Sublime

In the hands of employers, positive thinking has been transformed into something its nineteenth-century proponents probably never imagined—not an exhortation to get up and get going but a means of social control in the workplace, a goad to perform at ever-higher levels.

In the twenty-first century, a very different and more numerous breed of ideologues promulgated the opposite message—that all was well with our deeply unequal society and, for those willing to make the effort, about to get much, much better. The motivators and other purveyors of positive thinking had good news for people facing economic ruin from t

For me, this is exactly what’s so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money—and then tell us that it’s only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve acce

The extent to which people will defy nature to serve culture can be truly horrifying.

Thousands of people are maintained on comfortable salaries in air-conditioned offices simply in order to ensure that poor people continue to feel bad about themselves.

A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist.

Each person is a variable that can change—shifting the makeup of the whole.

The American Dream is a clusterfuck of intersecting oppressions that function systemically and infect us individually.

He told me bluntly that instead of acknowledging our limitations and trying to live within them, we have—en masse—fallen for an enormous delusion.