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Quote by Claude Lévi-Strauss

“The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most “savage” or “barbarous” of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.”

Quote by Claude Lévi-Strauss

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Race et histoire

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Claude Lévi-Strauss

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“Fatally, the term 'barbarian' is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses to acknowledge any ranking rules or hierarchy. Whoever wishes to understand the twentieth century must always keep the barbaric factor in view. Precisely in more recent modernity, it was and still is typical to allow an alliance between barbarism and success before a large audience, initially more in the form of insensitive imperialism, and today in the costumes of that invasive vulgarity which advances into virtually all areas through the vehicle of popular culture. That the barbaric position in twentieth-century Europe was even considered the way forward among the purveyors of high culture for a time, extending to a messianism of uneducatedness, indeed the utopia of a new beginning on the clean slate of ignorance, illustrates the extent of the civilizatory crisis this continent has gone through in the last century and a half - including the cultural revolution downwards, which runs through the twentieth century in our climes and casts its shadow ahead onto the twenty-first.”

“The Absolute can exercise its potential only through non-accidental accidents or chances. Chance, although almost accidental, is not accidental. In a predetermined world, chances would not be possible. Even if chances existed, they would only be appearances of chances and not real chances. In a world (universe) established based on its full potential, chance is compatible with determinism. This almost absurd statement becomes logical if observed from the point of view of the potential of the Absolute, which is predetermined. Absolute is not only absolute but also capable of infinity by exercising its infinite potential.”