Quotes

One hideous symptom of severe depression is that it is impossible both to do anything and to do nothing

Hurons believe that our souls have other desires, which are, as it were, inborn and concealed […] They believe that our soul makes these natural desires known by means of dreams, which are its language. Accordingly, when these desires are accomplished, it is satisfied; but, on the contrary, if it be not granted what it desires, it becomes angry, and not only does not give its body the good and the happiness that it wished to procure for it, but often it also revolts against the body, causing various diseases, and even death.

Much though later European authors liked to imagine them as innocent children of nature, the indigenous populations of North America were in fact heirs to their own, long intellectual and political history – one that had taken them in a very different direction to Eurasian philosophers and which, arguably, ended up having a profound influence on conceptions of freedom and equality, not just in Europe but everywhere else as well.

It’s simply assumed, [...] that once societies scale up they will need, as Robin Dunbar puts it, ‘chiefs to direct, and a police force to ensure that social rules are adhered to’; or as Jared Diamond says, ‘large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws. In other words, if you want to live in a large-scale society you need a sovereign and an administration. It is more or less taken for granted that some kind of monopoly of coercive force (again, the ability to threaten everyone with weapons) is ultimately required in order to do this. Writing systems, in turn, are almost invariably assumed to have developed in the service of impersonal bureaucratic states, which were the result of the whole process. [...] none of this is really true, and predictions based on these assumptions almost invariably turn out to be wrong.

democracy as we have come to know it is effectively a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced largely to onlookers. [...] the political philosophers of later Greek cities did not actually consider elections a democratic way of selecting candidates for public office at all. The democratic method was sortition, or lottery, much like modern jury duty.

We like to tell ourselves that Europeans introduced the Americas not just to these agents of destruction but also to modern industrial democracy, ingredients for which were nowhere to be found there, not even in embryo. All this supposedly came as a single cultural package: advanced metallurgy, animal-powered vehicles, alphabetic writing systems and a certain penchant for freethinking that is seen as necessary for technological progress. ‘Natives’, in contrast, are assumed to have existed in some sort of alternative, quasi-mystical universe. They could not, by definition, be arguing about political constitutions or engaging in processes of sober deliberation over decisions that changed the course of world history; and if European observers report them doing so, they must either be mistaken, or were simply projecting on to ‘Indians’ their own ideas about democratic governance, even when those ideas were hardly practised in Europe itself. [...] this way of reading history would have been quite alien to Enlightenment philosophers, who were more inclined to think their ideals of freedom and equality owed much to the peoples of the New World and were by no means certain if those ideals were at all compatible with industrial advance. We are dealing, again, with powerful modern myths.

In some regions, we now know, cities governed themselves for centuries without any sign of the temples and palaces that would only emerge later; in others, temples and palaces never emerged at all. In many early cities, there is simply no evidence of either a class of administrators or any other sort of ruling stratum. In others, centralized power seems to appear and then disappear. It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization, and never did.

A founding block in that old edifice of human social evolution was the allocation of a specific place in history to foraging societies, which was to be the prelude to an ‘Agricultural Revolution’ that supposedly changed everything about the course of history. The job of foragers in this conventional narrative is to be all that farming is not (and thus also to explain, by implication, what farming is). [...] almost nothing about this established narrative matches the available evidence.

the average oppressed medieval serf still worked less than a modern nine-to-five office or factory worker, and the hazelnut gatherers and cattle herders who dragged great slabs to build Stonehenge almost certainly worked, on average, less than that. It’s only very recently that even the richest countries have begun to turn such things around (obviously, most of us are not working as many hours as Victorian stevedores, though the overall decline in working hours is probably not as dramatic as we think). And for much of the world’s population, things are still getting worse instead of better.

if we think humans are different from each other now, it’s largely illusory; and even such differences as do exist are utterly trivial and cosmetic, compared with what must have been happening in Africa during most of prehistory.

When it came to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty – or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology – indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century European ones.

When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was to be brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness.

[A] lot of Baby-Boomers have found themselves unprecedentedly wealthy, and in buying up nursing homes, care homes, you effectively had a means by which to unlock this wealth because you sort of have got access to this money printing machine because people will sell their homes to go in to a care home. They had no real choice but to then be locked into escalating fees. And so a lot of the Baby Boomers who might have considered themselves the kind of winners of the political and economic shifts that have occurred over the last forty years, they had sort of underestimated the extent to which there where these apex predators even higher up in the food chain waiting to tap into the capital or the wealth that they had accumulated. Wealth that was for better or worse ultimately destined […] to their children and their grand-children and so on in the shape of inheritance that was instead rediverted to Wall Street firms, to private equity funds and so on.

Harris and her party settled into a somewhat conservative pitch as the party of America before Trump. Perhaps the radical thought of a black woman as president made this approach seem prudent. But for many Arab and Muslim Americans, “America before Trump” meant returning to a time when FBI informants sought to entrap them, when police agencies spied on their mosques, and calling a presidential candidate a Muslim was a slur. Seemingly blind to this trauma, the Harris campaign followed up the Democratic National Convention snub by deploying Bill Clinton to Michigan. There, in the state with the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, Clinton told an audience that Israel had been forced “to kill civilians” by Hamas, and that the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea belonged to the Jewish people because “they were there first.” Meanwhile, Harris welcomed her endorsement by Dick Cheney, who was not a very popular vice president but was a zealous defender of torturing Muslims. The cumulative message was not “We don’t need your vote.” It was “We don’t value your life.”

[A] company called Automated Currency Instruments has attempted to bridge the separation of bank machine and gambling machine in a different way—by devising an ATM that “becomes part of the entertainment experience in the casino.” In this convergence of banking and play, “entertaining displays on the [ATM] unit keep the patron interested and entertained while he or she is waiting for the transaction to complete.” Instead of endowing gambling machines with ATM functionality, this system endows ATMs with ludic functionality, such that the very act of financial withdrawal becomes an act of play.

Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree: And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.

at the maternity ward, 300 terrorists were born