Words&Dirt

“A book is different––it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society, as the Master stated many times.”

––The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, by Neal Stephenson, loc. 2709-16

“This view of the current crisis and its necessary remedy is far from the center of the political debate in 2013. That is not because these proposals are radical or utopian. In the mid-twentieth century, they were mainstream. The fact that they are not today has nothing to do with inexorable trends of technology or with efficient markets supplanting clumsy states. The change in the mainstream view simply represents shifts in political power. So if we want these ideas to be taken seriously in politics, their sheer logic is not sufficient. We need to take the power back.

Today, one encounters two forms of pessimism. The first holds that the economy is doomed to a generation of depression and that all we can do is share sacrifice until confidence returns. The other holds that the economics in fact could and should be drastically different but that our politics will not allow us to get there from here. The latter pessimism is the more disabling. We must begin by reclaiming democratic politics.”

––Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility, by Robert Kuttner, pg. 294-5