaufragender Türme und sind in zunehmendem Masse eingespannt in Netzwerke von einer der Vorstellungsvermögen eines jeden einzelnen bei weitem übersteigenden Kompliziertheit, sei es so wie einst in den Diamantenminen Südafrikas zwischen Tausenden von Seilzügen und Winden, sei es wie heute in den Bürohallen der Börsen und Agenturen in den Strom der unablässig um den Erdball flutenden Information. Wenn wir uns aus solcher  Höhe betrachten, ist es entsetzlich, wie wenig wir wissen über uns selbst, über unseren Zweck und unser Ende, dachte ich mir, als wir die Küste  hinter uns liessen und hinausflogen über das gallertgrüne Meer.

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “anti-realist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity.

These men developed a kind of Freudian-Marxism, or “Freudo-Marxism,” integrating the extraordinarily bad but influential twentieth-century ideas of Sigmund Freud with the extraordinarily bad but influential nineteenth-century teachings of Karl Marx. This was no match made in heaven. The noxious Marx had conjured up the most toxic ideas of the nineteenth century, whereas the neurotic Freud had cooked up the most infantile ideas of the twentieth century. Swirling the insipid ideas of those two ideological-psychological basket cases into a single malevolent witch’s brew was bound to uncork a barrel of mischief. The Frankfurt School was the laboratory and the distillery for their concoction, and the children of the 1960s would be their twitching guinea pigs and guzzling alcoholics. The flower-children, the hippies, the Yippies, the Woodstock generation, the Haight-Asbury LSD dancers, the sex-lib kids would all drink deep from the magic chalice, intoxicated by lofty dreams (more like hallucinations and bad acid-trips) of fundamental transformation of the culture, country, and world. And a generation or two still later, they would become the nutty professors who mixed the Kool-Aid for the millennials who would merrily redefine everything from marriage to sexuality to gender, wittingly or not serving the Frankenstein monster of cultural Marxism by doing so.

Abban hiszek ugyan, hogy az irodalom nemcsak olvasókat feltételez, hanem magyarázókat is, társas sokaságot és kötődést, viszont azt nem hiszem, hogy az irodalomba be kell avattatni. Még az sem valószínű, hogy Kafka, a legnagyobb, beavatott volt, hiába próbálják fogságban tartani körök és baráti koszorúcskák. (…) Én a gyerekeimnek és egy mindenesünknek is odaadtam Kafkát és Faulknert, olvassák, de nem fennen hirdetve, hogy a művészet a népé, hanem azért, mert tisztelem Faulknert és Kafkát: nem hiszem, hogy a beavatottaknak írtak volna. A „nehezen érthetőség” pedig viszonylagos: a Grimm-mesék szintén nehezen érthetők; író nem rekeszt ki olvasót, és nem szerénységből nem teszi, hanem gőgből.

Hiszen az író sosem teljesen az, aminek valahol netalán besorolják: kéményseprőnek, marxistának, katolikusnak, miniszteri tanácsosnak stb. – még ha katolikus-marxista miniszteri tanácsos volna is, aki egyszer mókából letette a kéményseprő-mestervizsgát: elsősorban író ő, és csak azonkívül minden egyéb, és semennyire sem kötődik, ha nem kötődik legalább hétszeresen; sőt még az is lehet, hogy valami olyat keres, ami a közepe valaminek, csakhogy a többiek ott kívül – a kéményseprők, a marxisták, a katolikusok, a miniszteri tanácsosok stb. – ha valaminek a közepére gondolnak, akkor egy kör közepe jut az eszükbe, egy kör kerek, tehát esztétikailag használhatatlan kerek közepére, holott három-, kilenc- és ötvenhétszögeknek is van közepük.

If “bullshit,” as opposed to “bull,” is a distinctively modern linguistic innovation, that could have something to do with other distinctively modern things, like advertising, public relations, political propaganda, and schools of education. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” Harry Frankfurt, a distinguished moral philosopher who is professor emeritus at Princeton, says. The ubiquity of bullshit, he notes, is something that we have come to take for granted. Most of us are pretty confident of our ability to detect it, so we may not regard it as being all that harmful. We tend to take a more benign view of someone caught bullshitting than of someone caught lying. (“Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through,” a father counsels his son in an Eric Ambler novel.) All of this worries Frankfurt. We cannot really know the effect that bullshit has on us, he thinks, until we have a clearer understanding of what it is. That is why we need a theory of bullshit. Frankfurt’s own effort along these lines was contained in a paper that he presented more than three decades ago at a faculty seminar at Yale. Later, that paper appeared in a journal and then in a collection of Frankfurt’s writings; all the while, photocopies of it passed from fan to fan. In 2005, it was published as On Bullshit, a tiny book of sixty-seven spaciously printed pages that went on to become an improbable breakout success, spending half a year on the New York Times bestseller list.

What tends to go on in a bull session is that the participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to hear themselves saying such things and in order to discover how others respond, without it being assumed that they are committed to what they say. It is understood by everyone in a bull session that the statements people make do not necessarily reveal what they really believe or how they really feel. The main point is to make possible a high level of candor and an experimental or adventuresome approach to the subjects under discussion. Therefore provision is made for enjoying a certain irresponsibility, so that people will be encouraged to convey what is on their minds without too much anxiety that they will be held to it.

Nagy szót mondott ki ebben a városban Theodor W. Adorno: Auschwitz óta lehetetlen verset írni. Én modulálom ezt: Auschwitz óta nem lehet többé lélegzeni, enni, szeretni – aki az első lélegzetet beszívta, aki csak egyetlen cigarettára rágyújtott, az úgy döntött, hogy túl fogja élni, olvasni fog, írni fog, szeretni fog. Túlélő vagyok, mint olyan ember szólok önökhöz, aki tágabb meghitt terepet, nyelvi terepet föltételezett, mint amekkora nyilván föltételezhető volt. Aki olvas és ír, megnősült, cigarettázott, aki meghosszabbította a tartózkodását, s nem tudja, mi fog megmaradni. A bombával együtt él, mint önök, valamennyiünknek zsebében a bomba, a gyufa meg a cigaretta mellett, általa, a bomba által megváltozott az idő dimenziója, úgyszólván kizárja a hosszú tartamot.

Something is going on–something is brewing. Not just in one country. In quite a lot of countries. They’ve recruited a service of their own and the danger about that is that it’s a service of young people. And the kind of people who will go anywhere, do anything, unfortunately believe anything, and so long as they are promised a certain amount of pulling down, wrecking, throwing spanners in the works, then they think the cause must be a good one and that the world will be a different place. They’re not creative, that’s the trouble–only destructive. The creative young write poems, write books, probably compose music, paint pictures just as they always have done. They’ll be all right–But once people learn to love destruction for its own sake, evil leadership gets its chance.

He was also a more astute politician than even his admirers realized. During his rise to power, he constructed his own base as an independent candidate not beholden to the oil interests in Southern California. For party loyalty, he substituted personal connections to the state’s two most important (and quite conservative) publishers—Joe Knowland in Oakland, and Harry Chandler in Los Angeles. At the very least, these friendships helped neutralize papers that might otherwise have rejected his increasingly liberal agenda. He was a distinguished governor of California. The state was growing by as many as ten thousand new residents a week, and the pressures on the state’s schools, roads, and its water resources were enormous. Facing that challenge had made him tough-minded and pragmatic about government, its limits, and how best it could benefit ordinary people. He was both an optimist and an activist: If he did not exactly bring an ideology to the Court, then he brought the faith of someone who had seen personally what government could and should do to ameliorate the lives of ordinary people. That the great figures on the bench had so much more judicial experience—Black with sixteen years of service on the Court, Frankfurter and Douglas with fourteen each, and Jackson with twelve—did not daunt him. As he saw it, they knew more about the law, but he knew more about the consequences of the law and its effect on ordinary citizens. His law clerk, Earl Pollock, said years later that there were three things that mattered to Earl Warren: The first was the concept of equality; the second was education; and the third was the right of young people to a decent life. He had spent a lifetime refining his view of the role of government, and he came to the Court ready to implement it.

news hour after hour. The news is Shepsie’s life, and the news is terrible, and so it affects how he thinks, and this is the decision he came up with.” “The man came up with the decision,” my mother said, “because he is informed.” “I am also informed,” he said sharply. “I am no less informed—I have just reached a different conclusion. Don’t you understand that these anti-Semitic bastards want us to run away? They want to get the Jews so fed up with everything,” he told her, “that they leave for good, and then the goyim will have this wonderful country all to themselves. Well, I have a better idea. Why don’t they leave? The whole bunch of them—why don’t they all go live under their Führer in Nazi Germany? Then we will have a wonderful country! Look, Shepsie can do whatever he thinks is right, but we aren’t going anywhere. There is still a Supreme Court in this country. Thanks to Franklin Roosevelt, it is a liberal Supreme Court, and it is there to look after our rights. There is Justice Douglas. There is Justice Frankfurter. There is Justice Murphy and Justice Black. They are there to uphold the law. There are still good men in this country. There is Roosevelt, there is Ickes, there is Mayor La Guardia. In November there is a congressional election. There is still the ballot box and people can still vote without anybody telling them what to do.” “And what will they vote for?” my mother asked, and immediately answered herself. “The American people will vote,” she said, “and the Republicans will be even stronger.” “Quiet. Try to keep your voice down, will you? When November comes,” he told her, “we’ll find out the results, and there’ll be time then to decide what to do.” “And if there isn’t time?” “There will be. Please, Bess,” he said, “this cannot go on every night.” And his was the last word, though it

To illustrate this claim, Benjamin relates a fable about a father who taught his sons the merits of hard work by fooling them into thinking that there was buried treasure in the vineyard by the house. The turning of soil in the vain search for gold results in the discovery of a real treasure: a wonderful crop of fruit. With the war came the severing of ‘the red thread of experience’ which had connected previous generations, as Benjamin puts it in ‘Sketched into Mobile Dust’. The ‘fragile human body’ that emerged from the trenches was mute, unable to narrate the ‘forcefield of destructive torrents and explosions’ that had engulfed it. Communicability was unsettled. It was as if the good and bountiful soil of the fable had become the sticky and destructive mud of the trenches, which would bear no fruit but only moulder as a graveyard. ‘Where do you hear words from the dying that last and that pass from one generation to the next like a precious ring?’ Benjamin asks.

Year after year, they are joined by a new age group from Germany’s youth, totally educated in accordance with National Socialist principles, forged together by the ideas of our Volksgemeinschaft, and willing to move against anyone who should dare to sin against our fight for freedom. And just as in the time of the party’s struggle for power, our female party comrades, our German women and girls, were the most reliable supports of the movement, so now again the multitude of our women and girls form the strongest element in the struggle for the preservation of our Volk. After all, thank God, not only the Jews in London and New York but also those in Moscow made clear what fate might be in store for the German Volk. We are determined to be no less clear in our answer. This fight will not end with the planned annihilation of the Aryan but with the extermination of the Jew in Europe. Beyond this, thanks to this fight, our movement’s world of thought will become the common heritage of all people, even of our enemies. State after state will be forced, in the course of its fight against us, to apply National Socialist theories in waging this war that was provoked by them. And in so doing, it will become aware of the curse that the criminal work of Jewry has laid over all people, especially through this war. As our enemies thought in 1923 that the National Socialist Party was defeated for good and that I was finished with in the eyes of the German Volk because of my trial, so they actually helped National Socialist ideology to spread like wildfire through the entire German Volk and convey the essence of Jewry to so many million men, as we ourselves would never have been able to do under normal circumstances. In the same manner international Jewry, which instigated this new war, will find out that nation after nation engrosses itself more and more in this question to become finally aware of the great danger presented by this international problem. Above all, this war proves the irrefutable identity of plutocracy and Bolshevism, and the common ambition of all Jews to exploit nations and make them the slaves of their international guild of criminals. The same alliance we once faced as our common enemies in Germany, an alliance between the stock exchange in Frankfurt and the “Red Flag” in Berlin, now again exists between the Jewish banking houses in New York, the Jewishplutocratic class of leaders in London, and the Jews in the Kremlin in Moscow. Just as the German Volk successfully fought the Jewish enemy at home as a consequence of this realization and is now about to finish it off for good, the other nations will increasingly find themselves again in the course of this war. Together, they will make a stand against that race that is seeking to destroy all of them. Proclamation for the 23th anniversary of the N.S.D.A.P. (read by Hermann Esser) Fuhrer Headquarters, February 24, 1943

There’s a W. H. Auden poem called “Musée des Beaux Arts,” written in December 1938, just after Kristallnacht. In it is a description of a painting by Brueghel, in which the old master depicts Icarus falling from the sky while everyone else, involved in other things or simply not wanting to know, “turns away / quite leisurely from the disaster” and goes about daily tasks. I thought about that poem a lot over the next few days of the fair as I chatted about books, kept my appointments, and ate frankfurters off cardboard-thin crackers. The poem begins, “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

The Frankfurt School proclaimed that Western civilization had been built around a deliberate degenerative strategy: that of crushing man’s vital instincts through the rational control of nature, oneself, and others. The modern West’s chief characteristic was its essential lifelessness. As Marcuse later put it, Nietzsche’s “total affirmation of the life instinct” represented a “reality principle fundamentally antagonistic to that of Western civilization.”4 Liberation on the Frankfurt School’s terms, therefore, meant giving up a view of life that stressed man’s ability to use logic and reason to arrive at truth and his need to accommodate himself to a reasonable and natural social order in order to be happy and free. Instead, human beings had to look to a deeper and more “negative” consciousness, in short, a Nietzschean consciousness. The Frankfurt School created a new cultural hero, the “critical” writer/teacher/intellectual. A direct descendant of the Romantic artist, he would use his typewriter or classroom to attack and expose the contradictions and evils of modern Western civilization. “Under the conditions of late capitalism,” Horkheimer wrote in 1936, “truth has sought refuge among small groups of admirable men”—meaning himself and his friends. Later on, those same “admirable” critics would act as carriers of a new cultural pessimism, stemming this time from the political Left rather than the Right.

Like the rest of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse saw no hope for revolution from the working class. Instead, he looked to the marginalized groups who are excluded from consumer society and hence immune to its blandishments, a “substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and unemployable.”64 Marx himself had scornfully called this moblike group the Lumpenproletariat , a tool of demogogic reaction; now they became Marcuse’s last hope. In his Essay on Liberation (1969), Marcuse summoned forth an alliance of “the young, the intelligentsia,” blacks, welfare recipients, Third World revolutionaries, and New Left students, who would “break the historical continuum of injustice, cruelty, and silence.” “The armed class struggle is waged outside” the mainstream of Western society, in the streets and ghettos, the rice paddies of Asia, and the mountains of Latin America.65 “The Cuban revolution and the Viet Cong have demonstrated it can be done,” Marcuse wrote in 1968. “There is a morality, a humanity, a will, and a faith which can resist and deter the gigantic technical and economic force of capitalist expansion” and what he called “the affluent monster.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis. I shall not consider the rhetorical uses and misuses of bullshit. My aim is simply to give a rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from what it is not—or (putting it somewhat differently) to articulate, more or less sketchily, the structure of its concept. Any suggestion about what conditions are logically both necessary and sufficient for the constitution of bullshit is bound to be somewhat arbitrary. For one thing, the expression bullshit is often employed quite loosely - simply as a generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning. For another, the phenomenon itself is so vast and amorphous that no crisp and perspicuous analysis of its concept can avoid being procrustean. Nonetheless it should be possible to say something helpful, even though it is not likely to be decisive. Even the most basic and preliminary questions about bullshit remain, after all, not only unanswered but unasked.

by choosing Nietzsche and Freud as their models, the members of the Frankfurt School also unwittingly put the images and language of degeneration theory squarely in the middle of their critical Marxist program. All the ills of modern society that had been blamed on physiological degeneration—social decay, crime, insanity, suicide, neurosis, alcoholism, degradation of the arts, atavistic mass democratic politics, even anti-Semitism—were now the fault of capitalism and, by extension, the modern West.

Scotland's potential independent membership of the EEC may be important here. The tightening of our links with the Common Market could broaden our intellectual horizons to include Paris, Frankfurt and Milan, as well as Oxford and London (this would, of course, be a reforging of intellectual ties between Scotland and Continental Europe). In discovering these other traditions, we may be stimulated to rediscover our own, buried intellectualism. But without this European dimension, it may well be, Scotland will remain culturally chained to England, even if politically sovereign.

When one spends a long time alone in the Frankfurt airport, one goes crazy at receiving even the tiniest crumbs of affection.

The Frankfurt School theory towards the family is summarised by Jay Martin in a semi-official history of the institution: ‘Even a partial breakdown of parental authority in the family might tend to increase the readiness of a coming generation to accept social change’.

I suppose he will expect to be brought in at once. Under Secretaries are far more touchy than Secretaries of State,’ said Colonel Pikeaway gloomily. ‘All these Ministers insist on coming in and having kittens all over the place.

Say somebody wrote a self-replicating platform,” he said, “then loaded Eunice, whatever we mean by that, as core entity. The platform spawns subagents as it encounters situations that might benefit from attention. They then provide that attention. Recruiting me in Frankfurt, say, or compiling a dossier on Gavin. Then they report back, show their work, and get subsumed into her Borg.

The waiters taught me the proper way to wrap the knives and forks in napkins, and every day I emptied the ashtrays and polished the metal caddy for the hot frankfurters I sold at the station, something I learned from the busboy who was no longer a busboy because he had started waiting at tables, and you should have heard him beg and plead to be allowed to go on selling frankfurters, a strange thing to want to do, I thought at first, but I quickly saw why, and soon it was all I wanted to do too, walk up and down the platforms several times a day selling hot frankfurters for one crown eighty apiece. Sometimes the passenger would only have a twenty crown note, sometimes only a fifty, and I'd never have the change, so I'd pocket his note and go on selling until finally the customer got on the train, worked his way to a window and reached out his hand. Then I'd put down the caddy of hot frankfurters and fumble about in my pockets for the change, until the fellow would yell at me to forget about the coins and just give him the notes. Very slowly I'd start patting my pockets, and the dispatcher would blow his whistle, and very slowly I'd ease the notes out of my pocket, and the train would start moving, and I'd trot alongside it and when the train had picked up speed, reach out so that the notes would just barely brush the tips of the fellow's fingers, and sometimes he'd be leaning out so far that someone inside would have to hang on to his legs and one of my customers even beaned himself on a signal post. But then the fingers would be out of reach and I'd stand there panting, the money still in my outstretched hand, and it was all mine. They almost never came back for their change, and that's how I started having money of my own, a couple of hundred a month, and once I even got handed a thousand-crown note.

This literary purging, the soldiers said in hard, decisive words, would purify German society from communists and socialists... A few blocks away, charred pages and fragments of burning ash descended on the streets of Frankfurt like the exhale of a great forge. Standing by their darkened window, Paul wrapped a shawl around his wife’s shoulders and softly whispered a phrase from the German lyric poet Heinrich Heine: “Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people.

Passenger to Frankfurt ends with an affirmation in ‘hope’, ‘faith’ and ‘benevolence’. So Agatha would have been shocked and grieved by the twenty-first century. She would have mourned the town in which she had dreamed, loved, run up hills with Tony the dog, lost her virginity to Archie Christie, become a writer. Above all she would have been saddened by the new English joylessness, for life to her was a sacred gift.

Klossowski’s writings therefore invite us to move beyond the impasse of certain intellectual positions inherited from the 1960s: on the one hand, arguments that society is all-determining as a set of institutional and disci- plinary constraints (Frankfurt School, structuralism), and on the other hand, arguments for the perpetual vitality and agency of the subject which continually subverts and undermines these restrictions (post-structural- ism, Deleuze and Guattari). Rather than collapsing these positions, Klossowski requires us to take on board a more complex network of libidi- nal drives that require perpetual restaging and renegotiation. This tension between structure and agency, particular and universal, spontaneous and scripted, voyeur and voyant, is key to the aesthetic effect and social import of the best examples of delegated performance.

Drug counterculture was precisely the weapon that the Frankfurt School and their fellow-travellers employed, over the next 50 years, to create a cultural paradigm shift away from the so-called ‘authoritarian’ matrix of man in the living image of God, and the superiority of the republican form of nation-state over all other forms of political organization.

A handsome, cosmopolitan forty-three-year-old, Gebhardt had been a decorated World War I flying ace, serving in the squadron of Manfred von Richthofen, the legendary “Red Baron.” Following the war, he had earned his doctorate degree in political economy from Frankfurt University with a dissertation on “The International Trade in Machinery.” After a brief teaching stint, he had gone into business, earning a fortune in the automobile and locomotive industries before establishing a highly successful import-export firm that specialized in “exchanging German raw material for American commodities.” Charming, cultured, fluent in several languages, he also harbored political ambitions and had hopes of being named German ambassador to the United States—a fair expectation, given his close friendship with high Nazi officials, particularly Hermann Göring, a fellow Richthofen pilot during the Great War.9

It was then I saw on the side of the box – a name, a date: ‘Marcus Epstein: Frankfurt, March 2nd 1940’. It was today’s date, a year ago. And, at the bottom, a specific time. 2:10 p.m. ‘Romantic’, Mrs. Henderson had called Queenie’s clocks; but to me, realising what it probably meant, it made my throat thicken with tears. No wonder Mum had understood what a stopped clock might mean. Something must’ve happened to Marcus Epstein that day, at that time. Something terrible that made Queenie’s life stop dead. My brain tried to fill in the gaps. Perhaps Marcus was a Jew. Perhaps this was why she was so set on helping Hewish people, and had such guts when it came to standing up for what was decent. I didn’t know. In many ways it didn’t matter. It was Queenie’s private business. She was the person who’d thrown stones at German aircraft, and yet protected the injured pilot from more harm. She fought for people, that was what Queenie did. Beneath our race, our religion, we were all human beings. We all hurt in the same ways. Upstairs in front of the hall mirror, I could hear her now repinning her hair and fastening her coat. ‘Right, Olive, I’m ready,’ she called down. I went to join her, taking in her smooth, tearless face, the newly tidied hair. You’d never know from looking at her that her heart was still breaking. But that was the awful thing: life did go on, and so did that horrible empty ache you felt when someone wasn’t there any more.

Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late. Justice Felix Frankfurter Henslee v. Union Planters Bank, 1949.

Anaconda. Beaver Buster. Corn Dog.” “Not now, Bobby.” “Dipstick. Earthworm. Frankfurter.” “Put a lid on it.” “Gherkin. Hose. Iron Rod. Joystick.” “I said that’s enough,” Steve ordered. “And to think,” Victoria said, “when I was in school, we only memorized the Gettysburg Address.” “Don’t look at me,” Steve said. “I didn’t teach him that stuff.” “Kosher Pickle,” Bobby said. “You taught me that one.” “That’s

After the Marxist revolution failed to topple capitalism in the early twentieth century, many Marxists went back to the drawing board, modifying and adapting Marx’s ideas. Perhaps the most famous was a group associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which applied Marxism to a radical interdisciplinary social theory. The group included Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukács, and Walter Benjamin and came to be known as the Frankfurt School. These men developed Critical Theory as an expansion of Conflict Theory and applied it more broadly, including other social sciences and philosophy. Their main goal was to address structural issues causing inequity. They worked from the assumption that current social reality was broken, and they needed to identify the people and institutions that could make changes and provide practical goals for social transformation.

And today’s Frankfurt Book Fair, held annually in October, had its origins in an autumn trade fair formally established in 1240 by the German king, Frederick II.

by all rights, the word burger is a mistake. The word had no ancestor in Old English or even Middle English. The word burgher traces that far back, indeed, but it refers to a certain kind of middle-class citizen, and clearly has nothing to do with Whoppers and Quarter Pounders. The burger so familiar to us was an accident. It started with the fact that what we know as hamburger was initially called Hamburg steak, and a patty of it between bread called a hamburger sandwich, as opposed to the thing then known as frankfurter sandwiches, now called hot dogs.* The relevant word was Hamburg, as in the German city. To someone in the nineteenth century familiar with these then-new terms, hearing what they were eating called a “burger” would have sounded as odd as hearing somebody call a burrito a “rito” now.

Heidi Schindler is Heidi Klauss now. Forty-one years old, she lives in a suburb of Frankfurt with a husband and four children, and is reasonably happy, certainly happier than she expected to be at twenty-three. The paperback copy of Howards End is still on the shelf in the spare bedroom, forgotten and unread, with the letter tucked neatly just inside the cover, next to an inscription in small, careful handwriting that reads: To dear Dexter. A great novel for your great journey. Travel well and return safely with no tattoos. Be good, or as good as you are able. Bloody hell, I’ll miss you. All my love, your good friend Emma Morley, Clapton, London, April 1990

Young Munich-based journalist Konrad Heiden, who worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung (Frankfurt Newspaper), was also on the front lines, critically reporting on the Nazis in the early stages of Hitler’s political career. Heiden wrote a book titled A History of National Socialism in 1932 and fled into exile after Hitler came to power a year later, eventually ending up in the United States. In 1944, Heiden used his deep knowledge of the Nazi Party to publish Der Führer, a scathing biography of Hitler.

But I am afraid. They are devils, not people.” “They certainly seem that way, my dear, but the saddest part is that they are simple human beings like we are. That one,” I pointed, “is probably a cobbler from Hamburg. And that one,” I signaled another, “a butcher from Berlin. And that fat one is a cook from Frankfurt. They’re just normal people who have been given absolute power.