The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking. […]

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. [John Kenneth Galbraith]

That need can be fully satisfied only through activities that have some external goal, such as physical necessities, sex, love, status, revenge, etc.

Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners. Hence most of us can survive only as someone else's employee.

Notice that university intellectuals [Note: “Not necessarily including specialists in engineering "hard" sciences”] constitute the most highly socialized segment of our society and also the most left-wing segment.

The more dangerous leftists, that is, those who are most power-hungry, are often characterized by arrogance or by a dogmatic approach to ideology. […]

It's not enough that the public should be informed about the hazards of smoking; a warning has to be stamped on every package of cigarettes. Then cigarette advertising has to be restricted if not banned. The activists will never be satisfied until tobacco is outlawed, and after that it will be alcohol then junk food, etc.

In the late Middle Ages there were four main civilizations that were about equally "advanced": Europe, the Islamic world, India, and the Far East (China, Japan, Korea). Three of those civilizations remained more or less stable, and only Europe became dynamic. No one knows why Europe became dynamic at that time; historians have their theories but these are only speculation. At any rate, it is clear that rapid development toward a technological form of society occurs only under special conditions. So there is no reason to assume that long-lasting technological regression cannot be brought about.

James Watt’s steam engine and the many other inventions that have followed became integral to market societies [in particular, capitalism’s peculiar markets of land/labour/money, with their “fictitious commodities� of nature/humans/purchasing power] only because of the profit motive and the competition between profit-seeking entrepreneurs that market societies beget. Suppose for a moment that Watt had lived in ancient Egypt under the pharaohs and had invented his steam engine then. What would have become of it? Imagine that Watt secured an audience with the pharaoh to demonstrate his invention. The most he could have expected was that the ruler of Egypt would have been impressed and placed one or more of his engines in his palace, demonstrating to visitors and underlings how ingenious his empire was. In the absence of entrepreneurs competing for profits, and given the hundreds of thousands of slaves the pharaoh had at his beck and call, Watt’s engine would never have been used to power farms or workshops, let alone factories. [Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails]

In the United States of America, every independent workers� movement was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin. However, a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery. The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours� agitation […]

Tony Blair and New Labour [Labour Party’s “Blairism”]. We forced our opponents to change their minds.

We can use the Democratic Party ballot line strategically, for our own purposes: to wage campaigns that heighten the level of class consciousness in society, encourage people to take militant action in the form of strikes and other kinds of protest activity, and even raise awareness of and interest in socialism.

[...] neglect is more common than abuse: more kids are emotionally abandoned than are directly attacked, physically or emotionally.

It is the primary duty of parents to make their children socially desirable. That will provide the child with opportunity, self-regard, and security. It’s more important even than fostering individual identity.

Poor and working-class male children and grown men often embody the worst strains of patriarchal masculinity, acting out violently because it is the easiest, cheapest way to declare one’s “manhood.� If you cannot prove that you are “much of a man� by becoming president, or becoming rich, or becoming a public leader, or becoming a boss, then violence is your ticket in to the patriarchal manhood contest, and your ability to do violence levels the playing field.

Novelty oils the engines of academia, a place in which there is more credibility to be gained by tearing down established ideas than by reaffirming them.

I'm in the storytelling business, and so you're always drawn to the unusual. […] And if you come up through a newspaper as I did, your whole goal is to get a story on the front page, and you only get something on the front page if it's unusual, so you're quickly weaned off the notion that you should be interested in the mundane.

The results might not be adequate for most forms of statistical analysis, but I have found them an extraordinarily rich source for qualitative analysis, especially since in many cases I’ve been able to ask follow-up questions and, in some, to engage in long conversations with informants.

Why did Keynes’s promised utopia [prediction in 1930 that, by 2030, we would have a 15-hour work week]—still being eagerly awaited in the sixties—never materialize? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the twenties, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.

So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers� tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.� [not even citing direct quotes, tsk-tsk…] In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away. (Even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be.)

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service� sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or, for that matter, the whole host of ancillary industries (dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.�

We are faced here with a classic problem in social theory: the problem of levels of causality. In the case of any given real-world event, there are any number of different reasons why one can say it happened. […]

Much of the confusion that surrounds debate about social issues in general can be traced back to the fact that people will regularly take these different explanations as alternatives rather than seeing them as factors that all operate at the same time.

Often Marxists take me to task for ignoring the basic tenets of Marxism. I don’t think I ignore them, but I actually take them rather for granted. I’m just emphasizing other parts of the equation.

It’s also the easiest to overlook, since it often deals specifically with things people are not doing.

[…] basic assumptions about what people are, what can be expected of them, and what they can justifiably demand of one another. Those assumptions, in turn, have an enormous influence in determining what is considered to be a political issue and what is not.�

This [individual’s] story always makes me cry a little bit. Two million people die of Aids every year. It never has the same effect.
[from “Empathy’s Failures� in I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That]

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. […] I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. […] During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.

[-Common Sense, Vol. 4, No. 11 (November, 1935), p. 8; bold emphases added]

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.
When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.