Philosophy and other Meanderings of Life
"Religion, the dominion of the human mind ; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represents the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails. Religion! How it dominates man's mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But, out of that nothing God had created a kingdom, so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began. Anarchy rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break away your mental fetters, says Anarchasim to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress."
- excerpted from Emma Goldman's Anarchism : What it really stands for
" I speak of the American in the singular, as if there were not millions of them, north and south, east and west, of both sexes, of all ages, and of various races, proffesions, and religions. Of course, the one American I speak of, is mythical ; but to speak in parables is inevitable in such a subject, and it is perhaps, as well to do so frankly. There is a sort of poetic ineptitude in all human discourse when it tries to deal with natural and exsisting things. Practical men may notice it, but in fact human discourse in intrinsicially addressed not to natural exsisting things, but to ideal essences, poetic or logical terms which thought may define and play with . When fortune or necessity diverts our attention from this congenial ideal sport to crude facts and pressing issues, we turn our frail poetic ideas into symbols for those terrible irruptive things. In that paper money of our own stamping, the legal tender of the mind, we are obliged to reckon all the movements and values of the world. The univeral American I speak of is one of symbols, and I should still be speaking in symbols and creating moral units and false simplicity, if i spoke of classes pedantically, sub-divided, or individuals ideally integrated and defined. As, it happens, the symbolic American can be made largely adequate to the facts; because there are immense differences between individual Americans for some Americans are black-yet there is a great uniformity in their environment, customs, temper, and thoughts. They have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together in one vortex, whirling irressistably in a space otherwise quite empty. To be an American , is in his character, and almost the whole of what most americans are in their social outlook and political judgements.
-excerpted from George Santayana's Materialism and Idealism in American Life
"As a vast, solid phalanx the generations come on, they have the same features and their pattern is new in the world. All wear the same expression , but it is this which they do not detect in each other. It is the one life which ponders in the philosophers, which drudges in the laborers, which basks in the poets, which dilates in the love of women."
-Excerpted from Ralph Waldo Emerson's Notebooks
Meanderings of an 18yr Old attempting to Conform by trying to Be Different
Ahhh... the ever so euphoric buzz of that long awaited cigarette. The sweet nicotene fills my lungs with immortal smoke. One of the few sinful pleasures of life. But aren't all pleasures sinful? Why is it that piety rules our lives and not one of instinct? Isn't pure instinct the very thing that drives us towards our daily sins? That instantaneous pleasure wave that, we as raw individuals, crave, has turned into a taboo in our society. Why is it so bad to feel so good? That is the question that ponders few, since we are even taught not to question our exsistence, since it is already laid out for us a pon a silver platter . It is more than natural to crave desire, yet even more unnatural to supresss it. If indulgence and hedonism was taught as opposed to to negligence of the soul, would we, as a human race , be happier? Yet we are considered indulgent with our seven dollar espressos and our 200 channel cable systems. But that is not the true indulgence one should have. One should be indulgent in true happines and not prozac. And indulgent in true prosperity and not gentrifacation. Do we, as a society, understand the meaning of life? Obviously not, if it includes going to college for the sake of, not for the pursuit of knowledge, only inorder to get a high paying job, then to work your ass off for 30/40 years and then die of an early age because you spent your retiremnt fund on a three day trip to Vegas? What is the meaning of ita all? And i want the answer without religious influence , but the religion as we see it, not one of bibles and crosses, but one of newspapers and magazines, and our god's are our celebrities that we strive to be. To be perfect, to continually look through that soft-focus lense seems quite impossible from my stand point of 23rd and Lex. But what is my stand point? Why does it seem harder and harder to break through the mold that defines us and create a continaully changing one. We need a crusade of intelligence, not one of tele-marketing. We as people need to be freed , freed from the bondage of our society to conform and think a certain way. We need a crusade to find the ultiamte self, that knows it's purpose and realization of happiness. We need a crusade for the soul.
-Me