Rick Roderick > Quotes

“Mass culture is enlightenment in reverse. Its goal is precisely to wipe out that last little garrison of human autonomy.”
― Rick Roderick, The Self Under Siege: Philosophy In The Twentieth Century

“It’s not utopian to demand that in a world with this kind of technology, that as a moral demand, a society feed, clothe and house its people. A society that doesn’t do it, with the kind of technology and the wealth we have is beneath contempt and makes a mockery of all the previous history of civilization.”
― Rick Roderick

“The real question I am asking here is the one Marcuse asked in the sixties. How does a way of life break down? How does it break down. And Marcuse doesn’t give the pat Marxist answer, which means economically, and we ought to be glad that that pat Marxist answer is false because if a society could be driven to ruin by debt, you know, the way a lot of people said the Russians – the Soviet Union – fell because it was broke. Let’s hope that’s not true [laughs] since we are broke, let’s hope that’s false. As a generalisation, we had better hope it is false.

How do they break down? Well, here there is an analogy – for me – between the social and the self under siege, in many ways. In many ways, not in a few, and some of the symptoms we see around us that our own lives are breaking down and the lives of our society is a generalised cynicism and scepticism about everything. I don’t know how to characterise this situation, I find no parallel to it in human history. The scepticism and cynicism about everything is so general, and I think it’s partly due to this thing I call banalisation, and it’s partly due to the refusal and the fear of dealing with complexity. Much easier to be a cynic than to deal with complexity. Better to say everything is bullshit than to try to look into enough things to know where you are. Better to say everything is just… silly, or pointless, than to try to look into systems of this kind of complexity and into situations of the kind of complexity and ambiguity that we have to deal with now.”
― Rick Roderick, The Self Under Siege: Philosophy In The Twentieth Century

“a lot of people have died because they read a book the wrong way”
― Rick Roderick

“his theory... his view is about the destiny of the human race on this planet. about whether we will ever learn to make sense, or whether we'll just keep making money and madness. it's a real big question.”
― Rick Roderick, The Self Under Siege: Philosophy In The Twentieth Century

“the postmodern trajectory itself is a rather humorous joke on the human race which laboured for millennia to reduce working hours in order to produce leisure so we could enjoy this very leisure that then turns in a kind of vengeful act against us absorbing our leisure time, which was to be our living time, into time now spent in the service of what can only be called this inhuman spectacle”
― Rick Roderick, The Self Under Siege: Philosophy In The Twentieth Century

“In Greek society, that’s unthinkable because a polis is a place where the only force that a free person is supposed to recognise, is that peculiar unforced force of the better argument. That’s what differentiates you from a slave. You don’t argue with slaves in Greek society, they obey, and you tell them.”
― Rick Roderick, Philosophy & Human Values

“...in Eastern Europe they'll believe we've got a democracy. They'll love to have a VCR. And with each step forward they'll become more entrapped in the same totalitarian system that is much more subtle than the crude and simple one that many of them have overthrown.”
― Rick Roderick

“When you see these struggles, you hear this word: “FREEDOM.” It’s part of the struggle to announce it, that it’s your aim, without necessarily filling it with content...”
― Rick Roderick

“And if there is one sure sign in Hegel’s philosophy that history isn’t over, of course it’s a war. Because there are embodied people in struggle with different views about what freedom is and how to live.”
― Rick Roderick

“In fact this was outrageous to many of his early admirers, that he would become a revolutionary Marxist, because in the United States that always had been associated with Soviet style bureaucratic Marxism and of course then you began to think about the Cold War and all the little films you saw in grade school of Russian kids with their hands hanging on barbed wire, and all that stuff... which actually wasn’t a mode of thought, but was just our mode of propaganda. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t better than their propaganda; events have proven it was… better.”
― Rick Roderick

“As Freud said, if you don’t pay you don’t get better.”
― Rick Roderick