“The astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves?”
Whenever people try to undercut the independence of or science or journalism, for example, we see the countermovement of functional de-differentiation. The battle between creationism (or the more respectable “intelligent design”) and the theory of evolution has been an attack on the functional differentiation of science; it’s effort to subordinate science to religion. A closely related movement has been the movement away from public schooling in the form of fundamentalist schools and religion-based homeschooling, which seeks to subordinate education to religion.
There is a kind of conformity of vision in cognitive nonconformity, which I have pointed out before. It has always suggested to me that, although
In “The semantics of twenty-first century socialism and the Venezuelan political system,” José Javier Blanco Rivero writes The French philosopher [Claude Lefort] explains that in the
The idea that the president “runs the country” is just nonsense, and our president is certainly not, and never has been, “the leader of the free world.” Speaking of leaders in this way just serves to reassure people that there is someone in charge, someone with a plan, some God figure who is taking care of things. But there isn’t.
June 12, 2016 I like reading and listening to David Brooks. I don’t agree with everything he says, but at least he has common sense
Social Systems Theory 