- Kevin Kelly, from Smithsonian's article "Reading in a Whole New Way""Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen "friends" for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it."
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death : Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
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| I wonder where RTS and strategic-life (The Sims) and sports (Football Manager) simulation games go |
"The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.
The whole book is symbolic in nature except the rescue in the end where adult life appears, dignified and capable, but in reality enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island.
The officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser?"
"The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid"
Paraphrasing Lord Acton, “Freedom is not the permission to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.” The trouble is that, today, freedom is purely negative: freedom from parents, from teachers, from the police, and so on. We have lost sight of it as freedom to be that which we can be or ought to be. We need to recover the idea that, as Lord Acton stressed wisely and as the present pope has written of so well, freedom is the power to do what we ought. That assumes, however, we know the truth of who we are and what we ought to do. That is the freedom the modern secular liberal tends to forget.
Absolutely. To me, one of the most appalling things in this country at the moment is the capitulation to the postmodern view of truth—the view that truth is relative, socially determined, and all a manner of human construction, and that any truth claim is really a disguised bid for power.
What proponents of this view do not realize is that when all claims to truth are reduced to forms of bids for power, you just open yourself up to power games. That is an incredibly dangerous, Nietzschean moment.
When Vaclav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn resisted the Soviet regime, they did so on the basis of truth. “One word of truth,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “outweighs the entire world.” Or in the words of Havel, “Truth prevails for those who live in truth.” Many Western liberals applauded them at the time, but they do not have the same, strong concept of truth to do the job today.- Os Guinness, the great-great-great grandson of Arthur Guinness (founder of the Guinness brewery)
People thought that postmodernism promised a brave new world of knowledge, but they are suddenly beginning to realize it is a highly manipulative and very dangerous world. And when you see the dangers, suddenly you see the enormous significance of the words of Jesus: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” There is no freedom without truth.
- Andrew Ryan, Bioshock
- "I am Andrew Ryan, and I am here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?
'No,' says the man in Washington, 'it belongs to the poor.'
'No,' says the man in the Vatican, 'it belongs to God.'
'No,' says the man in Moscow, 'it belongs to everyone.'
I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose...
Rapture.
A city where the artist would not fear the censor,
where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality,
where the great would not be constrained by the small.
And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city, as well."
"Now, tolerance means that you must not say anybody is wrong. That’s the one wrong thing to say. But, now notice, under this view of tolerance, you are tolerant, not of individuals, you are tolerant of all positions. The tolerance is now directed toward all views that are articulated because you are not in a position to say that any view is wrong
The one thing that is not tolerated is the view that this view of tolerance is wrong.
And thus you have the intolerance of tolerance."
