The Ascent of Humanity Quotes

“Apparently, boredom was not even a concept before the word was invented around 1760, along with the word “interesting.”20 The tide of boredom that has risen ever since coincides with the progress of the Industrial Revolution, hinting at a reason why it has, until recently, been an exclusively Western phenomenon. The reality that the factory system created was a mass-produced reality, a generic reality of standardized products, standardized roles, standardized tasks, and standardized lives. The more we came to live in that artificial reality, the more separate we became from the inherently fascinating realm of nature and community. Today, in a familiar pattern, we apply further technology to relieve the boredom that results from our immersion in a world of technology. We call it entertainment. Have you ever thought about that word? To entertain a guest means to bring him into your house; to entertain a thought means to bring it into your mind. To be entertained means to be brought into the television, the game, the movie. It means to be removed from your self and the real world. When a television show does this successfully, we applaud it as entertaining. Our craving for entertainment points to the impoverishment of our reality.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self

“To name is to dominate, to categorize, to subjugate and, quite literally, to objectify”
― Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity

“Certainly this is what many people feel during empty moments or deliberate experiments at meditation: a churning unease that says "I should be doing something". This cultural compulsion is so strong that even spiritual practices such as meditation and prayer are easily converted into just another thing to do, moments mortgaged to the campaign of improving life.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity

“The destructive potential of language is contained within the very nature of representation. Words, particularly nouns, force an infinite of unique objects and processes into a finite number of categories.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity

“Alphabets therefore encourage an atomistic conception of meaning and, by extension, of the universe”
― Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity

“The apparent objectivity of written words explains why people tend to believe what they read more than what they hear”
― Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity

“To most of the roles society offers, I say, “You are made for more than that.” We inhabit, in the words of Ivan Illich, “a world into which nobody fits who has not been crushed and molded by sixteen years of formal education.” The very idea of having to be at a job “on time” was appalling to early industrial laborers, who also refused the numbing repetitiveness of industrial work until the specter of starvation compelled them. What truly self-respecting person would spend a life marketing soda pop or chewing gum unless they were somehow broken by repeated threats to survival? To participate in our society’s depredations is an indignity. [...]

Very few of society’s usual positions can accommodate the enormous creative life-force of an unbroken human being. To keep the world under control demands that we bottle up this creative force and expend as much of it as possible in harmless ways—harmless to the status quo, that is, though not to the individual. All the addicts and alcoholics I have known—all of them!—are blessed (or cursed) with what seems to be an exceptional creative energy that is burned up in their addiction. Other people channel it into obsessions and compulsions, hobbies, nervous tics, excessive exercise, overeating, work, and the like, contributing to a more dilute version of the addict’s sense of life betrayed.

When we submit to lesser lives, we cannot avoid a sense of self-betrayal: that we are complicit in the plunder of our most precious possession. The roles society offers do not befit the divine beings that we are. It is not merely that a career as a retail clerk is beneath my dignity; it is beneath anyone’s dignity. No one is meant to do such work for very long.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity

“The more finely we divided and measured time, first into hours, then minutes and seconds, the less we seemed to have of it and the more the clock encroached upon and usurped sovereignty over life, until today we are all “on the clock.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self

“This book proclaims a revolution of a wholly different sort. It is a revolution in our very sense of self and, as a consequence, in our relationship to the world and each other. It will not and cannot arrive through a violent overthrow of the present regime, but only through its obsolescence”
― Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self

“Some of us may have experienced it when we find ourselves cooperating naturally and effortlessly, instruments of a purpose greater than ourselves that, paradoxically, makes us individual more and not less when we abandon ourselves to it. It is what musicians are referring to when they say "The music played the band”
― Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity

“We delude ourselves when we suppose than the main impact of speech lies in the words (as opposed to the voice), just as we delude ourselves when we cite logical reasons, which are actually rationalizations or justifications, for our decisions.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity

“Perhaps it is the increasing abstraction of ourselves from the world, to which language contributes, that explains why “fifteen years ago people could distinguish 300,000 sounds; today many children can’t go beyond 100,000 and the average is 180,000. Twenty years ago the average subject could detect 350 shades of a particular color. Today the number is 130.”13 By naming the world, abstracting it and reducing it, we impoverish our perception of it. Language”
― Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self