VBV

“Ungenerous to the losers and oppressive to the winners, merit becomes a tyrant.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“The word “evil” contains nothing pathetic, nothing horrible, nothing sublime, it is objective and dry, it precisely indicates what it is actually about, it is ordinary, it is the same as the word “stone” or the word “cloud”; it's accurate matched to the subject, unmistakably falls into its reality, [...] Evil is a thing, it is as simple as a thing.

But you don’t want to hear about it. While facing the destruction you will keep repeating with manic persistence: it is so, it became so, it just became so, but it could have been different: evil is an event that happens by chance and anywhere, but if someone can stand with resolve on its way — it can be prevented. The end of the world will find you in full confidence that the end of the world is an accident. After all, you don't believe in the devil.

Seeing unnecessary cruelty, seeing joyless and aimless destruction, you don't even think about the devil. You have so many explanations and so many names at hand to explain away every aspect of the problem. You have your Freud to talk about the aggressive drive and death instinct, you have your Jaspers who tells you about the “passion for the night,” [...] you have yours Nietzsche, you have your psychologists with their “will to power”. You know how to hide a case behind words under the pretext of revealing it.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Rozmowy z Diablem

“The tool produces according to human needs, the machine regardless of human needs.”
― Brian Keeble, Art For Whom and For What?

“So we perhaps begin to see that work is not something we must be freed from - indeed cannot be freed from unless we are freeed entirely from action - but something we must engage in in such way and at such level that it is revealing of our deepest nature. It must contribute to our spiritual life while serving our bodily needs.
The very opposite of this case with the industrial pattern of work which is part and parcel of a social ethos that continually holds out the promise of leisure as a reward for the time and effort put into work. But this escape to a state of freedom from work is not offered as something that will serve our spiritual needs. Far from it.”
― Brian Keeble, Art For Whom and For What?