Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Generosity and charity militates against the proliferation of greed, whether it takes the form of kindness to one's neighbor, creating a progressive system of job sharing, or supporting state-funded welfare programs. When the politics of greed become a cultural norm, all acts of charity are wrongly seen as suspect and are represented as a gesture of the weak.”

“The will to sacrifice on behalf of another, always present when there is love, is annihilated by greed. No doubt this explains our nation's willingness to deprive poor citizens of government-funded social services while huge sums of money fuel the ever-growing culture of violent imperialism.”

“Greed is rightly considered a "deadly sin" because it erodes the moral values that encourage us to care for the common good. Greed violates the spirit of connectedness and community that is natural to human survival. It wipes out individual recognition of the needs and concerns of everyone, replacing this awareness with harmful self- centeredness.”

“Emotional reproduction naturalises the world as it is and makes it appear as a desirable state of things — as long as we make the right choices and behave in the right way. If we are unhappy, we just need to manage our feelings better.”

“It is through emotional reproduction that we come to invest emotionally in the right objects and the right futures. Through the privatisation of emotional reproduction, bad feeling becomes individualised. Emotional reproduction serves to smooth over malcontent with the dominant order, creating a belief that we can and should have satisfying emotional lives under capitalism.”

“Part of the work of emotional reproduction is producing ideological investment. This is reproduction in the sense of continually recreating an attachment to the world as we know it. Ideology depends on such emotional investment — it is not just a mental belief but a way of feeling and relating to the world. Ideology would not stick without feeling. To some degree, ideology is feeling.”

“When greedy consumption is the order of the day, dehumanization becomes acceptable. Then, treating people like objects is not only acceptable but is required behavior. It's the culture of exchange, the tyranny of marketplace values. Those values inform attitudes about love.”

“To know genuine love we have to invest time and commitment. As John Welwood reminds us in Journey of the Heart: The Path of Conscious Love, "dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love — which is to transform us." ”

“Confronted with a seemingly unmanageable emotional universe, some people embraced a new Protestant work ethic, convinced that a successful life would be measured by how much money one made and the goods one could buy with this money. The good life was no longer to be found in community and connection, it was to be found in accumulation and the fulfillment of hedonistic, materialistic desire.”

“Emotional reproduction is also the reproduction of social hierarchy, where those who are already comfortable have their needs met to a much greater extent than those at the bottom of the social hierarchy.”

“They are asked to put the emotional needs of others ahead of their own or, even better, make the fulfilment of the needs of others the cause of their own happiness. This is reproduced in many service jobs, where the enjoyment of caring for others becomes a precondition for doing the job well.”

“Emotional labour tends to cater to those at the top of the social hierarchy, as the feelings of those with higher status are often granted greater importance than the feelings of subordinated people. This is especially true of the creation of positive feeling, which, as Hochschild argues, tends to move upwards in social hierarchies...subordinates...owe more emotional labour than dominant partners in relationships."

“Emotion has an important role to play in shoring up our sense of identity and subjectivity. Subjectivity under capitalism is fundamentally bound to hierarchy. The notion of a coherent subject who is the master of his own capacities is tied to various forms of material and social inequality, as this form of subjectivity is more available to bourgeois white men.”

“Workers often cannot expect emotional wellbeing or satisfaction from their own work, but emotional reproduction seeks to make up for the hurt, boredom, and stress of life under capitalism.”

“Divorce rates were the primary indicators that marriage was not a safe haven. And mounting public awareness of the extent to which domestic violence and all manner of child abuse were widespread clearly revealed that the patriarchal family could not offer sanctuary.”

“folks turned inward to family and relationships to find again a sense of connection and stability. Coming face to face with rampant lovelessness in the home created an overwhelming sense of cultural brokenheartedness. Not only did individuals despair about their capacity to change the world, they began to feel...despair about their ability to make basic positive changes in the emotional fabric of their daily lives.”

“Americans were asked to sacrifice the vision of freedom, love, and justice and put in its place the worship of materialism and money. This vision of society upheld the need for imperialistic war and injustice. A great feeling of despair gripped our nation when the leaders who had led struggles for peace, justice, and love were assassinated.”

“Our nation fell into the trap of pathological narcissism in the wake of wars that brought economic bounty while undermining the vision of freedom and justice essential to sustaining democracy.”

“In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess.”

“Although we live in close contact with neighbors, masses of people in our society feel alienated, cut off, alone. Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair. Yet they are the outcome of life in a culture where things matter more than people. Materialism creates a world of narcissism in which the focus of life is solely on acquisition and consumption.”

“To live our lives based on the principles of a love ethic (showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate), we have to be courageous. Learning how to face our fears is one way we embrace love. Our fear may not go away, but it will not stand in the way.”

“Patriarchy, like any system of domination (for example, racism), relies on socializing everyone to believe that in all human relations there is an inferior and a superior party, one person is strong, the other weak, and that it is therefore natural for the powerful to rule over the powerless. To those who support patriarchal thinking, maintaining power and control is acceptable by whatever means.”

“All scholarship in the field of cultural studies focusing on a critical analysis of the mass media, whether pro or con, indicates that images of violence, particularly those that involve action and gore, capture the attention of viewers more than still, peaceful images.”

“Were we, collectively, to demand that our mass media portray images that reflect love's reality, it would happen. This change would radically alter our culture. The mass media dwells on and perpetuates an ethic of domination and violence because our image makers have more intimate knowledge of these realities than they have with the realities of love.”

“...imprisoned by fear, we can move toward a love ethic only by the process of conversion. Philosopher Cornel West states that "a politics of conversion" restores our sense of hope. Calling attention to the pervasive nihilism in our society he reminds us: "Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses, it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one's soul." ”

“When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.”

“Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In our society we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination.”

“I am especially fond of the biblical passage in the first epistle of John, which tells us: "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love."”

“To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man." Faith enables us to move past fear. We can collectively regain our faith in the transformative power of love by cultivating courage, the strength to stand up for what we believe in, to be accountable both in word and deed.”

“I have tried to show that love is the only sane and satisfactory response to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. Indeed, to speak of love is not 'preaching,' for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need in every human being”