Microwave Mentality Quotes

Just as the spectrums of light and sound are far broader than what we humans can see and hear, so the spectrum of mental states is far larger than what the average human perceives. We can see light in wavelengths of between 400 and 700 nanometres only. Above this small principality of human vision extend the unseen but vast realms of infrared, microwaves and radio waves, and below it lie the dark dominions of ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays. Similarly, the spectrum of possible mental states may be infinite, but science has studied only two tiny sections of it: the sub-normative and the WEIRD. For

get really concerned when I see people who are changing all the time. Every time you turn around they have a new call and a new vision. They may start out being called to prison ministry, When they find out that is hard, they get called to evangelism. When they discover that is hard, they are suddenly called to music ministry. The problem is that because of the mentality of our society, we are always looking for something easy. We think everything should be drive-through and push-button. If we can't microwave it, we don't mess with it. There are no microwave ministries. In fact, anything we want to do at microwave speed is not worth doing—except microwaving! So

Yet [Hoggart] could not help noticing that those unschooled slum dwellers were mentally independent in a way that his postwar students were not. His grandmother’s range of cultural reference was narrow and unimpressive, consisting mainly of homespun aphorisms and the Bible, but at least her mind had not been colonized by pulp novels and Hollywood movies. The difference between the old culture and mass culture was like the difference between preparing a meal and microwaving one, and Hoggart’s students had been rendered helpless in teh same way as someone who has never been taught how to cook. The colonial aspect of mass culture was easier for Hoggart to spot because he was British. Mass culture, for England and Europe, was a foreign takeover. But “Americanization” homogenized the home country as much as it did the rest of the globe, sapping the life out of regional subcultures. Before the 1950s, music, theater, magazines, and even radio were all local, to one degree or another. Hollywood movies were not.