Join Favorite Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Stefan's read, .
I am thinking of something I saw on the subway in the early 80s, maybe 1982. I was sitting at the end of the last car on an express train and saw three or four African-American boys (in my memory they were 11-13 years old, maybe younger), grouped around the back window, staring out of it with pure absorption. Curious, I stood to look over their shoulders and saw what they were so raptly taking in: the piercing combination of speed and density as the train gathered momentum and hammered through the massive concrete and metal tunnels, our view herking and jerking with the cars, snatching bits of burning light in metal casement, underground signage, the track flashing and going dark as we clangored through stations, past dozens of waiting humans, personalities firing off bodily messages that our eyes saw before our minds could read them. It was beautiful and the boys were radiant with it, this wordless amazement of things.
The Hidden Life of Stories
Mary Gaitskill
Given that some of the big political visions of the twentieth century led us to Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Great Leap Forward, maybe we are better off in the hands of petty-minded bureaucrats. Mixing godlike technology with megalomaniacal politics is a recipe for disaster. Many neo-liberal economists and political scientists argue that it is best to leave all the important decisions in the hands of the free market.
Homo Deus
Yuval Noah Harari
The Gnostic creation story holds that gnosis is revealed knowledge of a true god that lies behind the god of the religions or behind Nature's God. But it sees those things as Nature's God or the god of the religions, your God as a demonic architect or Artisan called the demiurge. It is evil, it is not good because it was born in the sin of wisdom who wanted to create, which wasn't its station. So it alienates man from his true nature, imprisons him in the world, imprisons him in being, imprisons him as a spiritual being in the mundane. Locks him in a mortal body that's going to die, that is made of material that gets sick, and in a world that has fallen in material and is filled with perils and evils and diseases. Gnosis of this truth opens the door in the faith to an escape from the prison. That means when you construct a hyperreality, if you can make it real, you get out of prison. It's how they actually do it. Gnostics, therefore, create and project hyperrealities because they simulate what they think is really real the image of the divine plan.
The Gnostic Parasite | Dr. James Lindsay
Sovereign Nations
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise