Ipsa

“I felt a downright fear of the mathematics class. The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn’t even know what numbers really were. They were not flowers, not animals, not fossils; they were nothing that could be imagined, mere quantities that resulted from counting. To my confusion these quantities were now represented by letters, which signified sounds, so that it became possible to hear them, so to speak. Oddly enough, my classmates could handle these things and found them self-evident. No one could tell me what numbers were, and I was unable even to formulate the question.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“In his airport bestseller from 2018, Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker, the leading voice in the choir of bourgeois optimism, revelled in the ‘conquest of infectious disease’ all over the globe – Europe, America, but above all the developing countries – as proof that ‘a rich world is a healthier world’, or, in transparent terms, that a world under the thumb of capital is the best of all possible worlds. ‘ “Smallpox was an infectious disease” ’, Pinker read on Wikipedia – ‘yes, “smallpox was” ’; it exists no more, and the diseases not yet obliterated are being rapidly decimated. Pinker closed the book on the subject by confidently predicting that no pandemic would strike the world in the foreseeable future. Had he cared to read the science, he would have known that waves from a rising tide were already crashing against the fortress he so dearly wished to defend.

He could, for instance, have opened the pages of Nature, where a team of scientists in 2008 analysed 335 outbreaks of ‘emerging infectious diseases’ since 1940 and found that their number had ‘risen significantly over time’.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“वह कैसे भविष्यवाणी कर सकती है कि जिस स्वर्ग की हमने आकाश में कल्पना की है, वह उस दिन ढह जाएगा यदि वह किसी तरह यह स्वर्ग बन गया? स्वर्ग में स्वर्ग और अधोलोक में नर्क को स्वर्ग-नरक के आधार पर व्यापार करने के लिए धरती पर स्वर्ग और नर्क की आवश्यकता है। यह आवश्यकता राजा-एंडी और दास-स्वामी के बीच के अंतर से पूरी होती है”
― Rahul Sankrityayan, वोल्गा से गंगा

“The idiot is a modern-day heretic. Etymologically, heresy means ‘choice’. Thus, the heretic is one who commands free choice·, the courage to deviate from orthodoxy. As a heretic, the idiot represents a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus. The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider. Today, in fight of increasingly coercive conformism, it is more urgent than ever to heighten heretical consciousness.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power