Lucía > Recent Status Updates

nunca se sabe si se perjudica a alguien hasta que su historia está completa, y eso tarda.

that this is what happens when we look at anyone’s life: how they are seen by their parents, friends, lovers, enemies, children; by passing strangers who suddenly notice a truth about them, or by long-term friends who hardly understand them at all. And then they look at us, in a manner different from how we look at ourselves. Well, getting our history wrong is part of being a person.

specific legacies: of words and phrases, of ideas which I couldn’t necessarily understand or reconcile, but which would follow me down the years.

I’m not sure she believed that happiness was the natural or even the desirable consequence of love. I think she believed that love was more about truth than happiness. I remember she once said, “Now that love is all in my past, I understand it better, both the clarity and the delirium.”

Love is always a mixture of the visceral and the theoretical. Of course, we do not recognise the theoretical as much —it is far too rooted in history and kinship. But this is why love is essentially artificial. I use that word in the best sense, of course. And what we call romantic love is the most artificial of all. And therefore the highest form, and also the most destructive.

a life, much as we would like it to be, does not amount to a narrative —or not a narrative such as we understand and expect.

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely, according to conscience, above all liberties.”
Milton

“Our minds are, as it were, sparks sent out by the sun, which is the mind of the universe, and that when they are kindled into flame they become aware of the future. Hence the Sibyls often say that their hearts burn within them and that a great flame is consuming them.”
Ammianus Marcellinus

It is by reason that one must convince and instruct men, not by blows, insults and torture.
Julian the Apostate

It is not about limits but interconnectedness – recovering a radical intimacy with other beings. (…)
It’s not just our economics that needs to change. We need to change the way we see the world, and our place within it.

If you start from the premise that all beings are the moral equivalent of persons, then you cannot simply take from them. To exploit nature as a ‘resource’ for the sake of human enrichment is morally reprehensible – similar to slavery or even to cannibalism. Instead, you have to enter into a relationship of reciprocity, in the spirit of the gift. You have to give at least as much as you receive.

degrowth is not about reducing GDP. Of course, slowing down unnecessary extraction and production may mean that GDP grows more slowly, or stops growing, or even declines. And if so, that’s OK. (…)
It is about shifting to a different kind of economy altogether – an economy that doesn’t need growth in the first place. To get there, we need to rethink everything

This is called ‘degrowth’ – a planned downscaling of energy and resource use to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just and equitable way.

Consider this: over the past 40 years, 28% of all new income from global GDP growth has gone to the richest 1% (all of whom are millionaires). This is astonishing, when you think about it. It means that nearly a third of all the labour we’ve rendered, all the resources we’ve extracted, and all the CO2 we’ve emitted over the past half-century has been done to make rich people richer.

it’s not growth that matters; it’s how income and resources are distributed.

Capitalism is so taken for granted that its proponents don’t even know how to justify it.

So why is it that, when it comes to our economic system, we have so readily swallowed the line that capitalism is the only possible option and we shouldn’t even think about creating something better?

We claim to celebrate creative, out-of-the-box thinking. Certainly we would never say of a smartphone or a piece of art, ‘This is the best gadget or painting that has ever been created and it will never be surpassed, and we shouldn’t even try!’ It would be naïve to underestimate the power of human creativity.

in a growth-oriented economy, efficiency improvements that could help us reduce our impact are harnessed instead to advance the objectives of growth – to pull ever-larger swathes of nature into circuits of extraction and production. It’s not our technology that’s the problem. It’s growth.

the very newspapers that carry harrowing stories about ecological collapse also report excitedly on how GDP is grow“ing every quarter, and the very politicians who wring their hands about climate breakdown also call dutifully for more industrial growth every year. The cognitive dissonance is striking.

Capitalism is fundamentally dependent on growth. If the economy doesn’t grow it collapses into recession: debts pile up, people lose their jobs and homes, lives shatter. Governments have to scramble to keep industrial activity growing in a perpetual bid to stave off crisis. So we’re trapped. Growth is a structural imperative – an iron law. And it has ironclad ideological support

Clean energy might help deal with emissions, but it does nothing to reverse deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion and mass extinction.

once we have 100% clean energy, what are we going to do with it? Unless we change how our economy works, we’ll keep doing exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: we’ll use it to power continued extraction and production, at an ever-increasing rate, placing ever-increasing pressure on the living world, because that’s what capitalism requires.

me pilló totalmente de sorpresa, desarmado, y asustado por lo fácil que era perderle la antipatía a quien se tiene por enemigo en cuanto deja de comportarse como tal.

Más vale que los soldados sean valientes que no que sean muchos.
Nicolás Maquiavelo
Del arte de la guerra

Los principios estratégicos y tácticos y la logística de la guerra son, en realidad, absurdamente simples: son las realidades las que hacen que la guerra sea tan complicada y tan difícil, y los historiadores, por lo general, las pasan por alto.
Lord Wavell

comprender los hechos históricos, que nunca son evidentes ni constantes, sino que conforman constructos sociales, culturales e históricos. Individuos o grupos distintos pueden asignar múltiples significados a un mismo fenómeno social. Estos significados no están grabados en piedra, sino que «se negocian» por medio de las normas históricas y culturales, las interacciones humanas y el desarrollo tecnocientífico.

Baruch Spinoza (...) advirtió que todos los esfuerzos encaminados a reprimir la conducta personal mediante la fuerza o las regulaciones jurídicas tienen más probabilidades de generar vicios y disolución que de reformarla.

Jacques Derrida captó cabalmente la ambigüedad inherente a la definición y la categorización de los estupefacientes: debemos concluir, escribe, que el concepto de droga es «un concepto no científico, instituido a partir de evaluaciones morales o políticas: lleva en sí mismo la norma o la prohibición. No comporta ninguna posibilidad de descripción ni de constatación, es un santo y seña».

La palabra «adicción» deriva del latín addictus, que designaba al ciudadano de la antigua Roma al que, por no poder hacer frente a sus deudas, los tribunales privaban de libertad y convertían en esclavo de su acreedor.6 Los estupefacientes ejercen un efecto similar: sus propiedades adictivas esclavizan a quienes los consumen.