We write about what we don't know about what we know.
The liberal idea of tolerance is more and more a kind of intolerance. What it means is 'Leave me alone; don't harass me; I'm intolerant towards your over-proximity.
Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.
The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.
Love is what makes sex more than masturbation. If there is no love even if you are really with a partner you masturbate with a partner.
If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?
For grief is felt not so much for the want of what we have never known, as for the loss of that to which we have been long accustomed.
Picture a place called the Karma Kafe and it'll save me the bother of describing it. There was nothing in it you wouldn't expect, from the Buddha flowerpots to the wallpaper decorated with symbols that probably said, "If you bought this just because it looked pretty, may Buddha piss in your coffee, you culturally ignorant moron.
It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.
Abnormalities in brain function have traditionally been detected using electroencephalography (EEG), which involves the measurement of the ongoing electrical activity generated by the brain.