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redditreceipts · 3 months
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The real AI fight
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Tonight (November 27), I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.
On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."
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Last week's spectacular OpenAI soap-opera hijacked the attention of millions of normal, productive people and nonsensually crammed them full of the fine details of the debate between "Effective Altruism" (doomers) and "Effective Accelerationism" (AKA e/acc), a genuinely absurd debate that was allegedly at the center of the drama.
Very broadly speaking: the Effective Altruists are doomers, who believe that Large Language Models (AKA "spicy autocomplete") will someday become so advanced that it could wake up and annihilate or enslave the human race. To prevent this, we need to employ "AI Safety" – measures that will turn superintelligence into a servant or a partner, nor an adversary.
Contrast this with the Effective Accelerationists, who also believe that LLMs will someday become superintelligences with the potential to annihilate or enslave humanity – but they nevertheless advocate for faster AI development, with fewer "safety" measures, in order to produce an "upward spiral" in the "techno-capital machine."
Once-and-future OpenAI CEO Altman is said to be an accelerationists who was forced out of the company by the Altruists, who were subsequently bested, ousted, and replaced by Larry fucking Summers. This, we're told, is the ideological battle over AI: should cautiously progress our LLMs into superintelligences with safety in mind, or go full speed ahead and trust to market forces to tame and harness the superintelligences to come?
This "AI debate" is pretty stupid, proceeding as it does from the foregone conclusion that adding compute power and data to the next-word-predictor program will eventually create a conscious being, which will then inevitably become a superbeing. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding faster and faster horses, we'll get a locomotive:
https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/
As Molly White writes, this isn't much of a debate. The "two sides" of this debate are as similar as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Yes, they're arrayed against each other in battle, so furious with each other that they're tearing their hair out. But for people who don't take any of this mystical nonsense about spontaneous consciousness arising from applied statistics seriously, these two sides are nearly indistinguishable, sharing as they do this extremely weird belief. The fact that they've split into warring factions on its particulars is less important than their unified belief in the certain coming of the paperclip-maximizing apocalypse:
https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/effective-obfuscation
White points out that there's another, much more distinct side in this AI debate – as different and distant from Dee and Dum as a Beamish Boy and a Jabberwork. This is the side of AI Ethics – the side that worries about "today’s issues of ghost labor, algorithmic bias, and erosion of the rights of artists and others." As White says, shifting the debate to existential risk from a future, hypothetical superintelligence "is incredibly convenient for the powerful individuals and companies who stand to profit from AI."
After all, both sides plan to make money selling AI tools to corporations, whose track record in deploying algorithmic "decision support" systems and other AI-based automation is pretty poor – like the claims-evaluation engine that Cigna uses to deny insurance claims:
https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims
On a graph that plots the various positions on AI, the two groups of weirdos who disagree about how to create the inevitable superintelligence are effectively standing on the same spot, and the people who worry about the actual way that AI harms actual people right now are about a million miles away from that spot.
There's that old programmer joke, "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't." But of course, that joke could just as well be, "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand ternary, those who understand binary, and those who don't understand either":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/11/the-ten-types-of-people/
What's more, the joke could be, "there are 10 kinds of people, those who understand hexadecenary, those who understand pentadecenary, those who understand tetradecenary [und so weiter] those who understand ternary, those who understand binary, and those who don't." That is to say, a "polarized" debate often has people who hold positions so far from the ones everyone is talking about that those belligerents' concerns are basically indistinguishable from one another.
The act of identifying these distant positions is a radical opening up of possibilities. Take the indigenous philosopher chief Red Jacket's response to the Christian missionaries who sought permission to proselytize to Red Jacket's people:
https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5790/
Red Jacket's whole rebuttal is a superb dunk, but it gets especially interesting where he points to the sectarian differences among Christians as evidence against the missionary's claim to having a single true faith, and in favor of the idea that his own people's traditional faith could be co-equal among Christian doctrines.
The split that White identifies isn't a split about whether AI tools can be useful. Plenty of us AI skeptics are happy to stipulate that there are good uses for AI. For example, I'm 100% in favor of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group using an LLM to classify and extract information from the Innocence Project New Orleans' wrongful conviction case files:
https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html
Automating "extracting officer information from documents – specifically, the officer's name and the role the officer played in the wrongful conviction" was a key step to freeing innocent people from prison, and an LLM allowed HRDAG – a tiny, cash-strapped, excellent nonprofit – to make a giant leap forward in a vital project. I'm a donor to HRDAG and you should donate to them too:
https://hrdag.networkforgood.com/
Good data-analysis is key to addressing many of our thorniest, most pressing problems. As Ben Goldacre recounts in his inaugural Oxford lecture, it is both possible and desirable to build ethical, privacy-preserving systems for analyzing the most sensitive personal data (NHS patient records) that yield scores of solid, ground-breaking medical and scientific insights:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-eaV8SWdjQ
The difference between this kind of work – HRDAG's exoneration work and Goldacre's medical research – and the approach that OpenAI and its competitors take boils down to how they treat humans. The former treats all humans as worthy of respect and consideration. The latter treats humans as instruments – for profit in the short term, and for creating a hypothetical superintelligence in the (very) long term.
As Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax reminds us, this is the root of all sin: "sin is when you treat people like things":
https://brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com/2009/02/granny-weatherwax-on-sin-favorite.html
So much of the criticism of AI misses this distinction – instead, this criticism starts by accepting the self-serving marketing claim of the "AI safety" crowd – that their software is on the verge of becoming self-aware, and is thus valuable, a good investment, and a good product to purchase. This is Lee Vinsel's "Criti-Hype": "taking press releases from startups and covering them with hellscapes":
https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5
Criti-hype and AI were made for each other. Emily M Bender is a tireless cataloger of criti-hypeists, like the newspaper reporters who breathlessly repeat " completely unsubstantiated claims (marketing)…sourced to Altman":
https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/111464030855880383
Bender, like White, is at pains to point out that the real debate isn't doomers vs accelerationists. That's just "billionaires throwing money at the hope of bringing about the speculative fiction stories they grew up reading – and philosophers and others feeling important by dressing these same silly ideas up in fancy words":
https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/111464024432217299
All of this is just a distraction from real and important scientific questions about how (and whether) to make automation tools that steer clear of Granny Weatherwax's sin of "treating people like things." Bender – a computational linguist – isn't a reactionary who hates automation for its own sake. On Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 – the excellent podcast she co-hosts with Alex Hanna – there is a machine-generated transcript:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417
There is a serious, meaty debate to be had about the costs and possibilities of different forms of automation. But the superintelligence true-believers and their criti-hyping critics keep dragging us away from these important questions and into fanciful and pointless discussions of whether and how to appease the godlike computers we will create when we disassemble the solar system and turn it into computronium.
The question of machine intelligence isn't intrinsically unserious. As a materialist, I believe that whatever makes me "me" is the result of the physics and chemistry of processes inside and around my body. My disbelief in the existence of a soul means that I'm prepared to think that it might be possible for something made by humans to replicate something like whatever process makes me "me."
Ironically, the AI doomers and accelerationists claim that they, too, are materialists – and that's why they're so consumed with the idea of machine superintelligence. But it's precisely because I'm a materialist that I understand these hypotheticals about self-aware software are less important and less urgent than the material lives of people today.
It's because I'm a materialist that my primary concerns about AI are things like the climate impact of AI data-centers and the human impact of biased, opaque, incompetent and unfit algorithmic systems – not science fiction-inspired, self-induced panics over the human race being enslaved by our robot overlords.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space
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Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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Research has consistently shown a positive relationship between exposure to advertising and the strength of materialistic values, especially within children. Analysis of US children and adolescents over several decades highlighted that when a country spent a greater amount on advertising, levels of materialism among youth also tended to be higher (Twenge & Kasser, 2013). Children who are exposed to a greater amount of consumer advertising go on to display stronger materialistic values and a greater desire to purchase the advertised products. This effect is particularly strong when people perceive advertisements to be an accurate portrayal of real life.  What is worrying is that children from less affluent backgrounds appear to be more exposed to consumer advertising, tending to spend more time watching television or living in more urban areas with higher levels of outdoor advertising present. This could mean that they risk developing higher levels of materialism. A study of 9–13-year-olds in the UK (Nairn & Opree, 2021) found that a much greater percentage of deprived (47%) compared to affluent (23%) children agreed that “I would rather spend time buying things than almost anything else.”
[...]
This negative impact of materialism on wellbeing has been documented across people’s lifespan. Some studies have suggested that the link between materialism and poor wellbeing is stronger for children from deprived backgrounds (Nairn & Opree, 2021), implying that advertising and materialism may promote a process of upward comparisons, whereby those people who do not have the affluent lifestyles that advertising promotes, and materialism desires, come to feel that they do not meet societal standards, hindering their self-esteem. Materialism doesn’t only cause problems for the person holding the strong materialistic values, it’s also bad for social relationships and the health of the planet. Exposure to materialistic cues such as consumer advertising has been shown to lead to anti-welfare attitudes and less helpful behaviours. People who are more materialistic also care less about environmental issues and engage in fewer sustainable behaviours.
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hermajestyimher · 2 years
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The Trap of Materialism: Why the Endless Rat-Race to the Top Will Only Make You Miserable:
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Part of the reason why I'm so vocal against the wave of New Money extravagance and excessive material boasting stems from how much it is ruining our perception of what a truly successful person looks like, and how success is actually measured. Social media is inundated with content that encourages us and makes us believe that the only path to true success, happiness, and a levelled-up life is through the constant, never-ending pursuit of material wealth, oftentimes at the cost of our own integrity, morals, and well-being. Material wealth that is not based on quality and tasteful inclinations, but on the excessive consumerism and tacky, insecure-driven flexing of expensive items for the sake of the brand and price tag solely.
We are being told by the algorithm that our lives are insufficient if they do not measure up to the curated standards that influencers portray on their social media accounts. We are constantly being bombarded with an onslaught of stimuli from flex-culture that makes us feel inadequate if we happen to not compare in our real lives, creating a need in us to want to achieve that same level of material wealth in an attempt to gain a sense of validation we would otherwise not be able to receive from the masses.
This rat race to the top of the consumerism and materialistic pyramid is killing us. It's making us feel anxious, depressed, and unappreciative of the things we have in life, making us lose sight of the things that are actually important, making us fall for online scams, skewing our live perspectives and goal settings, and making us worship people based on their perceived status and online persona. This is not a healthy way to live, and most people in our society are trapped in this cycle without even realizing it.
We are being told that pursuing a meaningful career and building wealth the correct way through secure long-term investments and education is not worthy, instead, we are being sold a fantasy of instant gratification and get-rich-quick schemes that appeal to the most immature and easily impressionable of our society: the youth. Chasing after things like fame, money by any means necessary, and hedonism will only leave you depressed. Living a life that has no real, tangible fulfillment or peace, where the opinions and perceptions of others towards you keep you in a constant state of worry is not a life worth living.
As a society and generation, we need to learn to break free from this insidious and toxic cycle of worshipping material wealth, online personas, and fast pleasures that don't deliver any lasting fulfillment. What truly matters in this world are our connections to people, how much good we can impart to others, and our accomplishments through hard work and dedication (e.g. achieving an education, building long-term financial stability, creating a name for yourself).
Take some time to reassess your life and ask yourself if the goals that you have set forward are truly yours, or if you have been influenced by the society around you to want to achieve something just to be perceived in a certain kind of way. Ask yourself, are the activities I engage in truly satisfying me as a person, or am I simply complying with the world around me to fit in, despite making me unhappy? The quicker you are able to assess the things that are and aren't helping you live a good life, the less time you will waste chasing after things that will only keep you from it.
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noosphe-re · 12 days
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Is Natural Science finally committed to materialism? There is no doubt that the theories of science constitute trustworthy knowledge, because they are verifiable and enable us to predict and control the events of Nature. But we must not forget that what is called science is not a single systematic view of Reality. It is a mass of sectional views of Reality - fragments of a total experience which do not seem to fit together. Natural Science deals with matter, with life, and with mind; but the moment you ask the question how matter, life, and mind are mutually related, you begin to see the sectional character of the various sciences that deal with them and the inability of these sciences, taken singly, to furnish a complete answer to your question. In fact, the various natural sciences are like so many vultures falling on the dead body of Nature, and each running away with a piece of its flesh. Nature as the subject of science is a highly artificial affair, and this artificiality is the result of that selective process to which science must subject her in the interests of precision. The moment you put the subject of science in the total of human experience it begins to disclose a different character.
Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam
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ayahuascadiaries · 6 months
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DMT is so extraordinary because it’s the only psychedelic that naturally occurs in the human body. The body, it seems, wants and needs the capacity to have psychedelic trips. They are a primary means for escaping from the hopeless and dismal prison of materialism.
From.the book The Dimitri Revolution: How DMT Changed Humanity of jack Tanner
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philosophybits · 7 months
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The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to It.
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
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autolenaphilia · 3 months
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I think a lot of the uproar whenever socialists suggest abolishing family and religion of the kind that is best expressed in this sentence: “how can you abolish religion and family, how would we then preserve traditional culture, it would mean cultural genocide and imperialism” stems from a fundamentally idealist understanding of the world. One that misunderstands Marx’s materialist view of history.
I mean idealism in the sense that ideas and culture drive history and societal change. Basically the course of history is decided by a struggle of ideas. This conflict is either peaceful in the liberal sense that people use reason to convince other people of their views, or it is waged by military means, and these military conflicts are seen as motivated by ideology, with the winner imposing their views on the conquered.
This idea is also driven by essentialist ideas literally coming from nationalism and religious “family values” conservatism, that religion, the family and ethnic identity are fundamental to human existence. And the only way for them to go away is for some authoritarian state to force people to give them up.
This creates a fantasy that abolition of family and religion will mean a totalitarian “communist state” using violence to force religious people to give up religion and breaking up families. And I presume said state waging war to force the rest of the world to give up religion and family. Literal cultural genocide with death squads. This fantasy seems to be inspired in part by Hoxhaist Albania’s “state atheism” and European colonialism forcing christianity on Africa and the Americas.
This fantasy however badly misunderstands the Marxian materialist perspective on culture, including family, ethnicity and religion, which is the basis for our predictions about the end of family and religion.
The short version is that we believe that the mode of production determines culture. Cultural institutions like family and religion and all of culture is dependent on certain modes of production, whether that will be feudal, capitalist or socialist. “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. “ as Marx said. And that by removing the capitalist economic foundation on which family and religion as we now know it stands, a socialist revolution will lead to those institutions naturally being destroyed. People will want to abandon religion and the family because in the socialist system, it will no longer make any sense to them.
Religion acts as both moral justification of and consolation for the sufferings of a class society. A socialist society would not be “a condition that requires illusions” as Marx put it. And as Engels explained all the way back in 1847, communism will end the family “since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.“
One might object that the institutions of the family and religion have survived previous such revolutions, like the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Doesn’t that prove that they are permanent fixtures of human nature? But communism will be something radically different, as the The Communist manifesto explains:
“The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. “
It’s a contradiction in terms to want to “preserve culture” and also want to radically change the economic foundation on which culture stands, any type of “left-wing” position that claims to do both is ridiculous. A wish to “preserve traditional culture” can only lead to a reactionary position, one in which society is kept in stasis, or somehow returned to an earlier state, a stasis which preserves both the economic foundation and with it the culture.
And of course no such stasis has ever actually existed. No economic system and its cultural superstructure is truly static, as history proves. Every culture has gone through multiple cycles of death and rebirth, the most serious are periods of social revolution that transition from one mode of production to another. But between those periods there is usually a constant process of cultural evolution. In the end all cultures have gone though a ship-of-theseus-like total transformation multiple times.
As the manifesto puts it: “What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. “
In fact, because capitalism is not a static system, we can see changes already happening in existing societies. The widespread secularization in the most advanced capitalist countries in western Europe, for example, shows how the decline of religion can happen peacefully and naturally. It wasn’t violent repression that has caused Swedes to abandon the Lutherean Christanity that once heavily defined Swedish culture, it was because it no longer made any sense in an advanced capitalist society.
In a socialist revolution, there will probably be violence, but it would largely be the reactionaries who would cause it. There was revolutionary violence against the Orthodox Church in the Russian revolution and against the Catholic Church in the Spanish revolution, but that was because the churches sided with the forces of reaction. And the men who benefit from the family, actual patriarchs, will probably react with violence towards any attempt to lessen their power. Even as we speak, men often react to women divorcing them by stepping up their abusive violence.
As for the accusation of imperialism, it’s true that this revolution will be global, because there is no other way to defeat global capitalism. “It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.” as Engels put it. But it will have to be the work of the working class themselves, which precludes a state, local or foreign/imperialist, doing it for them.
As the manifesto puts it: “In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.”
For more information on Marx’s material conception of history, just read Marx and Engels. This is basically all based on Marx’s works specifically. It’s why I don’t use terms like “dialectical materialism” or “historical materialism” or even “marxism”, because he didn’t use those terms, those descriptions came from later interpreters of his work, but that’s outside the scope of this text.
The works I quoted above are a good starting point. The preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy has a great introduction to his views, Marx himself summarizes them in a single paragraph and the whole book is worth reading. Regarding religion, another preface that states Marx’s view very clearly is the often-quoted introduction to A Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right, the source of the “religion is the opium of the people” quote. The Communist Manifesto is of course worth reading and quoted at length above. Engels wrote a FAQ-style draft of the manifesto called The Principles of Communism in 1847 that quite literally answers common questions about communism, particularly relevant to this post are the answers to questions 19-23.
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theemotionmachine · 3 months
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Many young men are attracted to people like Andrew Tate because he projects strength and confidence in our materialistic and status-seeking world. The truth is young men are lacking role models in life – real examples of heroism – so they are left scraping the bottom of the barrel for inspiration: celebrities, influencers, etc. One problem is seeing money and wealth as the only sign of success vs. other more important values (honor, loyalty, sincerity, courage, sacrifice, etc.) Masculinity is less about taking pictures in front of your Corvette with super models and more a fireman running into a burning building to save a child’s life.
Steven Handel, The Emotion Machine: Self-Improvement in the 21st Century
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newyorkthegoldenage · 3 months
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Seeing in The New York Times the photograph of Helen Keller in the Observation Tower of the Empire State Building, I [Dr. John H. Finley] wrote her asking her what she really “saw” from that height. This remarkable letter written by her came in answer and was published in The New York Times Magazine. It will be agreed by all who read it that, as she said, she “beheld a brighter prospect than my friends with two good eyes.”
January 13, 1932 Dear Dr. Finley:
After many days and many tribulations which are inseparable from existence here below, I sit down to the pleasure of writing to you and answering your delightful question, “What Did You Think ‘of the Sight’ When You Were on the Top of the Empire Building?”
Frankly, I was so entranced “seeing” that I did not think about the sight. If there was a subconscious thought of it, it was in the nature of gratitude to God for having given the blind seeing minds. As I now recall the view I had from the Empire Tower, I am convinced that, until we have looked into darkness, we cannot know what a divine thing vision is.
Perhaps I beheld a brighter prospect than my companions with two good eyes. Anyway, a blind friend gave me the best description I had of the Empire Building until I saw it myself.
Do I hear you reply, “I suppose to you it is a reasonable thesis that the universe is all a dream, and that the blind only are awake?” Y—es—no doubt I shall be left at the Last Day on the other bank defending the incredible prodigies of the unseen world, and, more incredible still, the strange grass and skies the blind behold are greener grass and bluer skies than ordinary eyes see. I will concede that my guides saw a thousand things that escaped me from the top of the Empire Building, but I am not envious. For imagination creates distances and horizons that reach to the end of the world. It is as easy for the mind to think in stars as in cobble-stones. Sightless Milton dreamed visions no one else could see. Radiant with an inward light, he sent forth rays by which mankind beholds the realms of Paradise.
But what of the Empire Building? It was a thrilling experience to be whizzed in a “lift” a quarter of a mile heavenward, and to see New York spread out like a marvellous tapestry beneath us. There was the Hudson—more like the flash of a sword-blade than a noble river. The little island of Manhattan, set like a jewel in its nest of rainbow waters, stared up into my face, and the solar system circled about my head! Why, I thought, the sun and the stars are suburbs of New York, and I never knew it! I had a sort of wild desire to invest in a bit of real estate on one of the planets. All sense of depression and hard times vanished, I felt like being frivolous with the stars. But that was only for a moment. I am too static to feel quite natural in a Star View cottage on the Milky Way, which must be something of a merry-go-round even on quiet days.
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I was pleasantly surprised to find the Empire Building so poetical. From everyone except my blind friend I had received an impression of sordid materialism—the piling up of one steel honeycomb upon another with no real purpose but to satisfy the American craving for the superlative in everything. A Frenchman has said, in his exalted moments the American fancies himself a demigod, nay, a god; for only gods never tire of the prodigious. The highest, the largest, the most costly is the breath of his vanity.
Well, I see in the Empire Building something else—passionate skill, arduous and fearless idealism. The tallest building is a victory of imagination. Instead of crouching close to earth like a beast, the spirit of man soars to higher regions, and from this new point of vantage he looks upon the impossible with fortified courage and dreams yet more magnificent enterprises.
What did I “see and hear” from the Empire Tower? As I stood there ’twixt earth and sky, I saw a romantic structure wrought by human brains and hands that is to the burning eye of the sun a rival luminary. I saw it stand erect and serene in the midst of storm and the tumult of elemental commotion. I heard the hammer of Thor ring when the shaft began to rise upward. I saw the unconquerable steel, the flash of testing flames, the sword-like rivets. I heard the steam drills in pandemonium. I saw countless skilled workers welding together that mighty symmetry. I looked upon the marvel of frail, yet indomitable hands that lifted the tower to its dominating height.
Let cynics and supersensitive souls say what they will about American materialism and machine civilization. Beneath the surface are poetry, mysticism and inspiration that the Empire Building somehow symbolizes. In that giant shaft I see a groping toward beauty and spiritual vision. I am one of those who see and yet believe.
I hope I have not wearied you with my “screed” about sight and seeing. The length of this letter is a sign of long, long thoughts that bring me happiness.
I am, with every good wish for the New Year,
Sincerely yours, Helen Keller
Top photo: Times Wide World Photos/Letters of Note Bottom photo: Associated Press
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"Medical costs are up and wages are not for one reason that is very easily understood by Americans: monopolies. Hospitals, doctor’s practices, health insurance, pharmaceuticals, ambulances, nursing homes, rehab facilities: Every part of our health care world is increasingly controlled by greedy bankers who kill people for money. "
- David Dayen and Matt Stoller, "Moving Past Neoliberalism Is a Policy Project"
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Materialism in the community
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robertogreco · 1 year
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Snufkin in Comet in Moominland, by Tove Jansson:
But that’s how it is when you start wanting to have things. Now I just look at them, and when I go away I carry them in my head. Then my hands are always free, because I don’t have to carry a suitcase.
From more on Snufkin see ”Understanding Snufkin: A Moomins Essay.”
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queen-of-empathy · 4 months
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Sacred Ground
your hands wrapped in the shroud of death
still tender against my living flesh
wracked in prayer, your palm flat
against mine
together we ask for forgiveness
each upon one knee
when I sigh, you say men
and the worship is over
until the white dove springs free
and allows me to snatch a taste of life
I harvest salt crystals from the sea
and silk strands from the wind
what use do we have for luxuries now
they built us a shopping mall
in a desolate town
all I needed to survive was the salt,
the silk, the springs of light
the unmineable gold that sits in seams
through valleys in your eyes
prayers spoken hand in hand are both
the question and the answer
God exists and listens right where
our palms touch
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thepeacockangel · 1 month
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All Oppression is Ultimately Rooted in Economics and The Capacity for Violence
Without understanding that any gains you make without having the material gains, and organizational capacity to hold those gains by force if necessary, any concessions you gain are just those who have power offering you consolation prizes to stop you from understanding and doing the above.
You cannot get the powerful to give up power through talk, through guilt, through morality, through protest even. You have to have the power to make and back up a threat of force, and that's just the undeniable reality, no matter how just your cause, without the capacity for force you will always only lose.
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun - Chairman Mao, I'm not a Maoist but he's fuckin right on that one. Also fuck the word "kyriarchy" you can just say capitalism because ultimately the economic organization is what hold up the ability to systemically enforce all forms of prejudice.
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grandhotelabyss · 3 months
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Why are you not a materialist?
We live inside of ideas concretized as sculpted landscapes, physical structures, technologies and tools, and language itself. In spite of Marx, the working class keeps voting on the basis of culture; in spite of Darwin, we still choose strange-looking lovers. Even Marx allowed that human beings, unlike bees and beavers, build freely and in accordance with beauty rather than necessity. Even Freud granted that most of human sexuality is, strictly speaking, perverse, not focused on the reproductive organs and their function but on all manner of fetishes, literally from head to toe. Scientists can't seem to prove that the brain is the locus of consciousness, nor do they seem to know what consciousness even is. The quantum physicists, if I understand them, posit a reality defined at the subatomic level by the observer. The archaeologists keep pushing the advent of civilization further and further back into the past, with deterministic models (e.g., civilization requires agricultural settlement) increasingly challenged and cult and cultus appearing to be the driver. Every third or fourth person has seen a ghost. What material interest of yours is served by your desire to know why I'm not a materialist? Almost everything in human life is beautifully gratuitous, irreducible to need and program. That there is something rather than nothing remains both a miracle and a mystery.
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