More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Just as biology exploits substance for its own purposes, so does this social pattern called a city exploit biology for its own purposes. Just as a farmer raises cows for the sole purpose of devouring them, this pattern grows living human bodies for the sole purpose of devouring them. That is what the Giant really does. It converts accumulated biological energy into forms that serve itself.
He was on his way to India, done with this corporate pseudo-science, still pursuing truth, knowing that to find it he would have to get free of the Giant first.
you want to live in New York you should be willing to be lucky,” he meant not just “lucky” but willing to be lucky—that is, Dynamic. If you cling to some set static pattern, when opportunity comes you won’t take it. You have to hang loose, and when the time comes to be lucky, then be lucky: that’s Dynamic.
Science always contains an eraser, a mechanism whereby new Dynamic insight could wipe out old static patterns without destroying science itself.
“The pencil is mightier than the pen.”
No minority has a right to block a majority from conducting the legal business of the organization. No majority has a right to prevent a minority from peacefully attempting to become a majority.
Freedoms that save the saviors also save the degenerates and allow them to tear the whole society apart. But restrictions that stop the degenerates also stop the creative Dynamic forces of evolution.
When something new and Dynamic wants to come into the world it often looks like hell, but it can get born in New York. It can happen. It seems like it could happen anywhere but that’s not so. There has to be a certain kind of people who can look at it and say, “Hey, wait a second! That’s good!” without having to look over their shoulder to see if somebody else is saying the same thing. That’s rare. This is one of the few places in the world where people don’t ask whether something’s been approved somewhere else.
When you pass a lot of static laws to cut out the worst, the best goes with it, the sparkle disappears and what’s left is just a lot of suburban blandness.
It’s always been that way, millions of rich and poor all mixed together, skyscrapers and parks, diamond tiaras in the windows and drunken vomit on the street. It
There was no precedent for it. They really had no guidelines for what to do with themselves.
There wasn’t anything she wanted to do. That was the trouble. She didn’t want to have anything more to do with people. She was tired of people. She just wanted to go off somewhere and be by herself and all alone.
and vanishes around a comer. Then the corridor becomes just another hotel corridor again.
The trouble with paying high prices for places with a view like this was that the first time it’s wonderful but it gets more and more static until you hardly notice it’s there. The boat was better, where the view keeps changing all the time.
He was really on top of the world now, he supposed … at the opposite end of some kind of incredible social spectrum from where he had been twenty years ago, bouncing through South Chicago in that hard-sprung police truck on the way to the insane asylum. Was it any better now? He honestly didn’t know. He remembered two things
You would think that fame and fortune would bring a sense of closeness to other people, but quite the opposite happens. You split into two people, who they think you are and who you really are, and that produces the Zen hell.
Without this celebrity force, advanced complex human societies might be impossible. Even simple ones.
High school. High school was really the place for celebrity. That’s what had those jocks out playing football every afternoon.
Anyway there it was: another whole field Phædrus would never have time to study—the anthropology of celebrity.
The Victorians represented the last really static social pattern we’ve had. And maybe someone who feels his life is too chaotic, too fluid, might look back at them enviously.
Biological man does not create his society any more than soil “creates” a tree.
Its original purpose had been all but lost under the gee-gaws and bric-a-brac they had laid upon it. Ultimately their minds became the same way.
Wilson belonged in both worlds, Victorian society and the new intellectual world of the twentieth century: the only university professor ever to be elected president of the United States.
He knew that intellectually contrived technological devices had increased in number and complexity, but he didn’t think the ability to enjoy these devices had increased in proportion.
Our scientific description of nature is always culturally derived.
The selection of which inorganic patterns to observe and which to ignore is made on the basis of social patterns of value, or when it is not, on the basis of biological patterns of value.
Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are social and intellectual values.
All my New York friends were in the negative nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytic reasons,” Kerouac wrote, “but Dean” (the hero of the book) “just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn’t care one way or the other.”
Japanese Zen is attached to social disciplines so meticulous they make the Puritans look almost degenerate.
static and intellectual
meant to say social and intellectual ?
These subject-object patterns were never designed for the job of governing society. They’re not doing it. When they’re put in the position of controlling society, of setting moral standards and declaring values, and when they then declare that there are no values and no morals, the result isn’t progress. The result is social catastrophe.
It says that what is meant by “human rights” is usually the moral code of intellect-vs.-society, the moral right of intellect to be free of social control.
Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level’s role in keeping the biological level under control.
Intellectuals must find biological behavior, no matter what its ethnic connection, and limit or destroy destructive biological patterns with complete moral ruthlessness, the way a doctor destroys germs, before those biological patterns destroy civilization
It’s the lifeboat problem. If you get too involved with too many people with too many problems they drag you under. You don’t save them. They sink you.
That was the hardest thing to deal with during his own commitment. Not the insanity. That came naturally. The hardest thing to deal with was the righteousness of the sane.
The sinister thing that struck the most fear in him was what they’d do in the name of kindness.
He told the sane what they wanted to hear and kept his real thoughts to himself.
There ought to be some halfway mixture of chaos and stability.
It’s a derivative, secondary field, a sometimes parasitic growth that likes to think it controls its host by analyzing and intellectualizing its host’s behavior.
Anyway, the reason Phædrus bought these books on James was that it was necessary to bone up a little in order to protect his Metaphysics of Quality against attack.
It smelled more like some Victorian religious propagandist trying to smuggle God into the laboratory data. They used to do that to try to counteract Darwin.
James was the godfather of William James Sidis, the child prodigy who could speak five languages at the age of five and who thought colonial democracy came from the Indians.
A philosophologist would have been mildly contemptuous of such a discussion because it had no “importance,” that is, no body of philosophical writings existed about it. But to a creative philosopher like James the question was like catnip.
They were always playing the role of priests saving heretics.
You have as much chance convincing a psychiatrist that the intellectual order he enforces is rotten as you have of convincing a cop that the social order he supports is rotten. If they ever believed you they’d have to quit their jobs.
You have to do a first-class acting job and not allow any little glances of resentment to get in there. If you do they may catch you at it and you may be worse off than if you hadn’t tried.
In the brujo’s case anthropologists would have sent him up north to the Cheyenne.
In Terrys San Fran
The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.… Forms and significances which seem obvious to an outsider will be denied outright by those who carry out the patterns;
Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
