When one believes in an alternate vision of history, ... he is stepping outside the city to see a pastoral vision in which the office buildings and t… - William Irwin Thompson
" "When one believes in an alternate vision of history, ... he is stepping outside the city to see a pastoral vision in which the office buildings and the universities do not obscure the archaic stars. All through history, from Abraham to Mao, prophets have left the city behind them to insist upon a vision of things greater than they are; but in the double nature of all phenomena, the abandoning of the city for the wilderness is also the pattern of madness: the psychotic leaves the social structure of sanity. From the psychotic’s point of view, one could paraphrase Voltaire to say that sanity is the lie commonly agreed upon. Those left behind in the city define themselves as responsible and sane and see the wanderer as a madman. The wanderer defines himself as the only sane person in a city of the insane and walks out in search of other possibilities. All history seems to pulse in this rhythm of urban views and pastoral visions.
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About William Irwin Thompson
William Irwin Thompson (July 16 1938 - November 8 2020) was a social philosopher, cultural critic, poet, and the founder of the Lindisfarne Association.
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Additional quotes by William Irwin Thompson
We are like flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: we cannot see what angels and gods lie underneath the threshold of our perceptions. We do not live in reality; we live in our paradigms, our habituated perceptions, our illusions; the illusions we share through culture we call reality, but the true historical reality of our condition is invisible to us. How can you fix up history if you cannot see it? And what if history cannot be fixed from inside history? What if the attempt to fix human history is an effort to seek out the dark with a searchlight?
There's been a kind of shift with the new electronic media away from education as a social glue that holds multicultural, diverse immigrant society together, to the state of entertainment. People are basically receiving their information in abstract, disembodied forms, whether its Internet or its World Wide Web or television or the rest of it. And with that has come a kind of dumbing down; there's a lack of emotional commitment to education.
The interface between an industrial economy and the biosphere is what the industrial nation state can’t handle. So the new culture isn't based on nation state turf; it's based on biological, ecological processes, so the atmosphere is more the model than the land. And the science that would describe the processes of the atmosphere are more the new complex dynamical sciences, chaotic systems of clouds, rather than the clods.
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