Libraries Transforming Society Quotes

As [President Thomas] Jefferson realized, with no government interference by setting the rules of the game of business and fair taxation, there could be no broad middle class—maybe a sliver of small businesses and artisans, but the vast majority of us would be the working poor under the yolk [sic] of elites. The Economic Royalists know this, which gets to the root of why they set out to destroy government's involvement in the economy. After all, in a middle-class economy, they may have to give up some of their power, and some of the higher end of their wealth may even be "redistributed"—horror of horrors—for schools, parks, libraries, and other things that support a healthy middle-class society but are not needed by the rich.... As Jefferson laid out in an 1816 letter...a totally "free" market, where corporations reign supreme just like the oppressive governments of old, could transform America 'until the bulk of the society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man.

The most direct critique [in the TV series The Prisoner] of what might be called the politics-industry of late capitalism, however, is undoubtedly [the episode] “Free for All”, both the funeral dirge for the national mass party and the unofficial founding charter of the New Left. In many ways, “Free for All” is the logical complement to the visual innovations and luminous mediatic strategies of “A., B. & C.”; whereas the latter identifies the space of the editing room as a new kind of cultural zone, and thus transforms a certain visual recursion into a protomorphic video library of images, the former concentrates not on the image per se but on the messages and texts transmitted by such—or what Derrida would identify as the thematic of a dissemination which is never quite identical with what is being disseminated. But where deconstruction and post-structuralism promptly sealed off this potentially explosive insight behind the specialized ghettos of linguistics or ontological philosophy, and thus unwittingly perpetuated precisely the authoritarian monopoly over theory authorized by the ontologies in the first place, the most insightful intellectuals of the New Left (most notably, Adorno and Sartre) would insist on the necessarily mediated nature of this dissemination, i.e. the fact that the narrative-industries of late capitalism are hardly innocent bystanders in the business of accumulation, but play an indispensable role in creating new markets, restructuring old ones, and ceaselessly legitimating, transacting and regulating the sway of the commodity form over society as a whole.

Transformational leadership is like medicine for society. It mends whatever is broken.

The best way to transform society is not through violent demonstrations, but through calculated conversations that question leadership and require accountability from leaders.

Those among you who have read Das grüne Gesicht by Meyrinck will remember perhaps that the same phenomenon is found there. It is something like a whirlwind catching up dust, but it is not dust. Chidr, the Green Face, is the whirlwind, and the dust consists of a swarm of ants. That figure is the center of Meyrinck's story, and he shows how Chidr works in ordinary human circumstances, how he comes in as a sort of sorcerer. The whole thing is a manifestation of the collective unconscious, the way the collective unconscious breaks into an ordinary human existence, the way it transforms and influences human existence. Then in the end there is a great catastrophe, a storm which devastates the whole town; and at the very end this whirlwind catches up a swarm of ants, the swarm of ants being the mob. Chidr is a whirl of mob psychology that carries people off to a distance like a swarm of ants. The Brausewind, then, is this catastrophic wind that breaks into social existence. Whenever the opposites meet, whenever a cold layer of air touches a warm layer of air there is most probably movement, there will be a cyclone, or a wandering whirlwind; one sees those wandering columns of water on the ocean, and in the desert one sees columns of dust. That is the simile for the peculiar collective movement by which people are seized, ergriffen. Here and there spouts of air gather up dust that moves and dies down, and then in another place it starts up again, like the little whirls of water on the sea or on our lakes when the Fohn is coming. And that is so in human society when the Föhnwind begins to blow. Since it shows in very different places one doesn't connect these phenomena, but it is one and the same wind really. Of course when it is in the desert it gathers up sand, and in the garden it gathers up leaves, and in a library it gathers up papers in heaps, and in crowds it gathers up hats, so each time one thinks it is something different; but it is always the same meteorological phenomenon: when opposites meet there is a whirlwind. That is the manifestation of the spirit in its most original form. So a savior is one who seizes, the Ergreifer who catches people like objects and whirls them into a form which lasts as long as the whirlwind lasts, and then the thing collapses and something new must come. That is the great wind described in the Pentecostal miracle, because there two worlds were clashing together, the world of the slaves and the world of the highly differentiated mind. You see, the teaching Christ received through his teacher, John the Baptist, must have been the ripe fruit of the time; otherwise it could not have been so in tune with the surroundings, with all the great problems of the time. And it is also absolutely out of the question that one man alone could have invented it in his own lifetime without making use of an enormous tradition. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1029-1030). Princeton University Press