Quotes About Society

While paper money will no doubt remain in circulation as a residual medium of exchange for the poor and computer-illiterate, money for high-value transactions will be privatized.

There is a striking analogy between the situation at the end of the fifteenth century, when life had become thoroughly saturated by organized religion, and that of today, when the world has become saturated with politics.

The Church engrossed large amounts of capital in unproductive ways, imposing burdens that limited the output of society and suppressed commerce. These burdens, like those imposed by the nation-state today, were numerous. We know what happened to organized religion in the wake of the Gunpowder Revolution: it created strong incentives to downsize religious institutions and lower their costs.

citizens of the pale

DECIPHERING THE LOGIC OF EXTORTION To recognize the megapolitical implications of the current shift to the Information Age, you have to strip away the cant and focus on the real logic of violence in society. This is like stripping away the layers of an overripe onion. It may bring tears to your eyes, but don't look away.

For better or worse, the societies of the twenty-first century are likely to be more unequal than those we have lived in during the twentieth.

The average North American has probably lavished one hundred times more attention on O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky than he has on the new microtechnologies that are poised to antiquate his job and subvert the political system he depends on for unemployment compensation.

The control of violence is the most important dilemma every society faces.

The tendency for more market-like property rights and relationships to develop near the top of an economic hierarchy or, in rarer cases, across the whole economy, as societies emerged from poverty, is an important characteristic of social organization. It is equally important to note that the most common organization of agricultural society historically has been essentially feudal, with market relations at the top and the closed village system at the bottom.

Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process.

WICKED is good

What's actually wrong with that Ben guy? He doesn't even look human anymore.

culture is as much an infrastructure as it is ideas.

the character of American civilization is a bundle of contradictions,

pluralism today—at least in America—exists without a dominant culture,

idealism ignores the way culture is generated,

idealism mistakenly imputes a logic and rationality to culture

culture is not neutral in relation to power but a form of power.

The cultural capital American Christianity has amassed simply cannot be leveraged where it matters most.

merely engaging the culture implies the issue and exercise of power.

theology moves in the opposite direction of social theory,

There is no way to be truly great in this world. We are all impaled on the crook of conditioning.

My purpose in life does not include a hankering to charm society.

In our technology-dominated world, the value of literature is getting harder and harder to maintain, but it must be maintained if we're going to have any humanity left at all.