October
10, 2006
FISHBOWL
What obligations do we have to the truth? Why do you believe what you believe?
Zinn
"In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without
the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to
keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers,
administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors,
lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen.
These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with
the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and
lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.
That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica—expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us (649)....
The prisoners of the system will continue to rebel, as before, in ways that cannot be foreseen, at times that cannot be predicted. The new fact of our era is the chance that they may be joined by the guards. We readers and writers of books have been, for the most part, among the guards. If we understand that, and act on it, not only will life be more satisfying, right off, but our grandchildren, or our great grandchildren, might possibly see a different and marvelous world" (655).
Morgan
"It is of course impossible to tell why men act as they do. Today we have
learned so much of the irrational springs of human behavior from Marx and Darwin
and Freud that we are disposed to see all declarations of principle as a
camouflage, conscious or unconscious, for some baser motive. But in exercising
our new insight we sometimes attribute to the men of previous ages an
extraordinary simple-mindedness and demand of them a standard of righteousness
which only an angel or a fanatic could meet. If the American colonists were
sincere, we say, why did they not state at the outset exactly what they believed
and then stick to it without faltering? We forget that to have done so they
would have had to know what they believed much better than any of us do and to
have adhered to it with a superhuman consistency" (50)"
Coetzee
"'Manas,
we went
through
this
repentance
business
yesterday.
I told you
what I
thought. I
won't do
it. I
appeared
before an
officially
constituted
tribunal,
before a
branch of
the law.
Before
that
secular
tribunal I
pleaded
guilty, a
secular
plea. That
plea
should
suffice.
Repentance
is neither
here nor
there.
Repentance
belongs to
another
world, to
another
universe
of
discourse'"
(58).
"He has not taken to Bev Shaw, a dumpy, bustling little woman with black freckles, close-cropped, wiry hair, and no neck. He does not like women who make no effort to be attractive. It is a resistance he has had to Lucy's friends before. Nothing to be proud of: a prejudice that has settle din his mind, settled down. His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. he ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough'" (72).
“They are not going to lead me to a higher life, and the reason is, there is no higher life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals. That’s the example that people like Bev try to set. That’s the example I try to follow. To share some of our human privilege with the beasts. I don’t want to come back in another existence as a dog or a pig and have to live as dogs or pigs live under us” (74).
"It happens every day, every hour, every minute, he tells himself, in every quarter of the country. Count yourself lucky to have escaped with your life. Count yourself lucky not to be a prisoner in the car at this moment, speeding away, or at the bottom of a donga with a bullet in your head. Count Lucy lucky too. Above all Lucy" (98).
A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have the chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad" (98).
Your This
I
Believe...