The portrayal of reality in the state-controlled press and popular entertainment is harmonious and pleasant. Justice, in the narratives approved for public consumption, is always served. Goodness alwa...
When times are not so prosperous, we think at least our successful career will save us and our families from failure and despair. We are attracted, against our skepticism, to the idea that poverty wil...
When it shall be said in any country in the world, ‘My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are no...
We are in the grip of what Kierkegaard called sickness unto death - the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement.
The sweats teach you that you can’t carry grudges, you can’t carry hatred in your heart. It’ll make you sick, so you have to learn to forgive,
The decision by the ruling elites in ancient Rome—dominated by a bloated military and a corrupt oligarchy, much like the United States—to strangle the vain and idiotic Emperor Commodus in his bath in...
The cornerstone of control is the state’s system of surveillance, exposed by Snowden. I saw the effect of blanket surveillance as a reporter in the Stasi sate of Communist East Germany. I was followed...
Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law...
Resistance is not, fundamentally, political. It is cultural and spiritual. It is about finding meaning and expression in the transcendent and the incongruities of life. Music, poetry, theater and art...
Our return to an image-based culture means the destruction of the abstract thought made possible by a literate, print-based society. Image-based societies do not grasp or cope with ambiguity, nuance,...
In rallies like those in Johnson’s Ohio tour, friends, neighbors, colleagues and family members who do not conform to the ideology are gradually dehumanized. They are tainted with the despised charact...
How much of a conscious goal do you think that is at the upper levels of organizing with, say, somebody like Rod Parsley? I think they’re completely conscious of it. The level of manipulation is quite...
Christian activists in Massachusetts are frequent guests at Christian conferences, where they speak of their persecution by homosexual radicals. This cultivated sense of persecution—cultivated by thos...
Blind adherence to an absolute leader, especially one who permits violence, hands followers a license to unleash hidden, prohibited lusts and passions usually kept locked within the human heart. It pe...
Bankrupt corporate capitalism is on its way to bankrupting the socialism that is trying to save it,
Armed combatants in war, who surrender their individuality and usually their capacity for moral choice, become part of a herd of dehumanized killers. Sex in wartime is reduced to its crudest biologica...
A society convulsed by disorder and chaos, as Voegelin pointed out, elevates and even celebrates the morally degenerate, those who are cunning, manipulative, deceitful, and violent.
A march held in Sacramento, California, in June 2016 by the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party to protest attacks at Trump rallies ended with a number of people stabbed.114 Police accused counter-pr...
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books, Neil Postman wrote: What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell fear...
We once had within our capitalist democracy liberal institutions—the press, labor unions, political third parties, civic and church groups, public broadcasting, well-funded public universities, and a...