Category: Thought

The opposition of wordsmith intellectuals to capitalism is a fact of social significance. They shape our ideas and images of society; they state the policy alternatives bureaucracies consider. From treatises to slogans, they give us the sentences to express ourselves. Their opposition matters, especially in a society that depends increasingly upon the explicit formulation and dissemination of information.

Robert Nozick, “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?”

There’s an obvious pushback about being told what to think. Twitter temporarily afforded the option of, well, ‘just let the people decide.’ That’s what democracy is. That’s why democracy is not real, and never was. Because real democracy means stuff might happen that you don’t like. What they mean when they say democracy is ‘our democracy.’ What they mean by ‘the outcome of the people’ — the ‘outcome of our people.’ What they mean by ‘freedom of speech’ — ‘freedom for our speech.’

Comedian Russell Brand, “Hang On… ‘A Tool for Democracy’ or a Tool of THE ESTABLISHMENT,” discussing “Jack Dorsey has resigned as CEO of Twitter – the platform that was intended as a tool for democracy but became the opposite” and a Matt Taibbi article on Substack.

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school’s hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements.

Robert Nozick, “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?”

Czy jeżeli ludożerca je widelcem i nożem to postęp?

Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?

Stanisław Jerzy Lec, in Unkempt Thoughts [Myśli nieuczesane] (1957) as translated by Jacek Galazka (1962).

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

George Santayana, “Why I Am Not a Marxist,” The Modern Monthly, Volume 9, Number 2 (April 1935).

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don’t bite everybody.

Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Unkempt Thoughts (Myśli nieuczesane, 1957; Jacek Galazka, translator, 1962).