The Self Under Siege Quotes

“Mass culture is enlightenment in reverse. Its goal is precisely to wipe out that last little garrison of human autonomy.”
― Rick Roderick, The Self Under Siege: Philosophy In The Twentieth Century

“The real question I am asking here is the one Marcuse asked in the sixties. How does a way of life break down? How does it break down. And Marcuse doesn’t give the pat Marxist answer, which means economically, and we ought to be glad that that pat Marxist answer is false because if a society could be driven to ruin by debt, you know, the way a lot of people said the Russians – the Soviet Union – fell because it was broke. Let’s hope that’s not true [laughs] since we are broke, let’s hope that’s false. As a generalisation, we had better hope it is false.

How do they break down? Well, here there is an analogy – for me – between the social and the self under siege, in many ways. In many ways, not in a few, and some of the symptoms we see around us that our own lives are breaking down and the lives of our society is a generalised cynicism and scepticism about everything. I don’t know how to characterise this situation, I find no parallel to it in human history. The scepticism and cynicism about everything is so general, and I think it’s partly due to this thing I call banalisation, and it’s partly due to the refusal and the fear of dealing with complexity. Much easier to be a cynic than to deal with complexity. Better to say everything is bullshit than to try to look into enough things to know where you are. Better to say everything is just… silly, or pointless, than to try to look into systems of this kind of complexity and into situations of the kind of complexity and ambiguity that we have to deal with now.”
― Rick Roderick, The Self Under Siege: Philosophy In The Twentieth Century

“the postmodern trajectory itself is a rather humorous joke on the human race which laboured for millennia to reduce working hours in order to produce leisure so we could enjoy this very leisure that then turns in a kind of vengeful act against us absorbing our leisure time, which was to be our living time, into time now spent in the service of what can only be called this inhuman spectacle”
― Rick Roderick, The Self Under Siege: Philosophy In The Twentieth Century

“his theory... his view is about the destiny of the human race on this planet. about whether we will ever learn to make sense, or whether we'll just keep making money and madness. it's a real big question.”
― Rick Roderick, The Self Under Siege: Philosophy In The Twentieth Century