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Chain-Gang All-Stars

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Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

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“Early in Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige", a magician performs a trick with a small bird which disappears in a cage flattened on the table. A small boy in the audience starts to cry, distraught that the bird was killed. The magician approaches him and finishes the trick, gently producing a live bird out of his hand - but the boy is not convinced, insisting that this must be another bird, the dead bird's brother. After the show, we see the magician alone, putting a dead bird squashed into the trash where many other dead birds lie. The boy was right. The trick could not be performed without violence and death, but it relies for its effectiveness upon concealing the squalid, broken residue of what has been sacrificed, disposing of it where no one who matters will see. Therein resides the basic premise of a dialectical notion of progress: when a newer higher stage arrives, there must be a squished bird somewhere.”

PhilosophyPoliticsProgressSocietyZizekOn Progress
Book:Against Progress
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“Society is, indeed, a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure; but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

Society
Author:Edmund Burke
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“True progress occurs in two steps: first, we make a step towards actualizing what we consider progress, and when we become aware of the squished bird that was the victim of this progress, we then accordingly redefine our notion of progress. It is in this sense that I define myself as a moderately-conservative communist: in order to survive we need a radical re-arrangement of our entire way of life towards some form of global solidarity and cooperation, but the urgent need to achieve this goal brings new dangers, so we should act with urgency and care.”

PoliticsProgressSocietyZizekOn Progress
Author:Žižek, Slavoj
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“As to individuals, other methods were employed with them, in order so thoroughly to disunite every party, and even every family, that no concert, order, or effect, might appear in any future opposition. And in this manner an Administration without connection with the people, or with one another, was first put in possession of Government.”

SocietyResistanceDisunity
Book:Select Works of Edmund Burke, Volume 1: Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents / The Two Speeches on America
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“Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites - kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers - who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was plowing fields and carrying water buckets.”

PoliticsHistorySocietyAgricultureElitismFarminging
Book:Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
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“Here’s one way you might punctuate and structure the excerpt for clarity: --- “Life is terrifying. None of us have a rule book. None of us know what we’re doing here, so the easiest way to stare reality in the face and not utterly lose your shit is to believe that you have control over it. If you believe you have control, then you believe that you’re at the top. And if you’re at the top, then people—well, they’ve got to be somewhere lower, right? Every species does this—does it again and again and again. It doesn’t matter if they do it to themselves, another species, or someone they created.” She jutted her chin toward Tack. “You studied history. You know this. Everybody’s history is one long slog of all the horrible shit we’ve done to each other.” “A lot of it, yes,” Tack said, “but there are good things too. There’s art, and cities, and science—all the things we’ve discovered, all the things we’ve learned and made better.” “All the things made better for some people. Nobody has ever figured out how to make things better for everybody. That’s why we have to keep talking to each other and listening,” Pepper said. Tack nodded human style and said. “And listening.”

HistorySociety
Book:A Closed and Common Orbit
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“Life is terrifying. None of us have a rule book. None of us know what we’re doing here, so the easiest way to stare reality in the face and not utterly lose your shit is to believe that you have control over it. If you believe you have control, then you believe that you’re at the top. And if you’re at the top, then people—well, they’ve got to be somewhere lower, right? Every species does this—does it again and again and again. It doesn’t matter if they do it to themselves, another species, or someone they created.” She jutted her chin toward Tack. “You studied history. You know this. Everybody’s history is one long slog of all the horrible shit we’ve done to each other.” “A lot of it, yes,” Tack said, “but there are good things too. There’s art, and cities, and science—all the things we’ve discovered, all the things we’ve learned and made better.” “All the things made better for some people. Nobody has ever figured out how to make things better for everybody. That’s why we have to keep talking to each other and listening,” Pepper said. Tack nodded human style and said. “And listening.”

HistorySocietyPerspective
Book:A Closed and Common Orbit
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