Posts Tagged ‘ Post-Modern ’

Being Products

Products seem perfectly natural to us, we cannot imagine being without them. But before the Industrial Revolution they did not exist. Many of the same things existed – medieval clothing, for example, was more elaborate than our own. And their castles and churches are marvels to us even today. But their lives were entirely different [ READ MORE ]

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

I am listening to this now, and it is freaking me out. I don’t see how anyone could see this as entertainment. It makes 1984 seem like an optimistic  fairy tale. From Wikipedia: A never named father and his young son journey across a grim post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after a major unexplained cataclysm has destroyed civilization and [ READ MORE ]

Bad Faith

This is one of Sartre’s key concepts, and one of his most important ones. On an impulse, I just looked it up on Wikipedia: Bad faith (Latin: mala fides) is double mindedness or double heartedness in duplicity, fraud, or deception.[1] It may involve intentional deceit of others, or self deception. The expression “bad faith” is associated with “double heartedness”,[1] which is also translated as “double mindedness”.[2][3][4] A [ READ MORE ]

History Repeats Itself?

I have an easy life. I am reading 1848 a turning Point?, a used book I picked up for practically nothing on Amazon, with the edges turning  yellow with age – and drinking the local cheap wine (which packs quite a wallop). Meanwhile, my cleaning lady cleans my apartment, making a hell of a racket cleaning my [ READ MORE ]

The Spoiled Child

This is one of Ortega y Gasset’s most famous similes, and you are struck by it the first time you hear it. This is like his depiction of mass-man – immediately you know what he is talking about – something you already knew about, but had no words for. I am still reading Human Existence [ READ MORE ]

The Non-Linear World

We have moved from a linear to a non-linear world, and the shock of this has been more than we can handle. What do I mean by this? I am talking about rate of change. Previously, this was manageable, now it is not. I am reminded of a Sixties song “Stop the world, I want to [ READ MORE ]

What Went Wrong

Something is wrong with the world, and that something is us. It’s not the birds, the bees, or the trees – it is us. But we refuse to acknowledge this, and keep insisting it is something else – this, that, or the other thing. This is understandable, because what has happened to us is something [ READ MORE ]

Ortega on Resistance

By Ortega I mean Ortega y Gasset and to by Resistance I refer to the quote below, taken from page 93 of Ortega’s “The Revolt of the Masses” and the Triumph of the New Man, by Pedro Blas Gonzalez. This text has not been proof- read very well, and I have made some minor changes to [ READ MORE ]

Making Horrible Music Together

As a young man I was a classical music addict. I had a traveling job as a field engineer, and I carried my music system with me everywhere I went. Setting it up was the first thing I did at every job. Back in the Fifties we had discovered hi-fidelity (Hi-Fi) musical reproduction. The primary recording [ READ MORE ]

Our Parent’s World did not Work

And not only that, but their parent’s world did not work either. One has to go back in American history to the end of the 18th Century, when America was founded, to find an America that worked. It almost didn’t pass its first big test, the Constitutional Convention – which only put off the problem of slavery [ READ MORE ]

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 106 other followers