The River

Monday, December 12, 2005

Ding!

Ask not for whom the blog rings...

"Something . . . happened to me during the late 1980s," Derrick Jensen reflects in his new book [The Culture of Make Believe], "I thought I was insane. Then, as now, so much of what I saw around me made no sense. Our culture is killing the planet, yet most of us don't seem to care . . . What seemed profoundly important to me seemed of no importance whatsoever to most people, and what seemed important to so many people seemed trivial to me. I couldn't wrap my mind around it" (pp. 139; 141).

Amazon marketplace discussion

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the personalities of the people who surround us, debord believes, are not their own, but are acquired through images made by pop culture, which replace whatever the person might have become free from these mediated images. they identify (and this usually happens unconsciously, so maybe this isn't as 'radical' a thought as it might at first seem)with characters on television, in movies, and believe that the cultural lie of this or that period is the absolute and metaphysical truth of existence, ie, everyone goes to school, tries to fit in, is happy, gets a family, tries to have a lot of friends, etc. the reason people reject debord's ideas is because they think of them as too radical and abstract, like marx. and yet all this is chillingly consistent with the concrete, everyday reality of our lives.think about most of the people you know and see if you find any of these herdlike qualities in them, and if you're looking at things truthfully, a bell rings.

different Amazon marketplace discussion


I dunno, maybe I'm obsessed...

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