Socio Economic Quotes

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Do not define me by my gender or my socio-economic status, Noah Willis. Do not tell me who I am and do not tell me who society thinks I am and then put me in that box and expect me to stay there. Because, I swear to God, I will climb the hell out of that box and I will take that box you've just put me in and I will use that box to smash your face in until you're nothing more than a freckly, bloodied pulp. You got that, sweet cheeks?
Megan Jacobson (Yellow)
This principle - that your spouse should be capable of becoming your best friend - is a game changer when you address the question of compatibility in a prospective spouse. If you think of marriage largely in terms of erotic love, then compatibility means sexual chemistry and appeal. If you think of marriage largely as a way to move into the kind of social status in life you desire, then compatibility means being part of the desired social class, and perhaps common tastes and aspirations for lifestyle. The problem with these factors is that they are not durable. Physical attractiveness will wane, no matter how hard you work to delay its departure. And socio-economic status unfortunately can change almost overnight. When people think they have found compatibility based on these things, they often make the painful discovery that they have built their relationship on unstable ground. A woman 'lets herself go' or a man loses his job, and the compatibility foundation falls apart.
Timothy J. Keller (The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God)
You take a poor, ignorant population, and give them arms, and say, ‘It’s yours. Kill.’ They’ll obey. The peasants, who were paid or forced to kill, were looking up to people of higher socio-economic standing to see how to behave.
Philip Gourevitch (We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families)
It’s is their “will” that plays part in the solidarity, not their socio-economic status!
Mohith Agadi
The writer should have a comprehensive outlook. He should aim at a holistic understanding of the prevailing social, political and economic conditions. He should evaluate all factors in a balanced way. To take a selective view will be erroneous. A realistic approach becomes necessary. This requires healthy literary criticism and exchange of views. A writer should necessarily venture into his enterprise by touching on a single issue. But then he should relate it to other socially relevant issues. This is what we call the socio-spiritual approach. You may begin your work dwelling upon the problems of an individual, but then as a writer you should be able to view it as part of the larger social reality.
Jayakanthan
People are weakened by the slack life they lead, by their boundless individualism, by the dreams promoted via television and advertising, and by their virtual experiences. This is what the anthropologist Arnold Gehlen has termed ‘second-hand experiences’ – socio-economic opium.
Guillaume Faye (Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age)
Why do writers use symbolism?” Okay, so let’s say you have a headache and you wanna tell someone about it and you say, “I have a headache!” and other people are like, “Yeah, whatever. Everybody gets headaches.” But your headache is not a regular headache, it’s a serious headache, so you say, “My brain is on fire!” to try to help these people understand that this is a headache that needs attention! That’s a metaphor, right? And you use it so that you can be understood. Now let’s say you want to take those same imagistic principles but apply them to a much more complex idea than having a headache, like, for instance, the yearning that one feels for one’s dreams. And you can see the dream but you can’t cross the bay to get to the green light that embodies your dream. And you want to talk about how socio-economic class in America is a barrier – a bay-like barrier, some would say – that stands between you and the green light and makes that gap unbridgeable. Now, you can just talk about that stuff directly, but when you talk about it symbolically, it becomes more powerful, because instead of being abstract it becomes kind of observable…. So I think that’s why.
John Green
An important ethical function of identity politics, in this context, is to highlight that obstacles to the self-development of individuals, and to the formation and exercise of their agency, emerge in complex cultural and psychic forms, as well as through more familiar kinds of socio-economic inequality.
Michael Kenny (The Politics of Identity: Liberal Political Theory and the Dilemmas of Difference)
Shamanism is not confined to specific socio-economic settings or stages of development. It is fundamentally the ability that all of us share, some with and some without the help of hallucinogens, to enter altered states of consciousness and to travel out of body in non-physical realms - there to encounter supernatural entities and gain useful knowledge and healing powers from them.
Graham Hancock (Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind)
There are no abstract women, whose lives are shaped only or primarily by their gender; in the real world, women have a place in the class, socio-economic, racial and ethnic structures within capitalist social formations.
Martha A. Gimenez (Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays)
Modern science, as we have noted earlier, has a world-view that both supports and is supported by the socio-political-economic system of western capitalist patriarchy which dominates and exploits nature, women, and the poor.
Vandana Shiva (Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development)
Agriculture makes people dependent on a few domesticated crops and animals instead of hundreds of wild food sources, creating vulnerability to droughts and blights and zoonotic diseases. Agriculture makes for sedentary living, leaving humans to do something that no primate with a concern for hygiene and public health would ever do: namely, living in close proximity to their feces. Agriculture makes for surplus and thus almost inevitably, the uneven distribution of surplus generating socio-economic status differences that dwarf anything that other primates cook up with their hierarchies. And from there it's just a hop, skip and a jump until we've got Mr. McGregor persecuting Peter Rabbit and people incessantly singing Oklahoma.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
Michael Parenti has observed: The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to insure plutocratic control of the planet, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere – including the people of North America – the blessings of an untrammeled ‘free market’ corporate capitalism. The struggle is between those who believe that the land, labor, capital, technology, and markets of the world should be dedicated to maximizing capital accumulation for the few, and those who believe that these things should be used for the communal benefit and socio-economic development of the many.16
William Blum (America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else)
Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men. The Resurgence of Authority stands opposed to the Rule of Money; Order to Social Chaos, Hierarchy to Equality, socio-economico-political Stability to constant Flux; glad assumption of Duties to whining for Rights; Socialism to Capitalism, ethically, economically, politically; the Rebirth of Religion to Materialism; Fertility to Sterility; the spirit of Heroism to the spirit of Trade; the principle of Responsibility to Parliamentarism; the idea of Polarity of Man and Woman to Feminism; the idea of the individual task to the ideal of ‘happiness’; Discipline to Propaganda-compulsion; the higher unities of family, society, State to social atomism; Marriage to the Communistic ideal of free love; economic self-sufficiency to senseless trade as an end in itself; the inner imperative to Rationalism.
Francis Parker Yockey (Imperium: Philosophy of History & Politics)
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.
Terry Pratchett (Men at Arms (Discworld, #15))
Listen here's the thing – I don't know what you kids are up to, but I do know one thing: laws are threats made by the dominant socio-economic, ethnic group in a given nation. It's just a promise of violence that's enacted and police are basically an occupying army, you know what I mean? You guys want to make some bacon?
Brennan Lee Mulligan
A flush works over my cheeks and grows when Rolondo says, “And here I thought I was pointing out the impact of our divergent socio-economic status when faced with potential agent induced incentives.” We both look at each other for a second then laugh again. “Fucking Sociology major,” I mutter. “Henry-muthafucka-Higgins. You gonna Eliza Doolittle me?” “There you go again, trying to get me to do you. Let the dream die, man.
Kristen Callihan (The Hook Up (Game On, #1))
For the correct Marxist classification of the proletariat-the class which is forced by socio-economic compulsion to sell its labour-power to the capitalist owners of the means of production – implies that both variations in the level of the reserve army of labour, and the variegated relations between the ‘purely physiological’ and ‘moral-historical’ components of the value of labour-power,63 are of decisive importance for the proletarian’s immediate destiny.
Karl Marx (Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2)
Thus, they were asking: do higher intelligence test scores from about age 20 predict better educational outcomes, higher social position, and arguably more pro-social behaviours in the thirties? The answer was: they did. They then asked if this was due to (confounded by) parental socio-economic status; it mostly wasn’t.
Ian J. Deary (Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
21. Jane Eyre “When being bullied Keisha Blake found it useful to remember that if you read the relevant literature or watched the pertinent movies you soon found that being bullied was practically a sign of a superior personality, and the greater the intensity of the bullying the more likely it was to be avenged at the other end of life, when qualities of the kind Keisha Black possessed– cleverness, will-to-power– became ‘their own reward,’ and that this remained true even if the people in the literature and movies looked nothing like you, came from a different socio-economic and historical universe, and– had they ever met you– would very likely have enslaved you, or at best, bullied you to precisely the same extent as Lorna Mackenzie who had a problem with the way you acted like you were better than everyone else”.
Zadie Smith (NW)
Since, on a socio-economic level, there are myriad wrongs that need to be righted, a major problem for the species seems to be how to assist the unfortunate, throttle the corrupt, preserve the biosphere, and effectively organize for socio-economic alteration wihtout the organization being taken over by dullards, the people who, ironically, are best suited to serving organized causes since they seldom have anything more imaginative to do and, restricted by tunnel vision, probably wouldn't do it if they had. 151
Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)
write these pages, Japan and the U.S. are still practicing widespread selective denial of major problems. Japan currently acknowledges some problems (its large government debt and aging population), and incompletely acknowledges the issue of Japanese women’s role. But Japan still denies other problems: its lack of accepted alternatives to immigration for solving its demographic difficulties; the historical causes of Japan’s tense relations with China and Korea; and denial that Japan’s traditional policy of seeking to grab overseas natural resources rather than to help manage them sustainably is now outdated. The U.S., as I write, is still in widespread denial of our own major problems: political polarization, low voter turnout, obstacles to voter registration, inequality, limited socio-economic mobility, and decreasing government investment in public goods.
Jared Diamond (Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (Civilizations Rise and Fall, #3))
The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an opposition to private property. A person who is deprived of something he can call “his own,” and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it. This makes it much more difficult for him to recognize his dignity as a person, and hinders progress towards the building up of an authentic human community.
Pope John Paul II
Together with the mechanisation of plant cultivation, industrial animal husbandry is the basis for the entire modern socio-economic order.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
sex separation in the classroom leads to a bullshit socio-economic situation perpetuated by people with good intentions.
Darnell Lamont Walker
If racism is the product of historical and socio-economic conditions, to the extent that these conditions can be changed, racism can eventually be abolished.
Rebecca Ruth Gould (Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom)
usual early-modern socio-economic causes of war, and then turned it into a crusade. In the name of one, men are permitted to kill; in the name of the other, they are commanded to destroy.
Claire North (The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August)
The reality is that under capitalist conditions―meaning maximization of short-term gain―you're ultimately going to destroy the environment: the only question is when. Now, for a long time, it's been possible to pretend that the environment is an infinite source and an infinite sink. Neither is true obviously, and we're now sort of approaching the point where you can't keep playing the game too much longer. It may not be very far off. Well, dealing with that problem is going to require large-scale social changes of an almost unimaginable kind. For one thing, it's going to certainly require large-scale social planning, and that means participatory social planning if it's going to be at all meaningful. It's also going to require a general recognition among human beings that an economic system driven by greed is going to self-destruct―it's only a question of time before you make the planet unlivable, by destroying the ozone layer or some other way. And that means huge socio-psychological changes have to take place if the human species is going to survive very much longer. So that's a big factor.
Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky)
So the plutocrats direct the legitimate grievances of the middle Americans toward innocent foes, and in return the middle Americans vote for the plutocrats thinking they are thereby defending their own precarious socio-economic interests.
Michael Parenti (Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader)
[W]hereas a few hundred years ago man suspected and imagined that the universe was, for all intents and purposes, limitless, today he knows this to be true. His improved understanding of the material world around him has given him the means to make sure that his original conception of the universe was correct, in that every day its limits are being pushed aside and new horizons appear." His Highness the Aga Khan's 1964 First World Socio-Economic Conference address (Karachi, Pakistan)
Aga Khan IV
In neoliberal victim theory, the rather uncompassionate conception of victimization as self-made – the idea that winners win and losers lose because they have simply chosen to do so – fairly obviously evacuates sociological explanation of social suffering, directly subverting progressive political efforts to make victimization through poverty, inequality, discrimination and violence visible as collective and socio-economically embedded in an array of intersecting engines of social hierarchy and difference.
Rebecca Stringer (Knowing Victims (Women and Psychology))
When Marx and Engels applied the law of contradiction in things to the study of the socio-historical process, they discovered the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, they discovered the contradiction between the exploiting and exploited classes and also the resultant contradiction between the economic base and its superstructure (politics, ideology, etc.), and they discovered how these contradictions inevitably lead to different kinds of social revolution in different kinds of class society.
Mao Zedong (On Contradiction)
Nazism is a psychological problem, but the psychological factors themselves have to be understood as being molded by socio-economic factors; Nazism is an economic and political problem, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds.
Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom)
Generally Labour Legislations are constructively fortified with the goal of revitalizing the socio-economic fabric of the country through their malleable yet firm provisions, which hypothetically works its way through harmonizing the relationship between employer and employee.
Henrietta Newton Martin
Ambedkar’s presidential speech elaborated on these themes. He argued forcefully that the multiplicity of castes, races, religions and languages could not come in the way of India’s readiness for independence. His eloquent and scathing indictment of imperialism attacked Britain for the impoverishment of India and for doing nothing to lighten either the burden of untouchability or the exploitation of peasants and workers. Finally, his reference to ‘capitalists’ and ‘landlords’ and his characterization of the Congress leaders as ‘feudalists’ indicate the growing influence of socio-economic radicalism on his thinking.
Gail Omvedt (Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India)
But any explanation which analyzes one sector to the exclusion of all others is unbalanced, and thus wrong. The socio-economic, spiritual and psychological explanations look at the same phenomena from different aspects, and the very task of a theoretical analysis is to see how these different aspects are interrelated, and how they interact.
Erich Fromm (The Sane Society)
So we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets, we've shunned them from the greasy-grind The poor little things, they look so sad and old as they mount us from behind I ask them to desist and to refrain And then we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop)Rosary clutched in his hand, he died with tubes up his nose And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals chanted his name in code We shook our fists at the punishing rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me in this idiot constituency of the moon Well, he knew exactly who to blame And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix! Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!(Doop doop doop doop dooop) Well, I go guruing down the street, young people gather round my feet Ask me things, but I don't know where to start They ignite the power-trail ssstraight to my father's heart And once again I call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...)We call upon the author to explain Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing that mediocres my every thought? I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker, it's fucked up and he is a fucker But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain I call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Oh rampant discrimination, mass poverty, third world debt, infectious diseease Global inequality and deepening socio-economic divisions Well, it does in your brain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window (Hey Doug, how you been?) Brings me back a book on holocaust poetry complete with pictures Then tells me to get ready for the rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) I say prolix! Prolix! Something a pair of scissors can fix Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best! He wrote like wet papier mache, went the Heming-way weirdly on wings and with maximum pain We call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Down in my bolthole I see they've published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish "The waves, the waves were soldiers moving". Well, thank you, thank you, thank you And again I call upon the author to explain Yeah, we call upon the author to explain Prolix! Prolix! There's nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!
Nick Cave
Millions of people across the world live in a state of acute environmental crises caused by the lack of access to safe and usable water resources, because of natural disasters, socio-economic conditions, wars and conflicts. At Green the Gene, we are developing extremely simple yet highly technology and data intensive solutions tailored to address extremely specific problems faced by communities.
Madhav Datt
The inspiration our campaign was providing, the sight of so many young people newly invested in their ability to make change, the bringing together of Americans across racial and socio-economic lines - it was the realization of everything I’d once dreamed might be possible in politics, and it made me proud. But the continuing elevation of me as a symbol ran contrary to my organizer’s instincts, that sense that change involves “we” and not “me”.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
Based on the balancing act of the golden mean, bourgeois marriage mixed moderate but continuing sexual attraction, a mutual social and economic interest in living together, respect for the wife, a will to create a lineage, significant socio-cultural similarity, hypocrisy for dissimulating and managing adulterous liaisons (hence the importance of legal prostitution), and the building up of a patrimony to be transmitted. When the couple gets old, this leads to a habitual tenderness much stronger than the passionate and ephemeral simulation of today’s young couples.
Guillaume Faye (Sex and Deviance)
The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed." ― Mahatma Gandhi Gandhiji had said these immortal words that are so true now than at any other time. Mother Nature has given us resources that are sufficient for everyone but not enough for everybody's greed. Some people because of their greed are trying to keep a lot more than what is required for themselves. This is creating socio-economic disparities. Most importantly, Gandhiji's philosophy was about creating a better world. We have a choice to lead a simple life, but one that is truly 'rich' in meaning.
Avijeet Das
The histories of justice and liberty have often been written. Not so that of equality, which, so far has failed to find its proper biographer. There seems to be no equivalent to Plato's On Justice (better known as The Republic) or to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. That is strange, for equality is quite as important as the other two. Never has this been more true than in our own day. On one hand, we are inundated by volumes that warn us of the dangers of growing socio-economic gaps and by movements that protest against those gaps.[1] On the other, equality’s opposite, discrimination, has not only become taboo but is being used as a lever for all kinds of social reforms, credible and incredible alike.
Martin van Creveld (Equality: The Impossible Quest)
THE economic consequences of fluctuations in the objective exchange-value of money have such important bearings on the life of the community and of the individual that as soon as the State had abandoned the attempt to exploit for fiscal ends its authority in monetary matters, and as soon as the large-scale development of the modern economic community had enabled the State to exert a decisive influence on the kind of money chosen by the market, it was an obvious step to think of attaining certain socio-political aims by influencing these consequences in a systematic manner. Modern currency policy is something essentially new; it differs fundamentally from earlier State activity in the monetary sphere.
Ludwig von Mises (The Theory of Money and Credit)
When an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him or to bring into play information about him already possessed. They will be interested in his general socio-economic status, his conception of self, his attitude toward them, his competence, his trustworthiness, etc. Although some of this information seems to be sought almost as an end in itself, there are usually quite practical reasons for acquiring it. Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what he will expect of them and what they may expect of him. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to call forth a desired response from him.
Erving Goffman (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life)
Splitting humankind into biological castes will destroy the foundations of liberal ideology. Liberalism can coexist with socio-economic gaps. Indeed, since it favours liberty over equality, it takes such gaps for granted. However, liberalism still presupposes that all human beings have equal value and authority. From a liberal perspective, it is perfectly all right that one person is a billionaire living in a sumptuous chateau, whereas another is a poor peasant living in a straw hut. For according to liberalism, the peasant’s unique experiences are still just as valuable as the billionaire’s. That’s why liberal authors write long novels about the experiences of poor peasants – and why even billionaires avidly read such books.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
Finally, we arrive at the question of the so-called nonpolitical man. Hitler not only established his power from the very beginning with masses of people who were until then essentially nonpolitical; he also accomplished his last step to victory in March of 1933 in a "legal" manner, by mobilizing no less than five million nonvoters, that is to say, nonpolitical people. The Left parties had made every effort to win over the indifferent masses, without posing the question as to what it means "to be indifferent or nonpolitical." If an industrialist and large estate owner champions a rightist party, this is easily understood in terms of his immediate economic interests. In his case a leftist orientation would be at variance with his social situation and would, for that reason, point to irrational motives. If an industrial worker has a leftist orientation, this too is by all mean rationally consistent—it derives from his economic and social position in industry. If, however, a worker, an employee, or an official has a rightist orientation, this must be ascribed to a lack of political clarity, i.e., he is ignorant of his social position. The more a man who belongs to the broad working masses is nonpolitical, the more susceptible he is to the ideology of political reaction. To be nonpolitical is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defense against the awareness of social responsibility. The analysis of this defense against consciousness of one's social responsibility yields clear insights into a number of dark questions concerning the behavior of the broad nonpolitical strata. In the case of the average intellectual "who wants nothing to do with politics," it can easily be shown that immediate economic interests and fears related to his social position, which is dependent upon public opinion, lie at the basis of his noninvolvement. These fears cause him to make the most grotesque sacrifices with respect to his knowledge and convictions. Those people who are engaged in the production process in one way or another and are nonetheless socially irresponsible can be divided into two major groups. In the case of the one group the concept of politics is unconsciously associated with the idea of violence and physical danger, i.e., with an intense fear, which prevents them from facing life realistically. In the case of the other group, which undoubtedly constitutes the majority, social irresponsibility is based on personal conflicts and anxieties, of which the sexual anxiety is the predominant one. […] Until now the revolutionary movement has misunderstood this situation. It attempted to awaken the "nonpolitical" man by making him conscious solely of his unfulfilled economic interests. Experience teaches that the majority of these "nonpolitical" people can hardly be made to listen to anything about their socio-economic situation, whereas they are very accessible to the mystical claptrap of a National Socialist, despite the fact that the latter makes very little mention of economic interests. [This] is explained by the fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility. They make a person afraid and force him into a shell. If, now, such a self-encapsulated person meets a propagandist who works with faith and mysticism, meets, in other words, a fascist who works with sexual, libidinous methods, he turns his complete attention to him. This is not because the fascist program makes a greater impression on him than the liberal program, but because in his devotion to the führer and the führer's ideology, he experiences a momentary release from his unrelenting inner tension. Unconsciously, he is able to give his conflicts a different form and in this way to "solve" them.
Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism)
In Indian social-cultural-political discourse there is a general tendency to ignore deeper, intellectual thought, and the sensationalist mass media has actually contributed to a great dumbing down of even the educated masses. In this climate where any and all intellectuality has been mostly confined to a few ivory towers of academy, it is difficult to get even the educated and socio-economically privileged section of the society interested in the idea of exploring any deeper intellectual thought. It seems as if the trinity of pop-sociology, pop-psychology and pop-culture has taken over the general mentality of the society leaving little room for any serious, intellectually rigorous discourse on social-cultural phenomena. If at all, there is any serious attempt to think through and understand the observed phenomena, it is almost always done using the intellectual theories and frameworks developed in the Western academic circles. But this habit of non-thinking or thinking only in terms of borrowed categories must change if we want India to awaken to her innate intellectual potential.
Beloo Mehra (The Thinking Indian: Essays on Indian Socio-Cultural Matters in the Light of Sri Aurobindo)
When we think without Marx's perspective, that is, without considering class interests and class power, we seldom ask why certain things happen. Many things are reported in the news but few are explained. Little is said about how the social order is organized and whose interests prevail. Devoid of a framework that explains why things happen, we are left to see the world as do mainstream media pundits: as a flow of events, a scatter of particular developments and personalities unrelated to a larger set of social relations - propelled by happenstance, circumstance, confused intentions, and individual ambition, never by powerful class interests - and yet producing effects that serve such interests with impressive regularity. Thus we fail to associate social problems with the socio-economic forces that create them and we learn to truncate our own critical thinking. Imagine if we attempted something different; for example, if we tried to explain that wealth and poverty exist together not in accidental juxtaposition, but because wealth causes poverty, an inevitable outcome of economic exploitation both at home and abroad. How could such an analysis gain any exposure in the capitalist media or in mainstream political life?
Michael Parenti (Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)
Judge Fisher permitted the defendants to explain how their opposition to the war had caused them to commit an act of resistance. He also permitted them to call as witnesses a wide range of people who supported resistance to the war, including both Daniel and Philip Berrigan. One by one, defense witnesses spoke of resistance to the government's war policy as an admired virtue central to understanding of American history and to maintaining a just society. One of the surprising witnesses was Major Clement St. Martin, the commander of the New Jersey State induction center in Newark from 1968 to 1971. Files under his control had been destroyed by the defendants. Nevertheless, he testified in their defense.He said he had become completely frustrated after years of making futile complaints through appropriate channels about the gross corruption in the way the draft forced the sons of the poor to serve in Vietnam and released the sons of the rich and sons of state and federal officials from service. His frustrations had grown particularly deep, he testified, in 1969 when a "very high" Selective Service official, responding to complaints filed by the major, told him, "Mind your business. We have twenty million animals to chose from.
Betty Medsger
According to socialism, instead of spending years talking about my mother, my emotions and my complexes, I should ask myself: who owns the means of production in my country? What are its main exports and imports? What’s the connection between the ruling politicians and international banking? Only by understanding the surrounding socio-economic system and taking into account the experiences of all other people could I truly understand what I feel, and only by common action can we change the system. Yet what person can take into account the experiences of all human beings, and weigh them one against the other in a fair way? That’s why socialists discourage self-exploration, and advocate the establishment of strong collective institutions – such as socialist parties and trade unions – that aim to decipher the world for us. Whereas in liberal politics the voter knows best, and in liberal economics the customer is always right, in socialist politics the party knows best, and in socialist economics the trade union is always right. Authority and meaning still come from human experience – both the party and the trade union are composed of people and work to alleviate human misery – yet individuals must listen to the party and the trade union rather than to their personal feelings.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
As long as you keep treating the individual as the basis of political agency,’ he was saying now, ‘you’re going to be stuck with different forms of capitalism. This is my whole idea. This is what I’m trying to write about. What if we stopped talking in terms of individuals at all, and instead we took the relationship as the base socio-economic unit? The relationships, the bonds, the connections–they’re just as basic to any system as the actual individuals, the actual data. Right? And in relationships, we do all sorts of things that radically challenge the neoliberal status quo: we make sacrifices, we put the other person first, we learn to compromise, we care, we help, we listen, we give ourselves away–and fundamentally, those are different kinds of sacrifices to the kind that are all about self-discipline and following a regime. They’re not individualistic; they’re mutual. Like, all the stuff that you were saying before, stopping eating meat, flying less, shopping local, I mean, all power to you, for sure, but there’s something so puritanical about it, like, it’s a programme of asceticism, always being strict and consistent and never being lazy or whatever–and at the end of the day it’s still about you as an individual. Your purity, your moral conscience, the sacrifices you’ve made.
Eleanor Catton (Birnam Wood)
Age of Extremes" delivers its fundamental argument in the form of a periodisation. The ‘short 20th century’ between 1914 and 1991 can be divided into three phases. The first, ‘The Age of Catastrophe’, extends from the slaughter of the First World War, through the Great Depression and the rise of Fascism, to the cataclysm of the Second World War and its immediate consequences, including the end of European empires. The second, ‘The Golden Age’, stretching approximately from 1950 to 1973, saw historically unprecedented rates of growth and a new popular prosperity in the advanced capitalist world, with the spread of mixed economies and social security systems; accompanied by rising living standards in the Soviet bloc and the ‘end of the Middle Ages’ in the Third World, as the peasantry streamed off the land into modern cities in post-colonial states. The third phase, ‘Landslide’, starting with the oil crisis and onset of recession in 1973, and continuing into the present, has witnessed economic stagnation and political atrophy in the West, the collapse of the USSR in the East, socio-cultural anomie across the whole of the North, and the spread of vicious ethnic conflicts in the South. The signs of these times are: less growth, less order, less security. The barometer of human welfare is falling.
Perry Anderson
Classical liberalism has been reproached with being too obstinate and not ready enough to compromise. It was because of its inflexibility that it was defeated in its struggle with the nascent anticapitalist parties of all kinds. If it had realized, as these other parties did, the importance of compromise and concession to popular slogans in winning the favor of the masses, it would have been able to preserve at least some of its influence. But it has never bothered to build for itself a party organization and a party machine as the anticapitalist parties have done. It has never attached any importance to political tactics in electoral campaigns and parliamentary proceedings. It has never gone in for scheming opportunism or political bargaining. This unyielding doctrinairism necessarily brought about the decline of liberalism. The factual assertions contained in these statements are entirely in accordance with the truth, but to believe that they constitute a reproach against liberalism is to reveal a complete misunderstanding of its essential spirit. The ultimate and most profound of the fundamental insights of liberal thought is that it is ideas that constitute the foundation on which the whole edifice of human social cooperation is Liberalism: A Socio-Economic Exposition constructed and sustained and that a lasting social structure cannot be built on the basis of false and mistaken ideas. Nothing can serve as a substitute for an ideology that enhances human life by fostering social cooperation—least of all lies, whether they be called "tactics," "diplomacy," or "compromise." If men will not, from a recognition of social necessity, voluntarily do what must be done if society is to be maintained and general well-being advanced, no one can lead them to the right path by any cunning stratagem or artifice. If they err and go astray, then one must endeavor to enlighten them by instruction. But if they cannot be enlightened, if they persist in error, then nothing can be done to prevent catastrophe. All the tricks and lies of demagogic politicians may well be suited to promote the cause of those who, whether in good faith or bad, work for the destruction of society. But the cause of social progress, the cause of the further development and intensification of social bonds, cannot be advanced by lies and demagogy. No power on earth, no crafty stratagem or clever deception could succeed in duping mankind into accepting a social doctrine that it not only does not acknowledge, but openly spurns. The only way open to anyone who wishes to lead the world back to liberalism is to convince his fellow citizens of the necessity of adopting the liberal program. This work of enlightenment is the sole task that the liberal can and must perform in order to avert as much as lies within his power the destruction toward which society is rapidly heading today. There is no place here for concessions to any of the favorite or customary prejudices and errors. In regard to questions that will decide whether or not society is to continue to exist at all, whether millions of people are to prosper or perish, there is no room for compromise either from weakness or from misplaced deference for the sensibilities of others. If liberal principles once again are allowed to guide the policies of great nations, if a revolution in public opinion could once more give capitalism free rein, the world will be able gradually to raise itself from the condition into which the policies of the combined anticapitalist factions have plunged it. There is no other way out of the political and social chaos of the present age.
Ludwig von Mises (Liberalism: The Classical Tradition)
in capitalist societies the majority of people subsist by combining paid employment and unpaid domestic labor to maintain themselves . . . [hence] this version of social reproduction analyzes the ways in which both labors are part of the same socio-economic process.
Tithi Bhattacharya (Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Mapping Social Reproduction Theory))
Rather than reducing inequality itself, the initiatives aimed at tackling health or social problems are nearly always attempts to break the links between socio-economic disadvantage and the problem it produces. The unstated hope is that people - particularly the poor -v can carry on in the same circumstances, but will somehow no longer succumb to mental illness, teenage pregnancy, educational failure, obesity, or drugs.
Kate E. Pickett (The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better)
A French observer of early America, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote that the greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than other nations, but rather in our ability to repair our faults.x Through amendments to our Constitution and court decisions applying those amendments, we abolished slavery, prohibited racial discrimination, and recognized men and women as people of equal citizenship stature. Though we have made huge progress, the work of perfection is scarcely done. Many stains remain in this rich land. Nearly a quarter of our children live in poverty. Nearly half of our citizens do not vote. And we still struggle to achieve greater understanding and appreciation of each other across racial, religious and socio-economic lines. We sing of America, “sweet land of liberty”. Newcomers to our shores . . . came here, from the earliest days of our nation to today, seeking liberty, freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be you and me. A great American jurist, Judge Learned Hand,xi understood liberty. He explained in 1944 what liberty meant to him when he greeted a large assemblage of new Americans gathered in New York City’s Central Park, to swear allegiance . . . to the United States. These are Judge Hand’s words: Just what is this sacred liberty that must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the rootless, unbridled will, it is not freedom to do as one likes. I cannot define the spirit of liberty, I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which weight their interests alongside its own, without bias.10 May the spirit of liberty, as Judge Hand explained it, be your beacon. May you have the conscience and the courage to act in accord with that high ideal, as you play your part in helping to achieve a more perfect union. From “Remarks at the New York Historical Society”, 10 April 2018
Geoff Blackwell (I Know This to Be True: Ruth Bader Ginsburg: On Equality, Determination, and Service)
The problem with tastefulness is that it is often posited as definitive and absolute, when in reality it is little more than a proxy for wider socio-economic dynamics.
Nathalie Olah (Steal As Much As You Can: How to Win the Culture Wars in an Age of Austerity)
The fact that depriving prisoners of the opportunity to acquire an education increases the rates of crime and violence in our society, and that there is no reason a society as wealthy as ours cannot afford to provide free higher education for everyone, are points that tend to get lost in discussions of this issue. But there are two even bigger points that also tend to get lost, so I will emphasize them here. The first is that it is in the interests of the extremely wealthy upper class for the government to pursue policies whose effect is to raise the rates of crime and violence in our society. It is in their economic interest to increase the gap between rich and the poor to the highest level possible because they are the rich, and the greater the gap, the more they get. But the larger that gap becomes, the higher the rate of crime and violence. There is a clear conflict of interest between their economic interest in becoming wealthier, and the public's interest in preventing violence. There is also a political dimension: namely, how to persuade the public to vote for politicians who will write the laws that keep diverting more money into the hands of the upper class and out of the hands of the middle and lower classes. A high rate of crime and violence pits the middle class against the lower class. Most of the categories of violence that the laws define as criminal are committed by lower-class people, and this makes the middle classes angry at the poor and afraid of them. But it also divides the lower class against itself — most poor people do not commit violent crimes, but most of the victims of violent crime are poor. The higher the rates of crime and violence, then, the more the middle and lower classes are distracted from noticing that they are in most danger of being robbed by the very wealthy and their political agents. As the old saying goes, the poor man robs you with a gun, the rich man with a pen. In this analysis, I am not assuming that there are many individual members of any class who are consciously aware of the role they are playing in this conflict. Some are, and of those, some work consciously to support this system, and some work consciously to oppose it. But the beauty of the system, from the standpoint of the rich, is that the vast majority of people whose lives are affected by it, whether for good or for ill, do not have to understand the system or consciously support it in order for it to work. The socio-economic and criminal justice systems do that job for them.
James Gilligan (Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow))
Nash, who carried in his head a sort of social ladder, had quietly decided that police officers of all ranks were to be graded with piano tuners.
Ngaio Marsh (The Nursing Home Murder (Roderick Alleyn, #3))
The sufferings which some people go through in this world are in some cases a result of morally indifferent behaviour. Lack of social justice, unequal opportunities, extractive socio-economic institutions, socio-political injustice and outright wars have resulted in loss of millions of lives in the modern scientific age. Religion compels pro-social behaviour to avoid sufferings as far as possible and even if the sufferings do occur without human interventions, then religion urges moral action to help the needy and exemplify self-less spirit in dealing with catastrophes. If we leave the faith altogether, then science alone cannot provide any solace and meaning to the people who live their lives in unfair circumstances and who die in vain unjustly.
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
Taxes reduce the demand for physical resources from the non-government sectors. Resources which then become available for purchase by the government in pursuit of the socio-economic programme it was elected to provide.
Neil Wilson; (Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers (The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies))
Various ‘race theories’ are very widespread among reactionary scientists in some countries who regard the ruling class of their own nation as the ‘higher’ race and the working people as the ‘lower’ race, or classify nations other than their own as ‘lower’ races and make their own nation the ‘higher race’. In this way they unreasonably confuse the grouping of people by classes and by other socio-economic factors with their biological grouping. It is precisely by means of race theories that the ‘white’ imperialists justify the enslavement and exploitation of the colonial peoples…
Mikhail Nesturkh (Ras-ras Umat Manusia)
The Great Acceleration marks the phenomenal growth of the global socio-economic system, the human part of the Earth System. It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change. In little over two generations—or a single lifetime—humanity (or until very recently a small fraction of it) has become a planetary-scale geological force. Hitherto human activities were insignificant compared with the biophysical Earth System, and the two could operate independently. However, it is now impossible to view one as separate from the other. The Great Acceleration trends provide a dynamic view of the emergent, planetary-scale coupling, via globalization, between the socio-economic system and the biophysical Earth System. We have reached a point where many biophysical indicators have clearly moved beyond the bounds of Holocene variability. We are now living in a no-analogue world.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
CPEC has entered a new phase of high-quality development focusing on industrial, agricultural and socio-economic cooperation. The Matiari-Lahore project will contribute to the stable power supply in Pakistan and promote the industrialization of the country.
Nong Rong, Chinese Ambassador to Pakistan
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has taken this relationship to new heights. It has contributed significantly to the development of port, roads, and energy infrastructure in Pakistan. CPEC has now entered into the second phase with a focus on industrial cooperation, trade, agriculture, and socio-economic development
Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri, Foreign Office Spokesperson
Despite repeated and often factitious references to the tyranny of the Red Menace, the anticommunist opinion makers never spelled out what communists actually did in the way of socio-economic policy. This might explain why, despite decades of Red-bashing propaganda, most Americans, including many who number themselves among the political cognoscenti, still cannot offer an informed statement about the social policies of communist societies.
Michael Parenti (Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)
Those who replace the “letter” of Christianity with its “spirit” generally turn it into a load of socio-economic nonsense.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
This day I remember well. It is the very first moment in my life when I saw desperation enacted by hate. I watched as the second plane flew into the second tower, the pit in my stomach plummeting to a place I have yet to recover. The devastation of those jumping, the visions of cement and debris falling from the sky like thunder. I remember not being able to reach my friends and coworkers, the fear paralyzing me as I imagined them fighting for their lives and the lives of countless others. I remember my cousin who was in the Pentagon who was narrowly spared that day. That day — like it did for so many — that changed me. Forever. And while we honor those lost and remember those who did such things, remember that it was everyone coming together that saved this nation. It was us standing beside one another regardless of politics or religion, race or gender, and no one cared about wealth or poverty, or anything else for that matter. In that moment America stood tall. Today we are completely undone … unraveled and our excuse is moot. I wish we could, as a nation, realize that 9/11 represented a multitude of things. Our freedom, our fear, our triumphant spirit to overcome tragedy and terrorism—foreign and domestic—and our ability to eliminate prejudice when confronting human decency. Today we remember the many lives lost, those still suffering, and those who bravely and courageously continue to do all they can to protect our freedom to speak out, to challenge oppressors, and to rise above the lunacy. New Yorkers are proof that communities of all colors, beliefs and socio economic statuses can come together in the face of adversity. I hope this country — state by state — can stop acting like children and instead act like human beings. That we can be worthy of the months and weeks and days that followed 9/11 when we rose to the occasion as a collective whole.
Dawn Garcia
The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed." Gandhiji had said these immortal words that are so true now than at any other time. Mother Nature has given us resources that are sufficient for everyone but not enough for everybody's greed. Some people because of their greed are trying to keep a lot more than what is required for themselves. This is creating socio-economic disparities. Most importantly, Gandhiji's philosophy was about creating a better world.
Avijeet Das
They all knew that murderers came in all shapes and sizes and from every point on the socio-economic spectrum.
Angela Marsons (Stolen Ones (D.I. Kim Stone, #15))
fighting a pandemic does not require a substantial change of the underlying socio-economic model and of our consumption habits. Fighting environmental risks does.
Klaus Schwab (COVID-19: The Great Reset)
when the streets were animated with socio-economic caste struggle, this was a place with all history and no future.
Tochi Onyebuchi (Goliath)
A society that fails to care for the socio-economic conditions of its members, and does not establish an equitable system to justice cannot endure, let alone be free.
Jacob L. Wright (Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins)
When one theologian of the period says that the “priority” for the prophets is “spiritual repentance” and not “socio-economic reform,” that assumes the spiritual and material are separated in a way they are clearly not by the prophets.39 Isaiah 1 urges socioeconomic reform (“Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow”) and spiritual repentance (“Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow”) in the span of two verses (vv. 17–18).
Kaitlyn Schiess (The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here)
But whereas calls for reparations tend to focus on cash payments alone, fair equality of opportunity demands a much wider set of policies to dismantle the structures that perpetuate racial inequality today, from housing to education and employment. Although fair equality of opportunity is not the same as compensating for the racial injustices of the past, it would remove the socio-economic burdens that racial minorities continue to shoulder because of that history.
Daniel Chandler (Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society)
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I used to be a gibber-poet. . . . assemblages of appropriated text from cereal box side panels. I’d spell every third word backwards to foreground the slipping signification of say, riboflavin, dextrose, whatever — the arbitrariness of the act is what charges the work with politically subversive anti-hegemonic gender inspecificity. Once you implode the ingredients hierarchy you’ve eradicated the implicit privileging of the phallocentric socio-economic taxonomy. The whole banana to slip . . . into pro-metaphoric usage is so de-centered you can bet your boots they won’t be recon-deconstructing Sugar-Frosted Flakes again till the cows some home to roost.
James W. Blinn (The Aardvark Is Ready for War)
These notoriously destructive White-on-Black race riots started en masse just one year after the end of the Civil War and continued until the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Some historians have claimed that there were anywhere from 250-300 race riots over this period, most of which have been conveniently forgotten about by the American academia and press. Over 25 race riots broke out between April and October 1919 alone, a six-month period poet James Weldon Johnson labeled the "Red Summer." Among the most deadly outbreaks were those in East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); Chester, Pennsylvania (1917); Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1917); Houston, Texas (1917); Washington, D.C. (1919); Chicago, Illinois (1919); Omaha, Nebraska (1919); Charleston, South Carolina (1919), Longview, Texas (1919); Knoxville, Tennessee (1919); Elaine, Arkansas (1919); and Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921). Ward noted,   Although urban race riots in the United States between 1866-1951 were unique episodes rooted in the particular historic situation of each place, they shared certain characteristics. To begin with, the whites always prevailed, and the overwhelming majority of those who died and were wounded in all of these incidents were blacks. They also tended to break out in clusters during times of significant socio-economic, political, and demographic upheaval when racial demographics were altered and existing racial mores and boundaries challenged. Perhaps most importantly, the riots usually provoked defensive stances by members of the black communities who defended themselves and their families under attack. Seldom did the violence spill over into white neighborhoods.
Joseph Gibson (God of the Addicted: A Psychohistorical Analysis of the Origins, Objectives, and Consequences of the Suspicious Association Between Power, Profit, and the Black Preacher in America)
This inner critic, with its fear of imaginary censure, is one of the most powerful social controls that we have. It is solely responsible for you probably living at the same socio-economic level you were raised at, not being much more successful than your parents, never finishing that novel or getting your college degree or black belt. It exists to make sure that the group doesn’t have to adjust around you, to keep you within your tribe and keep you in your place in your tribe. Is that what you want?
Rory Miller (ConCom: Conflict Communication A New Paradigm in Conscious Communication)
Pareto explained how every elite is overthrown by a jealous minority which stirs the masses by denouncing the abuses of the establishment and finally replaces it. Elites, as he said, circulate. Naturally, their names and the rationalizations of their privileges change. But it is important to note also that each elite inspires a new socio-political mythology by which the new situation is interpreted for the occasion. Yet the same leitmotiv runs through all these self-glorifications: “where would the people be if it were not for our services?
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (The Entropy Law and the Economic Process)
Hip hop music (and the entire category) is one of few that unite fans of all colors, races, religions, socio-economic backgrounds, ages and genders.
Carlos Wallace (The Other 99 T.Y.M.E.S: Train Your Mind to Enjoy Serenity)
The definitional attributes of the far-right relate to enduring political and ideological qualities as well as those social layers produced by capitalist development most drawn to the far-right style of politics. The key appeal is to ‘the people’, understood as a racially-defined demos, premised on a gendered social hierarchy and obscuring the class cleavages associated with capitalist development. This is significant as it reflects an acceptance, indeed, an embrace of the possibilities of mass-democracy and particularly through the way in which this political form enables a censoring of elites, whether traditional, liberal-cosmopolitan or otherwise. 4 Further, in appealing to a people through language and symbols that both reify and fetishize particular qualities and attributes associated with the cultural identity of ‘the people’, the far-right not only articulates those values and institutions that it sees as key to the identity of a people (e.g. race/ethnicity, culture rooted in fixed narratives and symbols, history, masculinity, etc.), but also seeks to erase and obscure those other qualities – notably the socio-economic – that are, arguably, central to the material and lived reality of concrete individuals within capitalist societies.
Richard Saull (The Longue Durée of the Far-Right: An International Historical Sociology (Routledge Studies in Modern History))
Now, in this generation, the entirety of the globe is facing an ideological and socio-political collapse on a grand scale. This is by design, it is man-made. The outcome is still carefully assessed with little room for error or improvement. There is only one flaw: the divine element in humanity. Our sentient consciousness bestows with the capacity to support the freedom of thought and movement with the inherent awareness that both come at a cost. When we speak our minds, we are going to offend and be offended. There are no safe spaces in conversation. People will say things we don't like. We have to accept this is the price of freedom of speech. When we allow for freedom of movement during times of war, we have to accept that we are inviting in enemies as well as refugees, especially when we don't bother to discern which is which. Even the best, most selfless intentions can pave the way to our downfall...
Anita B. Sulser (We Are One (Light Is... Book 1))
Imperialism has not allowed us to achieve historical normality,’ Octavio Paz lamented in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). Paz was surveying the confused inheritance of Mexico from colonial rule, and the failure of its many political and socio-economic programmes, derived from Enlightenment principles of secularism and reason. Paz himself was convinced that Mexico had to forge a modern politics and economy for itself.
Pankaj Mishra (Age of Anger: A History of the Present)
As more complex forms of knowledge emerge and an economic surplus is built up, experts devote themselves full-time to the subjects of their expertise, which, with the development of conceptual machineries, may become increasingly removed from the pragmatic necessities of everyday life. Experts in these rarefied bodies of knowledge lay claim to a novel status. They are not only experts in this or that sector of the societal stock of knowledge, they claim ultimate jurisdiction over that stock of knowledge in its totality. They are, literally, universal experts. This does not mean that they claim to know everything, but rather that they claim to know the ultimate significance of what everybody knows and does. Other men may continue to stake out particular sectors of reality, but they claim expertise in the ultimate definitions of reality as such. This stage in the development of knowledge has a number of consequences. The first, which we have already discussed, is the emergence of pure theory. Because the universal experts operate on a level of considerable abstraction from the vicissitudes of everyday life, both others and they themselves may conclude that their theories have no relation whatever to the ongoing life of the society, but exist in a soft of Platonic heaven of ahistorical and asocial ideation. This is, of course, an illusion, but it can have great socio-historical potency, by virtue of the relationship between the reality-defining and reality-producing processes. A second consequence is a strengthening of traditionalism in the institutionalized actions thus legitimated, that is, a strengthening of the inherent tendency of institutionalization toward inertia.91 Habitualization and institutionalization in themselves limit the flexibility of human actions. Institutions tend to persist unless they become “problematic.” Ultimate legitimations inevitably strengthen this tendency. The more abstract the legitimations are, the less likely they are to be modified in accordance with changing pragmatic exigencies. If there is a tendency to go on as before anyway, the tendency is obviously strengthened by having excellent reasons for doing so. This means that institutions may persist even when, to an outside observer, they have lost their original functionality or practicality. One does certain things not because they work, but because they are right—right, that is, in terms of the ultimate definitions of reality promulgated by the universal experts.
Peter L. Berger (The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge)
As they debated the ethics and efficacy of activism, social workers were under attack from both conservative politicians and organized client groups. At the 1970 National Conference on Social Welfare conference, Johnnie Tillmon, the leader of the NWRO, blamed social workers (rather than the socio-economic system) for the problems welfare recipients faced. At the other end of the political spectrum the Nixon administration frequently trumpeted the view that social workers promoted community programs out of self-interest. Given this climate, it was no surprise that a popular book of the time referred to social work as “The Unloved Profession” (Richan & Mendelsohn, 1973). Social workers, in Tom Wolfes (1970) memorable phrase, had become one of the “flak catchers” of a turbulent society—bombarded with criticisms from ideological opponents of the left and the right. Despite the presence of radical
Michael Reisch (The Road Not Taken: A History of Radical Social Work in the United States)
Different Strokes for Different Folks “First things first—differences abound! Race, creed, color, gender, national origin, handicap, age, familial status, socio-economics, education, politics, religion, geography, and job status. Does that list look like a poster ad for the ACLU? Add in our vastly different life experiences and things really start to get interesting.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Communication: 8 Ways to Confirm Clarity & Understanding for Positive Impact(The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #5))
After attempting to outline Engels' thesis on the development of the family the following is said: "we are possessed of the myth of the inferiority of women. And from that arises the need of liberating women... her liberation can only occur when the socio-economic structure changes with the development of a new society.
Catalina Adrianzen (Marxism, Mariategui and the Women's Movement)
The separation of mind and body that informs medical practice is also the dominant ideology in our culture. We do not often think of socio-economic structures and practices as determinants of illness or well-being. They are not usually “part of the equation.” Yet the scientific data is beyond dispute: socio-economic relationships have a profound influence on health. For example, although the media and the medical profession — inspired by pharmaceutical research — tirelessly promote the idea that next to hypertension and smoking, high cholesterol poses the greatest risk for heart disease, the evidence is that job strain is more important than all the other risk factors combined. Further, stress in general and job strain in particular are significant contributors both to high blood pressure and to elevated cholesterol levels. Economic relationships influence health because, most obviously, people with higher incomes are better able to afford healthier diets, living and working conditions and stress-reducing pursuits. Dennis Raphael, associate professor at the School of Health Policy and Management at York University in Toronto has recently published a study of the societal influences on heart disease in Canada and elsewhere. His conclusion: “One of the most important life conditions that determine whether individuals stay healthy or become ill is their income. In addition, the overall health of North American society may be more determined by the distribution of income among its members rather than the overall wealth of the society…. Many studies find that socioeconomic circumstances, rather than medical and lifestyle risk factors, are the main causes of cardiovascular disease, and that conditions during early life are especially important.” The element of control is the less obvious but equally important aspect of social and job status as a health factor. Since stress escalates as the sense of control diminishes, people who exercise greater control over their work and lives enjoy better health. This principle was demonstrated in the British Whitehall study showing that second-tier civil servants were at greater risk for heart disease than their superiors, despite nearly comparable incomes. Recognizing the multigenerational template for behaviour and for illness, and recognizing, too, the social influences that shape families and human lives, we dispense with the unhelpful and unscientific attitude of blame. Discarding blame leaves us free to move toward the necessary adoption of responsibility, a matter to be taken up when we come in the final chapters to consider healing.
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
a PhD dissertation at the University of California, Davis.11 After carefully weighing the contrasting arguments of Taggart and Bush, I determined that Bush made by far the more convincing case—specifically his central thesis that the priesthood ban resulted from socio-economic prejudices endemic in American society at large. Such anti-black attitudes as embraced by Brigham Young were incorporated as policy, which evolved into doctrine—all of which occurred following the death of Joseph Smith.12 Striking was the breadth of Bush’s historical
Newell G. Bringhurst (Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism, 2nd ed.)
a PhD dissertation at the University of California, Davis.11 After carefully weighing the contrasting arguments of Taggart and Bush, I determined that Bush made by far the more convincing case—specifically his central thesis that the priesthood ban resulted from socio-economic prejudices endemic in American society at large. Such anti-black attitudes as embraced by Brigham Young were incorporated as policy, which evolved into doctrine—all of which occurred following the death of Joseph Smith.12 Striking was the breadth of Bush’s historical narrative tracing the evolution of Mormon anti-black attitudes and related practices from the 1830s to the 1970s. Impressive was the array of primary documents Bush marshaled in support of his arguments. By contrast, Taggart’s relatively limited work proved wanting in its overly simplistic “Missouri Thesis” that Joseph Smith had impulsively implemented the priesthood ban in a futile effort to alleviate Mormon difficulties in that slave state. The thoroughness of Bush’s findings notwithstanding, I determined that Bush had not adequately dealt with the origins of the ban as it involved Joseph Smith. Specifically, I became convinced that Smith himself held certain racist, anti-black attitudes which, in turn, were given scriptural legitimacy through his canonical writings, specifically the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price. Bush, moreover, failed to acknowledge the crucial role played by the emergence of Mormon ethnic whiteness affirming the Saints’ self-perceived status as a divinely favored race. Conversely, Mormons viewed blacks as a marginalized race, the accursed descendants of Cain, Ham, and Caanan. Further validating African-American’s accursed status was their dark skin.
Newell G. Bringhurst (Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism, 2nd ed.)
Why does this happen even though India has a good economic foundation? It is because we have an economic system which is vulnerable to the fluctuations of the world economy and our economic growth is not sustainable, as witnessed from the 5 per cent GDP growth in the 1990s to 9 per cent for around four years till 2009 and, finally, the present 5.5 per cent. This is mainly due to our prevailing economic policies which are stifling the growth of agriculture and food processing, the manufacturing sector and the service sector. If we bring a marked change in our socio-political and economic policies with a focus on inclusiveness, then I am confident that we as a nation will be able to overcome the economic crisis and progress to new heights.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (The Righteous Life: The Very Best of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam)
Inclusive growth-oriented policies will bring equitable, inclusive growth and level socio-economic imbalances in society which will remove socio-economic and political alienation and reduce Naxalist and Maoist tendencies. Developmental politics instead of political politics will also reduce the prevalent bitter political alienation.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (The Righteous Life: The Very Best of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam)
Members of many lowland Indian societies play flutes or sing for that number of hours for long periods. Yet we know much more about the socio-economic features of these communities than about the musical ones. Anthropological research priorities rarely start from the natives' views of what is important about their own lives.
Anthony Seeger (Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People)
Over the years there also has been a transitional shift of labour legislations being exclusively employee oriented to advanced socio-economic lex of harmonious construction, emphasizing on the overall development of the economy builders (work-force) of the nation.
Henrietta Newton Martin
Whereas in 1800 at least 90 per cent of Egyptians were poor peasants, by 1900 more than 25 per cent of the population of 10 million lived in Cairo, Alexandria and the Delta's main cities, and could be counted as lower middle class or working class.11 The economy was by and large in the hands of the royal family, its Turkish-Albanian-European entourage and the thousands of foreigners who had settled in Egypt from the mid- and late-nineteenth century; yet Egyptians, and especially the increasingly influential landowners, were rapidly climbing the political and socio-economic ladder.
Tarek Osman (Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak)
The liberal constitutional experiment that the Egyptian political scene had witnessed in the 1930s and 1940s remained the province of Cairo's and Alexandria's elite and upper middle class. The liberal cultural fashions of the same period were detached from the crushing living standards of the peasants in the Delta and Al-Saeed, as well as the poor in the country's urban areas. It was no surprise then that the vast majority of people on the Egyptian street cheered Nasser's repudiation of the ‘bygone era'(which conveniently lumped together the monarchy, the aristocrats, the landed gentry and the different political parties – from the liberal and secular to the conservative and religious). Nasser's political and socio-economic plans emerged as the country's sole and compelling project with a substantial, expansive mandate.
Tarek Osman (Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak)
At that time, a grand Arabic project emanating from Cairo had credibility. That is not true today. The relative standing of Egyptians (the country, the people and the culture) in the Arabic milieu has significantly declined. The major socio-economic challenges that ordinary Egyptians have struggled with for thirty-five years have exacted their price on the country's living standards, income levels, educational quality, as well as on the people's skills, aptitudes, behaviours and attitudes. Such deterioration was taking place while many Arab countries, especially in the Gulf (but also in the Levant), were improving their indices in all these areas.
Tarek Osman (Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak)
The incidence of teenage mothering among the elite turns out to be tiny. But among the girls whose fathers are unskilled workers, 23 per cent became teenage mothers. The lowest socio-economic classes are eleven times more likely to have babies in their teenage years – normally outside marriage.
James Bartholomew (The Welfare State We're In)
Professor Landry was a prime example of someone who marched to the beat of her own drum, as evidenced by her policy that no one precede her name with Professor. She firmly believed that titles had been created to distinguish the upper class from the lower class, and she wanted no part in perpetuating socio-economic stereotypes. So she either went by Landry, Neve, or Hey, you. She didn’t really care, so long as the word “professor” never echoed off the walls she was within. She
Nicole Williams (Hard Knox: The Outsider Chronicles)
A passion to read overcomes everything including students’ family background and parents’ education and income. A passion for reading leads to reading achievement no matter the student’s socio-economic status.
Phyllis Hunter (It's Not Complicated!: What I Know for Sure about Helping Our Students of Color Become Successful Readers)
The practice of design is intrinsically linked to the world around us. It is all about reflection. Understanding the disciplines that feed and influence our practice is essential: art in the broadest sense, music, politics or socio-economic environment.
Frédéric Vanhorenbeck
The role of political leadership in any society will remain critical to the socio-economic progression of the world. It is however worrying to see the growing number of people, including the youth, getting into politics for economic gain and not for a cause. This, inter alia, is the contaminated seed and eventual root of chronic corruption because such leadership will always be selfishly seeking gain and enrichment from their roles and offices.
Archibald Marwizi (Making Success Deliberate)
millions of people are prepared to kill one another to defend their own prejudices—their God given right to hate. Frankly, it doesn’t matter what country you live in, what religion you follow, what socio-economic background you belong to. Hatred within the human race runs rampant and is an evil I don’t think will ever be contained.
Michele Scott (Covert Reich)
In other words, almost everything Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, Hirsi Ali, and Maher have written or said on the topic of Islamic terrorism ignores politics, socio-economics, history, and studies of global terrorism.
C.J. Werleman (The New Atheist Threat: The Dangerous Rise of Secular Extremists)
Here's the thing: public school is a completely unnatural environment. At no other point in your life will you spend 90 percent of your time with people your exact age, socio-economic status, and zip code. It is neither natural nor healthy for children to spend almost all of their time with other children, and this is what has brought out the culture we see of fads, teen pregnancy, drug use by younger and younger kids, and marketing to toddlers. Kids are looking to other children for guidance rather than adults.
Kathy LaPan-Miller (Getting Started Homeschooling Your 2e Child)
Employer and employee are both ' contributors ' to socio economic development of any nation
Henrietta Newton Martin (General Laws and Interpretation-Sultanate of Oman-Part I Perspicuous Edition -2014)
The situation is hopeless; it is clear that there is no hope of finding a solution within the existing order. One has to gather the courage to openly accept this hopelessness and to then propose in its place a radical socio-economic change: a direct “politicization” (socialization) of the economy, with a much stronger role for the state and, simultaneously, much greater transparency of state apparatuses within civil society.
Slavoj Žižek (Heaven in Disorder)
Humans live in society and exercise their free will in socio-economic relations. Unlike the dials in a well-functioning clock which do not intersect, humans have the potential to be compassionate or not to be. But, why should I part with my time to help some stranger I might never meet again or for someone who lives miles away from me? Why should I part with my wealth if it is scarce, legally belongs to me and so nobody could question what I would decide to do with it in life? Science seeks cause-effect relations in physical realities. Mathematics is one of the tools to guide this search in complex relationships. Some scientists exclusively focus on material processes. So, they only extract the deeper meaning as regularity and algorithm itself. Science can only help us thus far. The reflection on nature and its regularity around us requires a philosophical underpinning for deeper meaning.
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
Vote for a transformative leader that empowers the growth of a nation, not a figurehead that thrives on socio-economic instabilities.
Wayne Chirisa
Millennials are young, tech-savvy, and—increasingly—non-white. This combination of changing socio-demographic factors, their population size, and their tendency to want everything filtered through a digital interface means that they will leave an indelible mark on society. Enabled by mobility and digital connectivity, the sum total of these changes represents the emergence of a new social contract with vast implications for the social, economic, and political environments whose impacts will be as significant and far-reaching as that of the printing press of the Industrial Revolution. I refer to these changes as a whole as the “Untethered Society.” I define coming untethered as a condition in which ties to people, places, jobs, traditional processes, and organizing structures in society—like churches and political parties—are being weakened, broken, and displaced by digital hyperconnectivity.
Julie M. Albright (Left to Their Own Devices: How Digital Natives Are Reshaping the American Dream)
Schloen comments: “Tempting as it may be to avoid explicit theorizing, the fact remains that contestable choices are embedded in even the most ‘obvious’ and innocent-looking of ‘common sense’ interpretations in archaeology and socio-economic history.
Mark S. Smith (The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Resource Series (BRS)))
Maternal death during childbirth is not unique to humans, although it has long been accepted that humans have a somewhat unique situation of having to fit a large-headed infant through a narrow pelvis. This biological constraint, along with socio-economic and political issues, makes childbirth (except in the case of surrogacy) a potentially dangerous event that women must face if they wish to be evolutionarily successful.
Kimberly A. Plomp (Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach)
Philosophically, contention can be seen as the dialectical unity of polar energies bringing together opposed forces that need to and must be reconciled if life is to continue. It is not something to be feared or avoided—people seeking balance and harmony must embrace the process of contention. The I Ching also teaches that contention is related to the concept of impermanence, that struggle is constant and that it is only the form of contention that changes over time…. How to fight against colonialism? There is, as one conceivable path, a well-established spectrum of contention that is rooted in the experience of peoples all over the world. Conflict is contention taken to its limit; war is conflict taken to the extreme—always considered as a last resort and and in just cause, but always the end result nonetheless. This idea of struggle, founded on the base power of violence, is in fact a cycle of futility. Feelings of pride rise and the people, who begin to assert themselves, raising voices in protest, causing disruption, eventually acting violently against injustice, causing inevitable counter-violence, spurring warfare, repression, and again, subjugation (whether the subjugated become the powerful matters little as the cycle of violence’s continuation is guaranteed). This is repeated perpetually in cycles of conflict between human communities until it is broken by the establishment of a peaceful coexistence that follows the transcendence of the psychological, spiritual, and socio-economic bases of the relationship between the peoples who were in conflict. The transcendence can happen when the critical period of heightened attention caused by a disruption of normality opens the door to new understandings before it is shut again in the closed-minded and hard oppositional environment that accompanies violence and counter-violence’s march to subjugation of one of the parties in the relationship. … we must protect ourselves from violent attack and survive in a physical sense, but we should have faith in the power of our ideas and in our abilities to communicate her ideas without resorting to the mute force of violence to bring our message to people.We should seek to contend, to inform our agitating direct actions with ideas, and to use the effects of this contention to defeat colonialism by convincing people of the need to abandon the cycle of subjugation in conflict enjoying us in a relationship of respect and sharing.
Taiaike Alfred
Less trade is the last thing most countries need if they are to improve their economies and the standard of living of workers of a lower socio-economic status. Reducing immigration is one sure way to stymie economic growth. And then there are the policies that this populist mantra is designed to mask: cuts to essential services like health and education to fund tax cuts for higher income workers and corporations. It's like a pickpocket who arranges a distraction while happily fleecing his victims. (p.22)
Chris Bowen (On Charlatans (On Series))
Vladimir’s reforms transformed the socio-economic structure of Kiev.
Captivating History (Medieval Russia: A Captivating Guide to Russian History during the Middle Ages (Exploring Russia's Past))
socio-economic improvements during her over thirty-year period in power.
Captivating History (Medieval Russia: A Captivating Guide to Russian History during the Middle Ages (Exploring Russia's Past))
It is the socio-historical character of Marx’s concept of nature which distinguishes it from the outset. Marx considered nature to be ‘the primary source of all instruments and objects of labour’,3 i.e. he saw nature from the beginning in relation to human activity. All other statements about nature, whether of a speculative, epistemological, or scientific kind, already presuppose social practice, the ensemble of man’s technologico-economic modes of appropriation.
Alfred Schmidt (The Concept Of Nature In Marx (Radical Thinkers Book 8))
The society of the spectacle paints its own picture of itself and its enemies, imposes its own ideological categories on the world and its history. Fear is the very last response. For everything that happens is reassuringly part of the natural order of things. Real historical changes, which show that this society can be superseded, are reduced to the status of novelties, processed for mere consumption. The revolt of youth against an imposed and “given” way of life is the first sign of a total subversion. It is the prelude to a period of revolt — the revolt of those who can no longer live in our society. Faced with a danger, ideology and its daily machinery perform the usual inversion of reality. A historical process becomes a pseudo-category of some socio-natural science: the Idea of Youth. Youth is in revolt, but this is only the eternal revolt of youth; every generation espouses ”good causes,” only to forget them when ”the young man begins the serious business of production and is given concrete and real social aims.” After the social scientists come the journalists with their verbal inflation. The revolt is contained by overexposure: we are given it to contemplate so that we shall forget to participate. In the spectacle, a revolution becomes a social aberration– in other words a social safety valve–which has its part to play in the smooth working of the system . . . In reality, if there is a problem of youth in modern capitalism it is part of the total crisis of that society. It is just that youth feels the crisis most acutely.
Internationale Situationniste (On the Poverty of Student Life: Considered in Its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Particularly Intellectual Aspects, and a Modest Proposal for Its Remedy)
If you look at the rates of overt trauma such as childhood sexual abuse, emotional neglect and stress in families that traumatize children, trauma is widespread. Very few people really grow up fully untraumatized in this culture. And especially with the increasing stresses on people, the burgeoning of loneliness of people (so there's less support now, so when they do suffer, they are alone with their suffering, there's nothing to mitigate it) this is a highly stressed and traumatizing society and you can't separate that from socio-economic factors. With neo-liberalism and loss of people's livelihood and loss of meaningful employment, loss of secure employment, austerity, loss of communion and communities.. not only are people more stressed and traumatized, they are also less resilient. Because resilience requires connection and communal support.
Gabor Maté
Today, most countries fail to comply with the 1951 Convention. Signatory states in the developed world find ever more elaborate ways to disregard or bypass the principle of non-refoulement, adopting a suite of deterrence or non-entrée policies that make it difficut and dangerous for refugees to access their territory: carrier sanctions, razor wire fences, interception en route. Signatory states in the developing world do tend to admit refugees more because of geoghraphical necessity and international pressure than law, and when they do, they still almost universally fail to implement the socio-economic rights in the Convention. And, yet, paradoxically, many of the most generous host countries in the world are not even full signatories: Jordan, Lebanon, Thailand, Nepal, and Turkey, for instance.
Alexander Betts (Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System)
Ideally refugees should be allowed to fully participate in the socio-economic life of the host state. But even when full participation is politically blocked, we should at least be able to reimagine geographical spaces that can empower people, and allow them to become self-reliant pending a longer-term solution.
Alexander Betts (Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System)
The Hardest Part of being Black is not the way I watch my words around different people or how I feel like it's me against a wide array of enemies in an ongoing fight that's socio-economic and geo-political. It’s the sense of not being free enough, of (even in moments of happiness) not being able to enjoy a good meal or a hard victory or deserved peace or a beautiful mountain vista before it is snatched away from me.
Dwight Thompson (Pivot: Pinecones & Spaceships Volume I)
The concept ‘Brahmin’ in my diction does not mean knowledge. It means consumption of the socio-economic resources of the nation without investing any amount of labour power in it. It means consumption and destruction of national resources without any understanding and effort for rebuilding such resources. The concept ‘Sudra’ does not mean a particular people who are stupid with an un-cultured existence. It means the construction of the knowledge of production, of innovation of agrarian and artisan technology. The concept ‘Chandala’ does not mean unworthy of being a human being and leading an impure life in a spiritual sense. It means making the villages, the towns and the nation pollution free. The Chandalas are the builders of a culture that kept the living environment clean. It implies the transforming of skin into leather, into commodities. The notion ‘Brahmin’ in essence, on the other hand, represents unclean ugliness. The concept ‘Dalitbahujan’ now in essence means constructing the science of leather technology, building up the scientific use of manure, constructing the tools of production which not only improved our production but also kept our environment green and clean. Brahminism is the opposite of all this. It is the other name for consumption of natural resources without regenerating them. While Dalitism is positive, Brahminism is negative. India as a nation, thus, needs to undergo a revolution of reformulating knowledge and language.
Kancha Ilaiah (Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy)
Self love is true love, so let's unite. Whenever we experience any form of ostracism, embrace who we really are. We are a cosmic family regardless of our salient superficialities: race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic disparities and politiy.
Marla-Tiye Vieira (Jasmine Breeze)
Self-love is true love, so let's unite. Whenever we experience any form of ostracism, embrace who we really are. We are a cosmic family regardless of our salient superficialities: race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic disparities and polity.
Marla-Tiye Vieira (Jasmine Breeze)
Trump is hardly the first president to promise a crackdown on illegal immigration. But he has tried to erase the political distinction between illegal and legal immigration, the former in the interest of law and order and the latter in the interest of national security. Of course, reality is very different than the one Trump portrays. He dismisses the socio-economic importance of immigration, keeping our working population younger as the baby boomers retire. And he ignores the push and pull behind global migration. The push relates to the disintegration of fragile countries due to conflict and climate change. The pull involves the unmet need for low skill work within the United States at a time of effective full employment, which existing immigration quotas can’t meet due to political paralysis. Given the political polarization, the parties talk past one another. Calls for comprehensive immigration reform are blunted by accusations of amnesty. Thus, there is no reasoned debate and little room for compromise.
April Ryan (Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House)
But Mark is not concerned with advocating lower prices for the poor or fair economic practices. For Jesus has already repudiated the purity and debt systems themselves—and its specific marginalization of lepers (1: 41ff.) and women (5: 25ff.). Thus Jesus calls for an end to the entire cultic system—symbolized by his “overturning” (katestrepsen, which can also mean to “destroy”) of the stations used by these two groups. They represented the concrete mechanisms of oppression within a political economy that doubly exploited the poor and unclean. Not only were they considered second-class citizens, but the cult obligated them to make reparation, through sacrifices, for their inferior status—from which the marketers profited. Jesus’ action here is fully consistent with his first direct action campaign to discredit the socio-symbolic apparati that discriminated against the “weak” and the “sinners” (2: 17). The third and final action implies that the goal of these disruptive steps was a shutting down of temple operations altogether (10: 16).
Ched Myers (Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus)
Focusing on individual and aggregate happiness was here, for everyone with eyes to see, an obvious strategy to side-line an deflect attention from more objective and complex socio-economic indicators of welfare and the good life, such as redistribution of income, material inequalities, social segregation, gender inequity, democratic health, corruption and transparency, objective vs. perceived opportunities, social aids, or unemployment rates. Israelies, for another example, like to proudly exhibit their very high ranking in world indicators of happiness, as if these rankings could conceal the fact that their country has one of the highest levels in equality in the world and lives with an ongoing Occupation.
Eva Illouz
Mindfulness thrives on the belief that the root of problem is to be found in individuals themselves, rather than in a socio-economic reality. Allegedly, it is not society that needs reform, but individuals who need to adapt, change, and improve.
Eva Illouz
Page 32: The phenomenal commercial success of the Chinese in Thailand, and indeed throughout Southeast Asia, has no single or simple explanation. Certainly this success is partly attributable to such personal qualities as perseverance, capacity for hard work, and business acumen, but one of the most important factors has been the tight social and economic organization developed by overseas Chinese communities. Such communities in Southeast Asia appear remarkable self-sufficient and to many observers seem to form alien societies within the host society. They have proved unusually effective, on the one hand, for encouraging mutual aid and co-operation among heterogeneous linguistic and socio-economic groups and, on the other, for providing protection from hostile or competitive individuals and governments. Better than most people the Chinese have learned the dictum that ‘in unity there is strength’. Their organizational cohesion furnishes much of the answer not only to the economic well-being of the Chinese as a group but also to the persistence of their cultural patterns and values in an alien and sometimes unfriendly social environment. This is a community of interest as well, for the wealth accumulated by the successful business man is used in part to support a multiplicity of ethnic organizations: trade guilds, a powerful Chinese Chamber of Commerce, dialect associations, benevolent and charitable organizations, surname associations, religious groups for both men and women, sports associations and social clubs.
Richard J. Coughlin (Double Identity the Chinese in Modern Thailand)
Socio-economic development begins with creating equal opportunities for all, ensuring no one is left behind." "Empowering communities through education and economic opportunity is the foundation of sustainable development." "Sustainable development thrives when we blend tradition with innovation to create inclusive growth." "True socio-economic progress lies in investing in human capital and nurturing young minds to become future leaders." "Development is not just about economic growth; it's about building a society where every individual has the chance to thrive." "For any nation to prosper, we must prioritize policies that address both economic and social inequalities." "Inclusive development requires collective effort, innovative solutions, and unwavering commitment to justice." "The path to a sustainable future is paved with equitable policies, youth engagement, and sustainable economic practices." "Economic growth must be people-centered, prioritizing social welfare, environmental sustainability, and community resilience." "Transforming any socio-economic landscape requires bold leadership, transparent governance, and a vision for inclusive progress.
Vorng Panha
When the CPI defended the Partition Scheme with contrived socio-economic arguments, Ram Swarup objected that the Partition would only benefit the haves among the Muslims, not the have-nots.
Koenraad Elst (Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism)
By hiding behind the overarching term “white privilege,” the small percentage of privileged whites have ensured the following: first, they remain disguised behind the veil of whiteness and thus maintain the status quo. Second, they ensure that most marginalized white people remain defensive—and come to their defense—whenever their wealth and power are threatened. Third, through the structure of “whiteness,” privileged whites ensure that a large percentage of disadvantaged white people see other groups fighting against similar socio-economic ills as enemies, not allies to unite with in their battle. As such, the first bold proposal I make, if we are serious about social change, is to replace “white privilege” with “privileged whites” to account for the many whites who are not privileged and distinguish them from those who are. The huge number of disadvantaged white people are allies in this battle against the privileged, wealthy ruling class who utilize countless “isms” and “phobias” as sorting devices, while using the term “white privilege” as a tool to prevent any potential allyship between many white people who are not part of their club, yet are misled to think that the problem is everyone else in society except the privileged whites…Precision in language makes a huge difference to ensure all social groups who need to unite and work together have clarity on what kind of changes are needed, and who exactly is blocking change and transformation. [From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]
Louis Yako
It is not possible to ensure the success of political, psychological and socio-economic measures by means of military actions alone, for success depends on the quality of the political leadership.
Abdul Haris Nasution (Pokok-pokok Gerilya: dan Pertahanan Republik Indonesia di Masa Lalu dan Yang Akan Datang)
Botha did not see the renunciation of violence as a precondition for negotiations, but brought violence and negotiations into perspective in the following way: ‘I think by exchanging ideas, by saying to each other ‘let violence stop’ and as I have often said in public, let us renounce violence as a means to achieve an end. Let us talk to each other, sit around a table, put ideas to one another and see to what extent the socio-economic development in South Africa can take place.
Niël Barnard (Secret Revolution: Memoirs Of A Spy Boss)
When we first come into the world, we are small, fragile, and defenseless. We are totally dependent on the love and care of our parents, especially our mothers. In our modern society, we have learned very well how to take care of the physical, biological, and even the developmental needs of our babies, even though parents at various socio-economic levels still face vastly different challenges as they meet their infants’ needs. But we have let a vital need, the one whose fulfillment will determine our ability to have a feeling of self-worth and security, slip through the cracks of modern life. If our emotional needs are not met at the right time, we will face a daunting task later in life as we try to heal the structural wounds of our personalities. Like a plant that doesn’t get enough water or sun early on, we will have trouble growing to our full height, no matter how much fertilizer we get later. Fortunately, unlike plants, we can direct our consciousness and self-awareness toward healing, which can give us new foundations for fulfilling our lives.
Massimilla Harris (Into the Heart of the Feminine: Facing the Death Mother Archetype to Reclaim Love, Strength, and Vitality)
The New (Tongue-in-Cheek) Rules for Teachers 2013 You may never complain and if you do, you will be labeled greedy and lazy. You will be held responsible for the performance of your classroom, regardless of socio-economic background, learning ability, and home life. You may not drink socially if a parent or coworker finds it offensive. Your personal opinions must always reflect the general consensus around you, even when these change. Any past indiscretions will come back to haunt you. You may not participate in any form of social networking or hold an online identity. Do as the politicians say, not as they do.
Erin Osborne (What They Don't Teach You)
own with the post-Independence Government’s need for propagating national integration, socio-economic development and family planning throughout the vast country. The
Keval J. Kumar (Mass Communication in India)
IQ test scores in childhood will predict many important things in adulthood—higher intelligence predicts higher education level, higher socio-economic status, higher salary, better health, greater civic participation,[4] lower impulsivity, and longer lifespan.[5] Lower intelligence predicts higher criminality, and shorter-term future-orientation.[6] In other words, people who are more intelligent tend to live for the future whereas people who are less intelligent tend to live for the now.
Edward Dutton (At Our Wits' End: Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future (Societas Book 64))
Not only were people to be liberated from socio-political and economic oppression, but from theological oppression as well.
James A. Maxey
In this vision, the worlds is conceived as multiple and performative, i.e. shaped through practices, as different from a single pre-existing reality. This is why, for Bruno Latour, politics should become material, a Dingpolitik revolving around things and issues of concern, rather than around values and beliefs. Stem cells, mobile phones, genetically modified organisms, pathogens, new infrastructure and new reproductive technologies brings concerned publics into being that create diverse forms of knowledge about these matters and diverse forms of action - beyond institutions, political interests or ideologies that delimit the traditional domain of politics. Whether it is called ontological politics, Dingpolitik or cosmopolitics, this form of politics recognizes the vital role of nom-humans, in concrete situations, co-creating diverse forms of knowledge that need to be acknowledged and incorporated rather than silenced. Particular attention has gone to that most central organization of all for political geographers: the state. Instead of conceiving the state as a unified actor, it should be approached as an assemblage, which makes heterogenous points of order - geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological particularities - resonate together. As such, the state is an effect rather than the origin of power, and one should focus on reconstructing the socio-material basis of its functioning. The concept of assemblage questions the naturalization of hegemonic assemblages and renders them open to political challenge by exposing their contingency.
Slavoj Žižek (Sex and the Failed Absolute)
Perhaps it is unfair to expect such a high degree of scientific precision. But studies that conclude health disparities are caused by genetic difference do not even come close. These studies typically control for the socio-economic status (SES) of the research subjects in an attempt to compare subjects of different races who have the same SES. If there remains a difference in the prevalence or outcome of a disease, the researchers typically attribute the unexplained variation to genetic distinctions between racial groups. But this conclusion suffers from a basic methodological error. The researchers failed to account for many other unmeasured factors, such as the experience of racial discrimination or differences in wealth, not just income, that are related to health outcomes and differ by race. Any one of these unmeasured factors—and not genes—might explain why health outcomes vary by race.
Dorothy Roberts (Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century)
There are socio-economic factors to consider. Successive generations of white residents create environments that are hostile towards minority ethnic residents. Add in the groups and even political parties spreading hate. In this country we have the BNP, EDL, Combat 18. Some operate like conventional parties to gain power through the ballot box, like the BNP. Others favour an activist street movement, like EDL, but one thing they all have in common is intolerance.
Angela Marsons (Dead Souls (D.I. Kim Stone, #6))
Charlie thought of the flea-ridden couch, the bare bulb of the bike shop, and the gaunt lines in Spark Plug's face. He thought of his own dark nights when he felt the creeping hand of the government tracking him. Better men than he had cast morality aside to live in the mouth-watering world of wealth. Smarter men had seduced themselves into positions of power with half-truths and shoddy rationales. He had never been offered a chance to live in this Garden of Eden, but if he was, he suspected that the shiny red fruit of knowledge would send him tumbling away from the paradise of the wealthy. Charlie knew worried fathers who could not feed their families. He knew mothers who worked two jobs only to send their children to bed hungry. He had peeled apart the intricate layers of a socio-economic system that was riddled with rotten deals that screwed people over. He had tasted the bittersweet fruit of truth and his understanding of right and wrong barred the gate to a blissful existence in this garden.
Rivera Sun (The Dandelion Insurrection - love and revolution - (Dandelion Trilogy - The people will rise. Book 1))
The truly cost effective lifestyle would be to produce everything you require, it would subsequently imply a self-created kind of freedom. Time would be lost but it would all be your own, this however does not account for skill. The current institutionalised education system was not made for self-sustainability but rather extreme specialisation. The business sector itself accounts for a large amount of activity, so much so that it has its own defining term: the economy. Spaces in the world, both virtual and spatial have always had the socio-polticial-economic system but now it is more defined, more contested and more vulnerable.
Apollo Figueiredo (A Laugh in the Spoke)
Every child is born, with some inherited characteristics, into a specific socio-economic and emotional environment, and trained in certain ways by figures of authority. I inherited honesty and self-discipline from my father; from my mother, I inherited faith in goodness and deep kindness and so did my three brothers and sister. But it was the time I spent with Jallaluddin and Samsuddin that perhaps contributed most to the uniqueness of my childhood and made all the difference in my later life. The unschooled wisdom of Jallaluddin and Samsuddin was so intuitive and responsive to non-verbal messages that I can unhesitatingly attribute my subsequently manifested creativity to their company in my childhood.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (The Righteous Life: The Very Best of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam)
The collapse of the sixth wave is likely to represent a fracturing of the socio-economic model and the end of the age of capitalism as we know it. It will be mortally wounded by the dual effects of overcoming the issue of scarcity and the demise of the relationship between productivity and employment.
Sean A. Culey (Transition Point: From Steam to the Singularity)
Accountability should be void of color, religion, position, or socio-economic restrictions.
Carlos Wallace
Accountability should be void of color, religion, position, or socio-economic restrictions. If you are wrong, you are wrong.
Carlos Wallace
No scripture comes directly from God. They are collections of rules or values or both, that were shaped by the socio-economic conditions of a particular time and place. They reflect the needs and circumstances of that specific region in history.
Siddharth Katragadda (The Other Wife: A Novel in Verse)
Over the last generation, scholars have produced a bumper-crop of revealing social and economic histories of the regions teleconnected to ENSO's episodic disturbances. The thrust of this research has been to further demolish orientalist stereotypes of immutable poverty and overpopulation as the natural preconditions of the major nineteenth-century famines. There is persuasive evidence that peasants and farm laborers became dramatically more pregnable to natural disaster after 1850 as their local economies were violently incorporated into the world market. What colonial administrators and missionaries -- even sometimes creole elites, as in Brazil -- perceived as the persistence of ancient cycles of backwardness ere typically modern structures of formal or informal imperialism. From the perspective of political ecology, the vulnerability of tropical agriculturalists to extreme climate events after 1870 was magnified by simultaneous restructurings of household and village linkages to ergional production systems, world commodity markets and the colonial (or dependent) state. "It is, of course, the constellation of these social relations," writes Watts, "which binds the households together and project them into the marketplace, that determines the precise form of the household vulnerability. It is also these same social relations that have failed to stimulate or have actually prevented the development of the productive forces that might have lessened this vulnerability." Indeed, new social relations of production, in tandem with the New Imperialism, "not only altered the extent of hunger in a statistical sense but changed its very etiology." Three points of articulation with larger socio-economic structures were especially decisive for rural subsistence in the late Victorian "proto-third world." First, the forcible incorporation of smallholder production into commodity and financial circuits controlled from overseas tended to undermine traditional food security... Second, the integration of millions of tropical cultivators into the world market during the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a dramatic deterioration in their terms of trade... Third, formal and informal Victorian imperialism, backed up by the supernational automatism of the gold standard, confiscated local fiscal autonomy and impeded state-level developmental responses-especially investments in water conservancy and irrigation - that might have reduced vulnerability to climate shocks.
Mike Davis
Over the last generation, scholars have produced a bumper-crop of revealing social and economic histories of the regions teleconnected to ENSO's episodic disturbances. The thrust of this research has been to further demolish orientalist stereotypes of immutable poverty and overpopulation as the natural preconditions of the major nineteenth-century famines. There is persuasive evidence that peasants and farm laborers became dramatically more pregnable to natural disaster after 1850 as their local economies were violently incorporated into the world market. What colonial administrators and missionaries -- even sometimes creole elites, as in Brazil -- perceived as the persistence of ancient cycles of backwardness were typically modern structures of formal or informal imperialism. From the perspective of political ecology, the vulnerability of tropical agriculturalists to extreme climate events after 1870 was magnified by simultaneous restructurings of household and village linkages to regional production systems, world commodity markets and the colonial (or dependent) state. "It is, of course, the constellation of these social relations," writes Watts, "which binds the households together and project them into the marketplace, that determines the precise form of the household vulnerability. It is also these same social relations that have failed to stimulate or have actually prevented the development of the productive forces that might have lessened this vulnerability." Indeed, new social relations of production, in tandem with the New Imperialism, "not only altered the extent of hunger in a statistical sense but changed its very etiology." Three points of articulation with larger socio-economic structures were especially decisive for rural subsistence in the late Victorian "proto-third world." First, the forcible incorporation of smallholder production into commodity and financial circuits controlled from overseas tended to undermine traditional food security... Second, the integration of millions of tropical cultivators into the world market during the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a dramatic deterioration in their terms of trade... Third, formal and informal Victorian imperialism, backed up by the supernational automatism of the gold standard, confiscated local fiscal autonomy and impeded state-level developmental responses-especially investments in water conservancy and irrigation - that might have reduced vulnerability to climate shocks.
Mike Davis
The seductive, dominating power of these values is not an economic mistake, a political accident, or a military miscalculation. It is rather the work of the power of death which is having its relentless way among us. In tilting the gospel toward socio-economic, political matters, let it not be imagined that I am introducing a category that is "liberal" or partisan or new or modern. Indeed, all through the Bible the gospel has been exactly and precisely concerned with social relations related to power, goods, and access. Indeed, there is almost no aspect of the biblical presentation of the gospel that is otherwise. The issue, however, is not finally socio-economic or political. It is theological. It concerns the power for life and the power for death and the struggle between them for our life, our loyalty, and our imagination.
Walter Brueggemann (Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe)
Underachievement is a multifaceted issue that can impact people across all walks of life, age and socio-economic status.
Asuni LadyZeal
To the Western academic, the subjectivity and activism of transfeminized Third-Worlders is a distant concern next to their rhetorical utility as a ‘venerated’, vaunted “Third-Sex”, casting “primitive yet Enlightened” non-Western cultures as curious gender-practitioners from whom the West has so much to learn. All the while, the ways in which Third-Sexed populations like hijra identify with womanhood and organize for legal recognition as women are utterly elided; as Serano grimly notes of Nanda’s Gender Diversity in Whipping Girl, the “gender-diversity” of the Orientalized non-Western culture is a sacred cow for many academics who concern themselves with queerness and (supposedly) feminism, a crucial cudgel with which to beat and berate the “medicalized”, “Western” transsexual. Transition healthcare that is socio-economically out of reach for many Third World trans women is derided as “imperialism” while the transmisogynistic model of “Third-Sexing”, first imposed by our own cultures and then legitimized by Western academics, is simply considered scholarship. Many Westerners, it seems, would happily let my sisters languish without means or care just to reinforce their own worldviews.
Talia Bhatt (Trans/Rad/Fem)
The segregation of family, religious, socio-economic worlds is difficult when each of these threads was intricately inter-woven and has to be re-threaded in order to regain a coherent overview. R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Family, Faith, and Farming in Early-Modern Lancashire: The Stansfields of Inchfield, Walsden, c.1633–1763’ (2010), p. 43.
Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth
We must have a democracy. But a form of democracy between the ballot box and dictatorship in order to progress socio–economically. Pakistan, to put it plainly, needs a dictator—a civilian one—so it may never again have a dictator.
Alyan Khan (The Seven Venoms)
Class warriors downplay gender concerns, focused only on the oligarchy. Gender warriors downplay class concerns, focused only on the patriarchy. But inequalities of class and gender have to be considered together, especially when they pull in different directions. “Policymaking is not a zero-sum game in which you have to choose between caring about female disadvantage or the socio-economic gap or male underachievement,” write Nick Hillman and Nicholas Robinson. “All three matter.”5 Focusing too narrowly on the remaining barriers facing women can distract attention from the much deeper class divides that have opened up in our society. We might lean in, but fail to look down.
Richard V. Reeves (Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It)
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.
Terry Pratchett (Men at Arms (Discworld, #15))