As undefined forms become transformed through frantic and undefined practice, the viewer is left with a new agenda of the inaccuracies of our world. In my spare time, I enjoy nighttime and staring into mirrors.
"Within a repressive society, even progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to the degree to which they accept the rules of the game. To take a most controversial case: the exercise of political rights (such as voting, letter-writing to the press, to Senators, etc., protest-demonstrations with a priori renunciation of counterviolence) in a society of total administration serves to strengthen this administration by testifying to the existence of democratic liberties which, in reality, have changed their content and lost their effectiveness."
"I believe that in art, literature and music, insights and truth are expressed which cannot be communicated in ordinary language…and that with these truths, the image of an entirely new dimension is opened, which is either repressed or tabooed in reality. Namely the image of a human existence and of nature no longer confined within the norms of a repressive reality principle but really striving for their fulfillment and gratification even at the price of death and catastrophe."
The Russians have succeeded in one thing. They have sold the world the idea that they represent socialism and the ideas of Marx. And we have done the greatest service to their propaganda by agreeing that that’s what it is.
It’s a bummer that Fromm said this in 1958 and it still exemplifies the popular view of what socialism is.
"The complete emancipation from any and every belief in the existence of a power which is independent of history, yet governs it, is a lack that is part of the most primitive intellectual clear sightedness and truthfulness of modern man. And yet it is enormously difficult to avoid making a new religion of this very absence. As long as the horrors of life and death … have not been reduced by the efforts of a just society, even the spirit free of superstition will seek refuge from its distress in a mood which has something of the reassuring quiet of the temple, though that temple be built in defiance of the gods. In an era where human society is no further advanced than at present, even the most progressive are philistines somewhere in their souls. To the extent that men cannot help themselves, they need fetishes, even if they are those of their wretchedness and desolation."
