Society Nowadays Quotes

Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly -- that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion -- these are the two things that govern us.

Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around." "Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing 'chicken' and 'knock hubcaps.' I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?

To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people - that is all!

Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.

Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.

I borrowed a quote from Oscar Wilde and put it at the top of the menu: “To get into the best society nowadays one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people—that is all.

In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. When there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended - there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears - that's what soma is.

I am honestly starting to question evolution. We went from cavemen, to homo sapiens, to this incredible society of great minds—Alexander Graham Bell inventing telephones, Steve Jobs inventing…everything. And now we’re devolving. We’ve travelled back to cavemen, only nowadays we call them fuckboys.

Society ends up with the adults it deserves. It's just a little more obvious nowadays.

Everybody one meets is a paradox nowadays. It is a great bore. It makes society so obvious.

People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us. And yet—

Society nowadays tells people that their happiness is all that matters but happiness is never found if it costs someone else’s theirs. That is not what happiness is, nor would such a person deserve it, because happiness is forged by the setting aside of self and in doing for others to make them happy first and foremost, so if you have to hurt another human being to “find your happiness,” then you have no clue what the word actually means or what it’s willing to do, and in being so self-centered and entitled, it’s veritably tragic that the only care and concern you have is for yourself.

Nowadays, the Internet decides if you're good, not the big man in the big office. No matter how important that man thinks he is, everyone else knows that he's not important anymore, and the Internet decides these things, here in the modern age.

But work used to be the lot of every man, and now it is rapidly becoming an aristocratic privilege. Men nowadays are more often paid not to work.

In one of our government departments... but perhaps I had better not say exactly which one. For no one's more touchy than people in government departments, regiments, chancelleries or, in short, any kind of official body. Nowadays every private citizen thinks the whole of society is insulted when he himself is.

Remember when only a few people had mobile phones. Generally regarded as an object of derision, you would occasionally see business types clutching those ridiculous grey bricks to their faces and mutter to yourself 'what a prick.' Nowadays, an eyebrow hardly even flutters when we see a ten-year-old child happily texting away. You probably wouldn't notice anyway; you'd be too busy downloading an app that could definitively pinpoint who it was that had just farted in your tube carriage.

The core predicament of medicine - the thing that makes being a patient so wrenching, being a doctor so difficult, and being a part of society that pays the bills they run up so vexing - is uncertainty. With all that we know nowadays about people and diseases and how to diagnose and treat them, it can be hard to see this, hard to grasp how deeply uncertainty runs. As a doctor, you come to find, however, that the struggle in caring for people is more often with what you do not know than what you do. Medicine's ground state is uncertainty. And wisdom - for both the patients and doctors - is defined by how one copes with it.

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us.

There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view.' 'Why?' 'Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here ofr. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion - these are the two things that govern us. And yet [...] I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal - to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. [...] We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. ... The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.

Nowadays, a simple faulty brake light traffic stop, can get a black person killed. It's better to fix the broken light bulb, then having to face and cooperate with a senseless police officer.

The day of the full moon, when the moon is neither increasing nor decreasing, the Babylonians called Sa-bat, meaning "heart-rest." It was believed that on this day, the woman in the moon, Ishtar, as the moon goddess was known in Babylon, was menstruating, for in Babylon, as in virtually every ancient and primitive society, there had been since the earliest times a taboo against a woman working, preparing food, or traveling when she was passing her monthly blood. On Sa-bat, from which comes our Sabbath, men as well as women were commanded to rest, for when the moon menstruated, the taboo was on everyone. Originally (and naturally) observed once a month, the Sabbath was later to be incorporated by the Christians into their Creation myth and made conveniently weekly. So nowadays hard-minded men with hard muscles and hard hats are relieved from their jobs on Sundays because of an archetypal psychological response to menstruation.

To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people-that is all.

It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man-- that question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing at the present moment in these uprising times-- whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed. But I don't admit that my failure proved my view to be a wrong one, or that my success would have made it a right one; though that's how we appraise such attempts nowadays--I mean, not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes. If I had ended by becoming like one of these gentlemen in red and black that we saw dropping in here by now, everybody would have said: 'See how wise that young man was, to follow the bent of his nature!' But having ended no better than I began they say: 'See what a fool that fellow was in following a freak of his fancy!

he believed that the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became. ‘That’s why everyone hates each other nowadays,’ he reckoned. ‘Because they are overloaded with non-friend friends. Ever heard about Dunbar’s number?’ And then he had told her about a man called Roger Dunbar at Oxford University, who had discovered that human beings were wired to know only a hundred and fifty people, as that was the average size of hunter-gatherer communities.

People nowadays talk about the world's problems like they're reading lines off a teleprompter. They recite what they're told and echo it without thinking. It has become easier to divide people than to unify them, and to blind them than to give them vision. We are no longer unified like a bowl of Cheerios. Instead, we have become as segregated as a box of Lucky Charms. Every day we see the same leprechauns on TV acting like they're the experts of everything.

...civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended—there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist.

.. he believed that the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became. That's why everyone hates each other nowadays, he reckoned. Because they are overloaded with non-friend friends.

There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view." "Why?" "Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty hat one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us. And yet, I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself

Pretend to think well of yourself, and the world will think well of you,” an axiom a hundred times more useful in society nowadays than that of the Greeks, “Know thyself,” a knowledge for which, in our days, we have substituted the less difficult and more advantageous science of knowing others.

As indicated by our example, methodological nominalism is nowadays fairly generally accepted in the natural sciences. The problems of the social sciences, on the other hand, are still for the most part treated by essentialist methods. This is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons for their backwardness.

The 'Manifesto' being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolution in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and the oppressed class—the proletariat—cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class—the bourgeoisie—without, at the same time, and once for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles. This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we, both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845.

What we call nowadays totalitarianism belongs to a tradition which is just as old or just as young as our civilization itself

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

The map of utopias is cluttered nowadays with experiments by other names, and the very idea is expanding. It needs to open up a little more to contain disaster communities. These remarkable societies suggest that, just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting.

Nowadays, however, economic class is barely mentioned unless combined “intersectionally” with some other form of marginalized identity. It is therefore no surprise that many working-class and poor people often feel profoundly alienated from today’s left—Marxists rightly identify it as having adopted very bourgeois concerns. It is profoundly ironic that a movement claiming to problematize all sources of privilege is led by highly educated, upper-middle-class scholars and activists who are so oblivious to their status as privileged members of society.

It was almost a direct reversal of the old rules of conduct, under which a woman had to remain virginal or risk being cast out of society. Nowadays young women were apparently supposed to count being a sexual dynamo among their accomplishments—a far riskier avocation than embroidery or playing the harp. From damned if you do to damned if you don’t: the story of women’s lives

...the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter whom Emma married if she could file for separation later? How would Isabel Archer’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup? As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn’t mean much anymore, and neither did the novel. Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays? You couldn’t. You had to read historical fiction. You had to read non-Western novels involving traditional societies. Afghani novels, Indian novels. You had to go, literarily speaking, back in time.

he believed that the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became. ‘That’s why everyone hates each other nowadays,’ he reckoned. ‘Because they are overloaded with non-friend friends.

The word “coherence” literally means holding or sticking together, but it is usually used to refer to a system, an idea, or a worldview whose parts fit together in a consistent and efficient way. Coherent things work well: A coherent worldview can explain almost anything, while an incoherent worldview is hobbled by internal contradictions. … Whenever a system can be analyzed at multiple levels, a special kind of coherence occurs when the levels mesh and mutually interlock. We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living. When these levels do not cohere, you are likely to be torn by internal contradictions and neurotic conflicts. You might need adversity to knock yourself into alignment. And if you do achieve coherence, the moment when things come together may be one of the most profound of your life. … Finding coherence across levels feels like enlightenment, and it is crucial for answering the question of purpose within life. People are multilevel systems in another way: We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form. To understand ourselves fully we must study all three levels—physical, psychological, and sociocultural. There has long been a division of academic labor: Biologists studied the brain as a physical object, psychologists studied the mind, and sociologists and anthropologists studied the socially constructed environments within which minds develop and function. But a division of labor is productive only when the tasks are coherent—when all lines of work eventually combine to make something greater than the sum of its parts. For much of the twentieth century that didn’t happen — each field ignored the others and focused on its own questions. But nowadays cross-disciplinary work is flourishing, spreading out from the middle level (psychology) along bridges (or perhaps ladders) down to the physical level (for example, the field of cognitive neuroscience) and up to the sociocultural level (for example, cultural psychology). The sciences are linking up, generating cross-level coherence, and, like magic, big new ideas are beginning to emerge. Here is one of the most profound ideas to come from the ongoing synthesis: People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the three levels of their existence.

Nowadays, our leaders prefer to search for the causes of crime and poverty in the actions or inaction of those at the very bottom of society. The obscene transfers of wealth over the past forty years from that bottom to a privileged few at the top--and from much of the Third World to financial elites in the West--are all excused as the natural evolution of the Market, when, in fact, they are products of unparalleled greed by those who shape and direct that Market.

Nowadays, being “connected” means 24/7 availability. Emailing, texting, Twittering, calling, keeping one’s website and Facebook status current seem essential to being and remaining relevant in the world. In addition to the positive impact of globally interconnecting humanity, the information era is also contributing to the creation of a high-tech, low-touch society. It is impacting language, the publishing world, education, and social revolts. Neurologists and other pundits, including Nicholas Carr in his Atlantic article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, point out the paradoxical downsides of not setting healthy boundaries or applying discipline to how we engage technology. Some have gone so far as to suggest that it is making us “spiritually stupid” by keeping us too distracted to participate in spiritual practices. But how about this: can using technology with mindfulness lead to beneficial social and spiritual connection?

To most of society being crazy is like a virus. If we're out and about in public people think they can catch the craziness from us or something. It's much easier for them to separate us and forget we ever existed. Almost like being quarantined. I used to see a psychiatrist before I was brought here. I remember the way my mother's friends used to gossip about it. They wouldn't let me play with their children. It's kind of like women who are divorced nowadays. Other women don't talk to them. They're usually shunned.” A dull ache throbs in my side and I clench my fists. “It’s like we're tossed out trash.” Aurora smiles. “That's a great analogy, Adelaide.

Historically, shamans have always been part of the society where they lived, taking care of its problems, whenever they were allowed to operate. For centuries shamanic cultures have been persecuted in the western world until they were almost entirely exterminated. They have managed to survive in secrecy or through complex esoteric camouflage. Nowadays there seems to be more freedom and this ancient knowledge can re-emerge and be used in our own cultural context and not relegated somewhere else. The world needs shamans able to function on the roads, among the electronic equipment and engines, in the squares and markets of our contemporary society.

Lord Darlington: Oh, nowadays so many conceited people go about Society pretending to be good, that I think it shows rather a sweet and modest disposition to pretend to be bad. Besides, there is to be said. If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy with which we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live, including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing people to own things, are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist, and that they are self-acting. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts; and many of them would not be obeyed, even by well-meaning people, if there were not a policeman within call and a prison within reach. They are being changed continually by Parliament, because we are never satisfied with them.... At the elections some candidates get votes by promising to make new laws or to get rid of old ones, and others by promising to keep things just as they are. This is impossible. Things will not stay as they are. Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays think that spending nine years in school, oldage and widows’ pensions, votes for women, and short-skirted ladies in Parliament or pleading in barristers’ wigs in the courts are part of the order of Nature, and always were and ever shall be; but their great-grandmothers would have set down anyone who told them that such things were coming as mad, and anyone who wanted them to come as wicked.

The sufferings which may be observed nowadays - they are so widespread and so vast - but people speak nevertheless about a certain moral improvement which society has achieved…

We are so much distracted nowadays. There is so much distractions in the world today call it internet, media, football matches etc. but don't let it consume you.

Human societies have always defined themselves through narration, but nowadays corporations are telling man’s stories for him.

the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became. ‘That’s why everyone hates each other nowadays,’ he reckoned. ‘Because they are overloaded with non-friend friends.

But God's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic. If you had a God …" "My dear young friend," said Mustapha Mond, "civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended–there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears–that's what soma is.

Stories are like DNA, they shape the culture that they’re a part of. A society is not a society without its own unique stories. But we allow machines to make our stories, nowadays, or at least to tell them. We allow things to shape our understanding of who we are. We are entertained, not nurtured. We are given Twinkies for our mind, things that amuse but do not enlighten. It tickles our taste buds, but it does not enrich us.

Nowadays, when more subtle studies and more refined taste have reduced the art of pleasing into principles, a vile and misleading uniformity governs our customs, and all minds seem to have been cast in the same mould: incessantly politeness makes demands, propriety issues orders, and incessantly people follow customary usage, never their own inclinations. One does not dare to appear as what one is. And in this perpetual constraint, men who make up this herd we call society, placed in the same circumstances, will all do the same things, unless more powerful motives prevent them. Thus, one will never know well the person one is dealing with.

What gives modern society a superficial appearance of individualism, independence, and self-reliance is the vanishing of the ties that formerly linked individuals into small-scale communities. Today, nuclear families commonly have little connection to their next-door neighbors or even to their cousins. Most people have friends, but friends nowadays tend to use each other only for entertainment. They do not usually cooperate in economic or other serious, practical activities, nor do they offer each other much physical or economic security. If you become disabled, you don’t expect your friends to support you. You depend on insurance or on the welfare department.

he believed that the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became. ‘That’s why everyone hates each other nowadays,’ he reckoned. ‘Because they are overloaded with non-friend friends. Ever heard about Dunbar’s number?

. . . it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

It is, of course, its essentially schizophrenic outlook on society that makes the middle classes such a peculiar mixture of yeast and dough. We tend nowadays to forget that it has always been the great revolutionary class; we see much more the doughy aspect, the bourgeoisie as the heartland of reaction, the universal insult, forever selfish and conforming. Now this Janus-like quality derives from the class’s one saving virtue, which is this: that alone of the three great castes of society it sincerely and habitually despises itself.

Did you hear them, did you hear these monsters talking about monsters? Oh God, the way they jabber about people and their own children and themselves and the way they talk about their husbands and the way they talk about war, dammit, I stand here and I can't believe it!

Generally speaking,” he remarked, “the family doctor is the most comforting figure in our lives, and now he’s being pulled up by the roots. The family doctor is a figure without whom the family cannot exist in a developed society. He knows the needs of each member of the family, just as the mother knows their tastes. There’s no shame in taking to him some trivial complaint you’d never take to the outpatients’ clinic, which entails getting an appointment card and waiting your turn, and where there’s a quota of nine patients an hour. And yet all neglected illnesses arise out of these trifling complaints. How many adult human beings are there, now, at this minute, rushing about in mute panic wishing they could find a doctor, the kind of person to whom they can pour out the fears they have deeply concealed or even found shameful? Looking for the right doctor is the sort of thing you can’t always ask your friends for advice about. You can’t advertise for one in a newspaper either. In fact, it’s a matter as essentially intimate as a search for a husband or a wife. But nowadays it’s easier to find a good wife than a doctor ready to look after you personally for as long as you want, and who understands you fully and truly.

People think that the destructive theories that nowadays go by the name “socialism” are of recent origin. This is a mistake: these theories were contemporaneous with the first Economists. While they employed the all-powerful government of their dreams as an instrument to change the forms of society, socialists imagined seizing the same power to undermine its base.

but I was thinking of the people who make a religion out of something completely different. Like money—actually, that’s the nearest thing the government has to an ideology, and I’m not talking about bribes, Sam. Nowadays it’s not just unfortunate if you have a low-paid job, have you noticed? It’s actually irresponsible: you’re not a good member of society, you’re being very very naughty not to have a big house and a fancy car.

At one point the worst thing to happen was the odd stabbing or slashing, the violence that we live with nowadays used to only be seen in Hollywood gangster movies such as Gangs of New York, Menace to Society and Boys and the Hood. Even when we were reading about the crack hitting London, no one in Scotland would have thought in their wildest dreams that it would have taken off in our cities, towns and now even highland villages.

to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.* People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us.

In the old days, a child might pay for the sins of the father, or indeed mother. Nowadays, in the most advanced society on earth, the parents might pay for the sins of the child, along with uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, colleagues, friends, and even the man who unthinkingly smiled at you as he came out of the lift at three in the morning. The system of retribution had been greatly improved, and was so much more inclusive than it used to be.

In the old days, a child might pay for the sins of the father, or indeed mother. Nowadays, in the most advanced society on earth, the parents might pay for the sins of the child, along with uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, colleagues, friends, and even the man who unthinkingly smiled at you as he came out of the lift at three in the morning. The system of retribution had been greatly improved, and was so much more inclusive than it used to be." (p. 19)

To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us.

Just as a Buddhist could worship Hindu deities, and just as a monotheist could believe in the existence of Satan, so the typical American nowadays is simultaneously a nationalist (she believes in the existence of an American nation with a special role to play in history), a free-market capitalist (she believes that open competition and the pursuit of self-interest are the best ways to create a prosperous society), and a liberal humanist (she believes that humans have been endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights).

Nowadays people everywhere, even those in scientific disguises, are raving about the coming conditions of society from which "the exploitative character" is to have disappeared: - to my ears that sounds as if people had promised to invent a life which abstained from all organic functions. The "exploitation" is not part of a depraved or incomplete and primitive society: it belongs in the essential nature of what is living, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the real will to power, which is simply the will to live.

Have you really a very bad influence, Lord Henry? As bad as Basil says?’ ‘There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr Gray. All influence is immoral – immoral from the scientific point of view.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion – these are the two things that govern us.

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us. And yet—

All sens of purpose, of responsibility, indeed of any imaginable future, were removed from her by the deaths of her husband and child. It was they who used to make her life a story, they who seemed to be giving it a beginning, a middle and an end. Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date, full of meaningless events for Colonel Leek to recite when no one's paying attention. For all the use she is to Society, beyond intercepting the odd squirt of sperm that would otherwise have troubled a respectable wife, she might as well be dead. Yet, she exists, and, against the odds, she is happy.

Yeah, in my opinion the heart of the problem is Marxism-Leninism itself―the very idea that a "vanguard party" can, or has any right to, or has any capacity to lead the stupid masses towards some future they're too dumb to understand for themselves. I think what it's going to lead them towards is "I rule you with a whip." Institutions of domination have a nice way of reproducing themselves―I think that's kind of like an obvious sociological truism. And actually, if you look back, that was in fact Bakunin's prediction half a century before―he said this was exactly what was going to happen. I mean, Bakunin was talking about the people around Marx, this was before Lenin was born, but his prediction was that the nature of the intelligentsia as a formation in modern industrial society is that they are going to try to become the social managers. Now, they're not going to become the social managers because they own capital, and they're not going to become the social managers because they've got a lot of guns. They are going to become the social managers because they can control, organize, and direct what's called "knowledge"―they have the skills to process information, and to mobilize support for decision-making, and so on and so forth. And Bakunin predicted that these people would fall into two categories. On the one hand, there would be the "left" intellectuals, who would try to rise to power on the backs of mass popular movements, and if they could gain power, they would then beat the people into submission and try to control them. On the other hand, if they found that they couldn't get power that way themselves, they would become the servants of what we would nowadays call "state-capitalism," though Bakunin didn't use the term. And either of these two categories of intellectuals, he said, would be "beating the people with the people's stick"―that is, they'd be presenting themselves as representatives of the people, so they'd be holding the people's stick, but they would be beating the people with it.

The language of the Bible regarding principalities – the ruling authorities, the angelic powers, the demons, and the like – sounds, I suppose, strange in modern society, but these words in fact refer to familiar realities in contemporary life. The principalities refer to those entities in creation which nowadays are called institutions, ideologies, and images. Thus a nation is a principality. Or the Communist ideology is a principality. Or the public image of a human being, say a movie star or a politician, is a principality. The image or legend of Marilyn Monroe or Franklin Roosevelt is a reality, distinguishable from the person bearing the same name, which survives and has its own existence apart from the existence of the person.

Them, too, but I was thinking of the people who make a religion out of something completely different. Like money—actually, that’s the nearest thing the government has to an ideology, and I’m not talking about bribes, Sam. Nowadays it’s not just unfortunate if you have a low-paid job, have you noticed? It’s actually irresponsible: you’re not a good member of society, you’re being very very naughty not to have a big house and a fancy car.” “But if anyone asks for a raise,” I said, whapping the ice tray, “they’re being very very naughty to threaten their employer’s profit margin, after everything he’s done for the economy.” “Exactly. If you’re not rich, you’re a lesser being who shouldn’t have the gall to expect a living wage from the decent people who are.

Them, too, but I was thinking of the people who make a religion out of something completely different. Like money - actually, that's the nearest thing the government has to an ideology, and I'm not talking about bribes, Sam. Nowadays it's not just unfortunate if you have a low-paid job, have you noticed? It's actually irresponsible: you're not a good member of society, you're being very very naughty not to have a big house and a fancy car." "But if anyone asks for a raise," I said, whapping the ice tray, "they're being very very naughty to threaten their employer's profit margin, after everything he's done for the economy." "Exactly. If you're not rich, you're a lesser being who shouldn't have the gall to expect a living wage from the decent people who are.

Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us.

My dear young friend,' said Mustapha Mond, 'civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are dividied allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended - there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist.

It would be possible to demonstrate in this manner that only two possible worlds can exist for the human mind: the sacred (or, to speak in Christian terms, the world of grace3) and the world of rebellion. The disappearance of one is equivalent to the appearance of the other, despite the fact that this appearance can take place in disconcerting forms. There again we rediscover the All or Nothing. The present interest of the problem of rebellion only springs from the fact that nowadays whole societies have wanted to discard the sacred. We live in an unsacrosanct moment in history. Insurrection is certainly not the sum total of human experience. But history today, with all its storm and strife, compels us to say that rebellion is one of the essential dimensions of man. It is our historic reality. Unless we choose to ignore reality, we must find our values in it. Is it possible to find a rule of conduct outside the realm of religion and its absolute values? That is the question raised by rebellion.

There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral — immoral from the scientific point of view.Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone elses music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion -these are the two things that govern us.

There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view." "Why?" "Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us

There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view.' 'Why?' 'Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion - these are the two things that govern us.

Those who nowadays see inconveniences to living in this laboratory often come up against the incomprehension and disapproval of their peers. They are accused of opposing the technological society on which they are nonetheless dependent and the comforts of which they enjoy—even if this argument is losing credence as the effects of the ecological crisis become ever more direct and flagrant. This logic follows the same pattern as attempts to silence patients criticizing the medical system on the pretext that their health and sometimes their lives depend on it. We are thus to be neutralized by guilt and condemned to submission and resignation. Can we be held responsible for the society into which we were born and in relation to which our room for maneuver is inevitably limited? To use this as grounds to ban all critique of our society amounts to tying our hands in the face of disaster, hamstringing thought and, more broadly, stifling imagination, desire and the capacity to recall that things are not doomed to be as they currently are.

to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion - these are the two things that govern us. And yet, I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediævalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal - to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world takes place also. You, yourself, have had passions that made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame -

Nowadays, whether we like it or not, we are stuck with one form or another of advanced technology and we have got to make it work safely and efficiently: this involves, among other things, the intelligent application of structural theory. However, man does not live by safety and efficiency alone, and we have to face the fact that, visually, the world is becoming an increasingly depressing place. It is not, perhaps, so much the occurrence of what might be described as 'active ugliness' as the prevalence of the dull and the commonplace. Far too seldom is the heart rejoiced or does one feel any better or happier for looking at the works of modern man. Yet most of the artefacts of the eighteenth century, even quite humble and trivial ones, seem to many of us to be at least pleasing and sometimes incomparably beautiful. To that extent people—all people—in the eighteenth century lived richer lives than most of us do today. This is reflected in the prices we pay nowadays for period houses and antiques. A society which was more creative and self-confident would not feel quite so strong a nostalgia for its great-grandfathers' buildings and household looks.

To a modern student, pre-industrial politics appear to be virtually soaked in religion, both in the sense that rulers devoted much attention to religious questions [...] and in the sense that everyone talked endlessly about it, justifying and vilifying a vast range of action in religious terms. [...] ... the pre-modern world was poor in organization. Modern people are members of an immense variety of associations, both local and nationwide, or indeed international, being organized as voters, artists, scholars, scientists, antivivisectionists, devotees of this sport or that, consumers and so forth in addition to (if they so wish) as believers. But pre-industrial society was less differentiated, less wealthy and far less well equipped with means of communication. Hence there might be little or no organization above the level of household or village apart from that provided by religion. This automatically endowed religion with political importance, [...] but it also meant that religion united under its umbrella numerous activities that would nowadays be pursued under umbrellas of their own. [...] Pre-modern religion could be about anything and everything.

At the present time, political power is everywhere constituted on insufficient foundations. On the one hand it emanates from the so-called divine right of kings, which is none other than military force; on the other from universal suffrage, which is merely the instinct of the masses, or mere average intelligence. A nation is not a number of uniform values or ciphers; it is a living being composed of organs. So long as national representation is not the image of this organization, right from its working to its teaching classes, there will be no organic or intelligent national representation. So long as the delegates of all scientific bodies, and the whole of the Christian churches do not sit together in one upper council, our societies will be governed by instinct, by passion, and by might, and there will be no social temple. ...We are beginning to understand that Jesus, at the very height of his consciousness, the transfigured Christ, is opening his loving arms to his brothers, the other Messiahs who preceded him, beams of the Living Word as he was, that he is opening them wide to Science in its entirety, Art in its divinity, and Life in its completeness. But his promise cannot be fulfilled without the help of all the living forces of humanity. Two main things are necessary nowadays for the continuation of the mighty work: on the one hand, the progressive unfolding of experimental science and intuitive philosophy to facts of psychic order, intellectual principles, and spiritual proofs; on the other, the expansion of Christian dogma in the direction of tradition and esoteric science, and subsequently a reorganization of the Church according to a graduated initiation; this by a free and irresistible movement of all Christian churches, which are also equally daughters of the Christ. Science must become religious and religion scientific. This double evolution, already in preparation, would finally and forcibly bring about a reconciliation of Science and Religion on esoteric grounds. The work will not progress without considerable difficulty at first, but the future of European Society depends on it. The transformation of Christianity, in its esoteric sense would bring with it that of Judaism and Islam, as well as a regeneration of Brahmanism and Buddhism in the same fashion, it would accordingly furnish a religious basis for the reconciliation of Asia and Europe.

It is almost necessary to say nowadays that a saint means a very good man. The notion of an eminence merely moral, consistent with complete stupidity or unsuccess, is a revolutionary image grown unfamiliar by its very familiarity, and needing, as do so many things of this older society, some almost preposterous modern parallel to give its original freshness and point. If we entered a foreign town and found a pillar like the Nelson Column, we should be surprised to learn that the hero on the top of it had been famous for his politeness and hilarity during a chronic toothache. If a procession came down the street with a brass band and a hero on a white horse, we should think it odd to be told that he had been very patient with a half-witted maiden aunt. Yet some such pantomime impossibility is the only measure of the innovation of the Christian idea of a popular and recognized saint. It must especially be realized that while this kind of glory was the highest, it was also in a sense the lowest. The materials of it were almost the same as those of labour and domesticity: it did not need the sword or sceptre, but rather the staff or spade. It was the ambition of poverty. All this must be approximately visualized before we catch a glimpse of the great effects of the story which lay behind the Canterbury Pilgrimage.

In ancient agricultural societies, most religions revolved not around metaphysical questions and the afterlife, but around the very mundane issue of increasing agricultural output. Thus the Old Testament God never promises any rewards or punishments after death. He instead tells the people of Israel that ‘If you carefully observe the commands that I’m giving you [. . .] then I will send rain on the land in its season [. . .] and you’ll gather grain, wine, and oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your livestock, and you’ll eat and be satisfied. Be careful! Otherwise, your hearts will deceive you and you will turn away to serve other gods and worship them. The wrath of God will burn against you so that he will restrain the heavens and it won’t rain. The ground won’t yield its produce and you’ll be swiftly destroyed from the good land that the Lord is about to give you’ (Deuteronomy 11:13–17). Scientists today can do much better than the Old Testament God. Thanks to artificial fertilisers, industrial insecticides and genetically modified crops, agricultural production nowadays outstrips the highest expectations ancient farmers had of their gods. And the parched state of Israel no longer fears that some angry deity will restrain the heavens and stop all rain – for the Israelis have recently built a huge desalination plant on the shores of the Mediterranean, so they can now get all their drinking water from the sea.

The weaker sex has in no previous age been treated with so much respect by men as at present — this belongs to the tendency and fundamental taste of democracy, in the same way as disrespectfulness to old age — what wonder is it that abuse should be immediately made of this respect? They want more, they learn to make claims, the tribute of respect is at last felt to be well-nigh galling; rivalry for rights, indeed actual strife itself, would be preferred: in a word, woman is losing modesty. And let us immediately add that she is also losing taste. She is unlearning to fear man: but the woman who 'unlearns to fear' sacrifices her most womanly instincts. That woman should venture forward when the fear-inspiring quality in man — or more definitely, the man in man — is no longer either desired or fully developed, is reasonable enough and also intelligible enough; what is more difficult to understand is that precisely thereby — woman deteriorates. This is what is happening nowadays: let us not deceive ourselves about it! Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman strives for the economic and legal independence of a clerk: ''woman as clerkess' is inscribed on the portal of the modern society which is in course of formation. While she thus appropriates new rights, aspires to be 'master,' and inscribes 'progress' of woman on her flags and banners, the very opposite realises itself with terrible obviousness: woman retrogrades.

329 Leisure and Idleness. - There is an Indian savagery, a savagery peculiar to the Indian blood, in the manner in which the Americans strive after gold: and the breathless hurry of their work- the characteristic vice of the New World-already begins to infect old Europe, and makes it savage also, spreading over it a strange lack of intellectuality. One is now ashamed of repose: even long reflection almost causes remorse of conscience. Thinking is done with a stop-watch, as dining is done with the eyes fixed on the financial newspaper; we live like men who are continually " afraid of letting opportunities slip." " Better do anything whatever, than nothing "-this principle also is a noose with which all culture and all higher taste may be strangled. And just as all form obviously disappears in this hurry of workers, so the sense for form itself, the ear and the eye for the melody of movement, also disappear. The proof of this is the clumsy perspicuity which is now everywhere demanded in all positions where a person would like to be sincere with his fellows, in intercourse with friends, women, relatives, children, teachers, pupils, leaders and princes,-one has no longer either time or energy for ceremonies, for roundabout courtesies, for any esprit in conversation, or for any otium whatever. For life in the hunt for gain continually compels a person to consume his intellect, even to exhaustion, in constant dissimulation, overreaching, or forestalling: the real virtue nowadays is to do something in a shorter time than another person. And so there are only rare hours of sincere intercourse permitted: in them, however, people are tired, and would not only like " to let themselves go," but to stretch their legs out wide in awkward style. The way people write their letters nowadays is quite in keeping with the age; their style and spirit will always be the true " sign of the times." If there be still enjoyment in society and in art, it is enjoyment such as over-worked slaves provide for themselves. Oh, this moderation in "joy" of our cultured and uncultured classes! Oh, this increasing suspiciousness of all enjoyment! Work is winning over more and more the good conscience to its side: the desire for enjoyment already calls itself " need of recreation," and even begins to be ashamed of itself. " One owes it to one's health," people say, when they are caught at a picnic. Indeed, it might soon go so far that one could not yield to the desire for the vita contemplativa (that is to say, excursions with thoughts and friends), without self-contempt and a bad conscience.-Well! Formerly it was the very reverse: it was "action" that suffered from a bad conscience. A man of good family concealed his work when need compelled him to labour. The slave laboured under the weight of the feeling that he did something contemptible :- the "doing" itself was something contemptible. "Only in otium and bellum is there nobility and honour:" so rang the voice of ancient prejudice !

The language of mathematics differs from that of everyday life, because it is essentially a rationally planned language. The languages of size have no place for private sentiment, either of the individual or of the nation. They are international languages like the binomial nomenclature of natural history. In dealing with the immense complexity of his social life man has not yet begun to apply inventiveness to the rational planning of ordinary language when describing different kinds of institutions and human behavior. The language of everyday life is clogged with sentiment, and the science of human nature has not advanced so far that we can describe individual sentiment in a clear way. So constructive thought about human society is hampered by the same conservatism as embarrassed the earlier naturalists. Nowadays people do not differ about what sort of animal is meant by Cimex or Pediculus, because these words are used only by people who use them in one way. They still can and often do mean a lot of different things when they say that a mattress is infested with bugs or lice. The study of a man's social life has not yet brought forth a Linnaeus. So an argument about the 'withering away of the State' may disclose a difference about the use of the dictionary when no real difference about the use of the policeman is involved. Curiously enough, people who are most sensible about the need for planning other social amenities in a reasonable way are often slow to see the need for creating a rational and international language.

As a method of warfare with “beyond limits” as its major feature, its principle is to assemble and blend together more means to resolve a problem in a range wider than the problem itself. For example, when national is threatened, the answer is not simply a matter of selecting the means to confront the other nation militarily, but rather a matter of dispelling the crisis through the employment of “supra-national combinations.” We see from history that the nation-state is the highest form of the idea of security. For Chinese people, the nation-state even equates to the great concept of all-under-heaven [tianxia, classical name for China]. Nowadays, the significance of the word “country” in terms of nationality or geography is no more than a large or small link in the human society of the “world village.” Modern countries are affected more and more by regional or world-wide organizations, such as the European Community [sic; now the European Union], ASEAN, OPEC, APEC, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the WTO, and the biggest of them all, the United Nations. Besides these, a large number of multinational organizations and non-state organizations of all shapes and sizes, such as multinational corporations, trade associations, peace and environmental organizations, the Olympic Committee, religious organizations, terrorist organizations, small groups of hackers, etc., dart from left and right into a country’s path. These multinational, non-state, and supra-national organizations together constitute an up and coming worldwide system of power.3

Money has an even darker side. For although money builds universal trust between strangers, this trust is invested not in humans, communities or sacred values, but in money itself and in the impersonal systems that back it. We do not trust the stranger, or the next-door neighbour – we trust the coin they hold. If they run out of coins, we run out of trust. As money brings down the dams of community, religion and state, the world is in danger of becoming one big and rather heartless marketplace. Hence the economic history of humankind is a delicate dance. People rely on money to facilitate cooperation with strangers, but they’re afraid it will corrupt human values and intimate relations. With one hand people willingly destroy the communal dams that held at bay the movement of money and commerce for so long. Yet with the other hand they build new dams to protect society, religion and the environment from enslavement to market forces. It is common nowadays to believe that the market always prevails, and that the dams erected by kings, priests and communities cannot long hold back the tides of money. This is naive. Brutal warriors, religious fanatics and concerned citizens have repeatedly managed to trounce calculating merchants, and even to reshape the economy. It is therefore impossible to understand the unification of humankind as a purely economic process. In order to understand how thousands of isolated cultures coalesced over time to form the global village of today, we must take into account the role of gold and silver, but we cannot disregard the equally crucial role of steel.

When most people use the word ‘freedom’ nowadays, they use it in the sense of the French Revolutionaries: freedom from tradition, from established social institutions, from religious doctrines, from prescriptive duties. I think that this employment of the word does much mischief. For we do not live in an age—and there are such ages—which is oppressed by the dead weight of archaic establishments and obsolete custom. The danger in our era, rather, is that the fountains of the great deep will be broken up and that the pace of alteration will be so rapid that generation cannot link with generation. Our era, necessarily, is what Matthew Arnold called an epoch of concentration. Or, at least, the thinking American needs to turn his talents to concentration, the buttressing and reconstruction of our moral and social heritage. This is a time not for anarchic freedom, but for ordered freedom. There are much older and stronger concepts of freedom than that espoused by the French Revolutionaries. In the Christian tradition, freedom is submission to the will of God. This is no paradox. As he that would save his life must lose it, so the man who desires true freedom must recognize a providential order which gives all freedoms their sanction. The theory of ‘natural rights’ depends upon the premise of an on alterable human nature bestowed upon man by God. Only acceptance of the divine order can give enduring freedom to a society; for this lacking, there is no reason why the strong and the clever, the dominant majority or the successful oligarch, should respect the liberties of anyone else. Freedom without the theory of natural rights becomes simply the freedom of those who hold power to do as they like with the lives of those whose interests conflict with theirs.

with this line of reasoning. If it makes you feel better, you are free to go on calling Communism an ideology rather than a religion. It makes no difference. We can divide creeds into god-centred religions and godless ideologies that claim to be based on natural laws. But then, to be consistent, we would need to catalogue at least some Buddhist, Daoist and Stoic sects as ideologies rather than religions. Conversely, we should note that belief in gods persists within many modern ideologies, and that some of them, most notably liberalism, make little sense without this belief. It would be impossible to survey here the history of all the new modern creeds, especially because there are no clear boundaries between them. They are no less syncretic than monotheism and popular Buddhism. Just as a Buddhist could worship Hindu deities, and just as a monotheist could believe in the existence of Satan, so the typical American nowadays is simultaneously a nationalist (she believes in the existence of an American nation with a special role to play in history), a free-market capitalist (she believes that open competition and the pursuit of self-interest are the best ways to create a prosperous society), and a liberal humanist (she believes that humans have been endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights). Nationalism will be discussed in Chapter 18. Capitalism – the most successful of the modern religions – gets a whole chapter, Chapter 16, which expounds its principal beliefs and rituals. In the remaining pages of this chapter I will address the humanist religions. Theist religions focus on the worship of gods. Humanist religions worship humanity, or more correctly, Homo sapiens. Humanism is a belief that Homo sapiens has a unique and sacred nature, which is fundamentally different from the nature of all other animals and of all other phenomena. Humanists believe that the unique nature of Homo sapiens is the most important thing in the world, and it determines the meaning of everything that happens in the universe. The supreme good is the good of Homo sapiens. The rest of the world and all other beings exist solely for the benefit of this species. All humanists worship humanity, but they do not agree on its definition. Humanism has split into three rival sects that fight over the exact definition of ‘humanity’, just as rival Christian sects fought over the exact definition of God. Today, the most important humanist sect is liberal humanism, which believes that ‘humanity’ is a quality of individual humans, and that the liberty of individuals is therefore sacrosanct. According to liberals, the sacred nature of humanity resides within each and every individual Homo sapiens. The inner core of individual humans gives meaning to the world, and is the source for all ethical and political authority. If we encounter an ethical or political dilemma, we should look inside and listen to our inner voice – the voice of humanity. The chief commandments of liberal humanism are meant to protect the liberty of this inner voice against intrusion or harm. These commandments are collectively known as ‘human rights’. This, for example, is why liberals object to torture and the death penalty. In early modern Europe, murderers were thought to violate and destabilise the cosmic order. To bring the cosmos back to balance, it was necessary to torture and publicly execute the criminal, so that everyone could see the order re-established. Attending gruesome executions was a favourite pastime for Londoners and Parisians in the era of Shakespeare and Molière. In today’s Europe, murder is seen as a violation of the sacred nature of humanity. In order to restore order, present-day Europeans do not torture and execute criminals. Instead, they punish a murderer in what they see as the most ‘humane

There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr Gray. All influence is immoral — immoral from the scientific point of view.' 'Why?' 'Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly — that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion — these are the two things that govern us. And yet —' 'Just turn your head a little more to the right, Dorian, like a good boy,' said the painter, deep in his work, and conscious only that a look had come into the lad's face that he had never seen there before. 'And yet,' continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, and with that graceful wave of the hand that always was so characteristic of him, and that he had even in his Eton days, 'I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream — I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediævalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal — to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame—

Before all else, it is certain that the radical and ultimate cause of the evils which We deplore in modern society is the denial and rejection of a universal norm of morality as well for individual and social life as for international relations; We mean the disregard, so common nowadays, and the forgetfulness of the natural law itself, which has its foundation in God, Almighty Creator and Father of all, supreme and absolute Lawgiver, all-wise and just Judge of human actions. When God is hated, every basis of morality is undermined” (SP 28). Pius XII was already confronted with the beginnings of the problems with which we are familiar: the denial of God and moral relativism.

Two German kayakers arrive from the north at nightfall. They set up camp on the cape beach, about a third of a mile from the cabin, and come up to recharge their equipment on my solar batteries. We have to look at their photos, their films, exchange e-mail addresses. When you meet someone nowadays, right after the handshake and a quick glance you write down the website and blog information. Conversation has given way to a session in front of the screen. Afterwards, you won’t remember faces or tones of voice, but you’ll have cards with scribbled numbers. Human society’s dream has come true: we rub our antennae together like ants. One day we’ll just take a sniff.

According to you, ‘a functional society is one which is dominated by external mediation’10 Is contemporary Western society functional, given that it is dominated by internal mediation? A functional society is one whose institutions work without being constantly disrupted by violence. For instance, in traditional Indian society, this is defined through the concept of dharma, which basically means the strict separation of castes, and as a result a society in which everybody does what they are ordained to do.11 Therefore, a functional society according to external mediation is a hierarchical, traditional one. In the West, we have something special: we have outgrown the dharma definition of social order and we have a society that can be stable without strict internal hierarchical structure. Of course one must see this from the point of view of the mimetic theory and as the result of a historical process. A type of external mediation still ruled in the Western Middle Ages, and in terms of dharma, namely, the social and religious order, the hierarchical order, it could be defined as a functional society. The dissolution of this dharma probably took place in the period that extends from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. As a matter of fact, the Middle Ages cannot be said to be entirely ‘traditional’ either, since on the one hand, they were chaotic (in a pre-Christian way); and on the other, there was the disintegration of a certain type of order, which probably dominates up to a point in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and then breaks down. Above all, there was the constant threat of scarcity of goods, a decisive factor in bringing about mimetic crises. Nowadays there is a stability which is no longer based on dharma, and which must inevitably be based on the Judaeo-Christian principle of the individual who dominates his/her own violent impulses.

According to Gibbon, Roman society began to fall apart after marriage lost its value in the culture, and promiscuity became widespread. Divorce became common, families were fractured and then other social institutions also began to break down. Basically, without the dominance of what we call 'the traditional family,' cultures break down and eventually collapse.” “Isn't that a little bigoted? I mean, nowadays, a lot of people feel that there are many different variations of 'family' and all of them basically valid.” “History done right is a bigoted discipline.” Leyla took the glass of water. She sipped it and then winked at me. “This is good. We need a good intellectual discussion right now. So how is history bigoted?” “I guess what I mean is, it shows things as they really are, or were, rather. Nowadays we maintain all choices for family units are equal. We try to pretend that all beliefs and practices are neutral in relation to each other. But history tells a different story. It shows us that not all beliefs and practices are equal in terms of their effects on people. Some things really are better than others. Democracy really is better than Nazism and Communism. Capitalism, for all its faults, really has benefited far more people than socialism. And, according to convincing arguments from people like Edward Gibbon, society really is better off when traditional marriage and morality are valued, as opposed to when they aren't. It isn't just a religious thing either – Gibbon was not a Christian himself. It's just the bigoted historical fact.

some four stages (Table 4.6):- Table 4.6The changing life cycle Traditional life-cycle used to be 0–20 20–40 40–60 60–70+ Young Married (Work) with dependent children Working No dependents Retired Nowadays the life cycle has five segments: 0–20 20–30 30–50 50–67 67–80+ Young Single (Working) Married (Work) with dependent children Working with dependent