Quotes About Society

Good' and 'evil' are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because 'good' and 'evil' are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

Scientists in 2020 are not (as readers of mid-twentieth-century science fiction might have hoped) encountering alien civilizations in distant star systems; but they are encountering radically different forms of society under their own feet, some forgotten and newly rediscovered, others more familiar, but now understood in entirely new ways.

What social forms would still exist, even among people who had no recognizable form of law or government? Would marriage exist? What forms might it take? Would Natural Man tend to be naturally gregarious, or would people tend to avoid one another? Was there such a thing as natural religion?

Etant donné que la valeur du travail réside désormais moins dans ce qu'il produit ou dans les bienfaits qu'il apporte aux autres que dans sa dimension sacrificielle, tout élément susceptible de le rendre moins pénible ou plus plaisant, y compris la satisfaction de se sentir utile à ses semblables, diminue sa valeur - justifiant donc un salaire inférieur. C'est un système d'une incroyable perversité.

Why the West Rules – For Now

Good' and 'evil' are purely human concepts. it would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because 'good' and 'evil' are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

End of work arguments became increasingly popular in the late seventies and early eighties, as radical thinkers pondered what would happen to traditional working-class struggle once there was no longer a working class. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.)

There is every reason to believe that sceptics and non-conformists exist in every human society; what varies is how others react to them.

Still, I suspect they would all have agreed on at least two things: first, that the most important things one gets out of a job are (1) money to pay the bills, and (2) the opportunity to make a positive contribution to the world. Second, that there is an inverse relation between the two. The more your work helps and benefits others, and the more social value you create, the less you are likely to be paid for it.

We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children. It is very hard to imagine a society where this would not be true.

One of the few positive side effects of a prison system is that, simply by providing us information of what happens, and how humans behave under extreme situations of deprivation, we can learn basic truths about what it means to be human.

John Holloway, perhaps the most poetic of contemporary Marxists, once proposed to write a book entitled Stop Making Capitalism.50 After all, he noted, even though we all act as if capitalism is some kind of behemoth towering over us, it's really just something we produce. Every morning we wake up and re-create capitalism. If one morning we woke up and all decided to create something else, then there wouldn't be capitalism anymore. There would be something else.

How is it that moral obligations between people come to be thought of as debts and as a result, end up justifying behavior that would otherwise seem utterly immoral?

Gradually, subtly, without anyone completely understanding the full implications of what was happening, what had been the essence of moral relations turned into the means for every sort of dishonest stratagem.

it is only by the threat of sticks, ropes, spears, and guns that one can tear people out of those endlessly complicated webs of relationship with others (sisters, friends, rivals Ã¢â'¬Â¦) that render them unique, and thus reduce them to something that can be traded.

No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.

If 37 percent to 40 percent of jobs are completely pointless, and at least 50 percent of the work done in nonpointless office jobs is equally pointless, we can probably conclude that at least half of all work being done in our society could be eliminated without making any real difference at all.

We could easily become societies of leisure and institute a twenty-hour workweek. Maybe even a fifteen-hour week. Instead, we find ourselves, as a society, condemned to spending most of our time at work, performing tasks that we feel make no difference in the world whatsoever.

To this day, indigenous societies incorporated into the global economy, from Bolivia to Taiwan, almost invariably frame their own traditions, as Marshall Sahlins puts it, by opposition to the white man's 'living in the way of money'.38

Paper money was debt money, and debt money was war money, and this has always remained the case.

It is the premise of this book that we live in a deeply bureau­cratic society. If we do not notice it, it is largely because bureau­cratic practices and requirements have become so all-pervasive that we can barely see them—or worse, cannot imagine doing things any other way.

If taxes represent our absolute debt to the society that created us, then the first step toward creating real money comes when we start calculating much more specific debts to society, systems of fines, fees, and penalties, or even debts we owe to specific individuals who we have wronged in some way, and thus to whom we stand in a relation of "sin" or

I]n most human societies, men tend to try, and usually succeed, to monopolize the most exciting, dramatic kinds of work—they'll set the fires that burn down the forest on which they plant their fields, for example, and, if they can, relegate to women the more monotonous and time-consuming tasks, such as weeding. One might say that men will always take for themselves the kind of jobs one can tell stories about afterward, and try to assign women the kind you tell stories during.

It was deployed by a clique of outright racists, who in 1859 – as the British Empire reached its height of power – took over the British Ethnological Society and called for the extermination of inferior peoples.