From today…
From a few days ago…📷
The other consequence of the atomistic, serial, linear approach is a futile search for what causes what. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
If we are in a linear search for “what causes what,” we miss that there is not truly isolatable original cause and effect, and consequently no origin point on the line. And to be stuck on the line is to be severely limited in our ability to appreciate our interconnectedness with the whole. Meaning, if we find it, will be deeply rooted in the whole of everything. It can only be apprehended by letting go of the line.
It is inconceivable that humankind could exist without work. The new ethic of work starts out in the first place with the idea that work is a necessity for the human personality. (bell hooks, Feminist Theory)
This is in striking alignment with E. F. Schumacher’s Buddhist Economics. BE is a work of it’s time, and is sexist in it’s attitude that women are bound for nurturing children, but the basic ideas about work are very much in harmony with hooks here.
The linear path is seductive to the left hemisphere’s mindset in its directness and simplicity. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
Our difficulty in finding meaning in our lives, can, I suspect, be attributed to a linear way of looking at the world around us. It is a failure to appreciate the interconnectedness of all of it; that a spherical way of embracing the world and our relationship to it is more meaningful; that collective tending of what we are enmeshed in is the most meaningful response to it; that perpetual linear growth is not the way the universe works.
The left hemisphere regards words as tokens that can be manipulated to mean what we like, not living, embodied signs, with a history. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
McGilchrist’s main thesis is that we, western civilization and, I would guess, any civilization emulating it, live entirely too much in the left brain way of processing and looking at things… this release of words from their ties to an embodied cultural history is what has given rise to a situation where it is possible to say, “facts don’t matter, what people believe, matters”…
Gold for US women! ⚽️
A few from this morning…
By the late seventies, among privileged people the worship of money was expressed by making corruption acceptable and the ostentatious parading of material luxury the norm. (bell hooks, All About Love)
extractive economy benefits greatly when people can’t learn to get along together. (Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers)
Capitalism and patriarchy together, as structures of domination, have worked overtime to undermine and destroy this larger unit of extended kin. Replacing the family community with a more privatized small autocratic unit helped increase alienation and made abuses of power more possible. (bell hooks, All About Love)
… this is also a thesis of Caliban and the Witch, by Sylvia Federici…
The linear path is responsible for the myth of progress. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
When we see love as the will to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same. There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. (bell hooks, All About Love)
In the end, each has become an interest group, concerned only with itself. While each may talk about Black Power, Women Power, Worker’s Power, in the final analysis each is only talking about separation of powers, or “a piece of the action.” None is talking about real power, which involves the reconstruction of the entire society for the benefit of the great majority and for the advancement of humanity. (bell hooks, Feminist Theory)
The philosopher Hannah Arendt put it neatly in her postwar study of totalitarian life: “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” (Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible)
Yes!
Christi Carras of the Los Angeles Times reported today that the reality TV industry has collapsed. From April to June, reality TV production in the Los Angeles region fell by 57% compared to the same period in 2023; that’s a 50% drop over the five-year average, excluding the Covid-induced production shutdown. The immediate reasons for the dropping production are systemic to the business, Carras reports, but the change seems to represent Americans’ souring on the blurring of reality and entertainment that gave us the Trump era.
Why is it a thing to film a scene so in the dark that you can’t make anything out? Seems unnecessarily artistic to me.
Managed to get the Sunday chores done… pushed through the all over aches my bodyhas beenen experiencing for a week now… i am feeling a little better today but don’t know if that will last…
From this morning…
… we are doing a Despicable Me and Minions marathon…
Not causing harm requires staying awake. Part of being awake is slowing down enough to notice what we say and do. The more we witness our emotional chain reactions and understand how they work, the easier it is to refrain. It becomes a way of life to stay awake, slow down, and notice. (Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart)
One of the ironies of the culture of greed is that the people who profit the most from earnings they have not worked to attain are the most eager to insist that the poor and working classes can only value material resources attained through hard work. (bell hooks, All About Love)
we jump from an awareness of a distinction to the assumption of a division. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
… even the most exact sciences float above ‘axiomatic abysses’: unexamined assumptions. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
We need to recognise the limitations of intellectual analysis, and the way in which insight is achieved not just by the controlling intellect, fussily classifying and cataloguing the pieces of the jigsaw, but by a process of attunement, whereby we allow different levels of understanding and awareness to coalesce, until a picture of the whole begins to emerge. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)