#dualism

For everyone now strives most of all to seperate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life, but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#philosophy #self #experience

Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism. ...when had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom? ↗

— John le Carré

#philosophy #wisdom #love

The first duty of a man is to think for himself ↗

— José Martí

#democracy #freedom #history #hope #individualism

Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration ↗

— Neil Postman

#individuality #typography #age

If we never experience the chill of a dark winter, it is very unlikely that we will ever cherish the warmth of a bright summer’s day. Nothing stimulates our appetite for the simple joys of life more than the starvation caused by sadness or desperation. In order to complete our amazing life journey successfully, it is vital that we turn each and every dark tear into a pearl of wisdom, and find the blessing in every curse. ↗

— Anthon St. Maarten

#blessing #blessings #blessings-in-disguise #curse #dark-night-of-the-soul

The Open Road goes to the used-car lot. ↗

— Louis Simpson

#capitalism #freedom #frontier #individualism #liberalism

The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRls). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism. ↗

— Mark Fisher

#capitalist-realism #individualism #mental-health #mental-illness #mental-health

There's been a boiling down of real emotion into a set pattern instead of individualism. ↗

— Skeet Ulrich

#boiling #down #emotion #individualism #instead

A Libertarian society of unfettered individualism spreads its benefits to virtually everyone - not just those who have the resources to seize political power. ↗

— Harry Browne

#everyone #individualism #just #libertarian #political

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate? ↗

— Harold Edmund Stearns

#civilization #conventions #distinction #equality #individualism