“Commandments in the Atomic Age” by Günther Anders, 1957
Your second thought after awakening should run: ‘The possibility of the Apocalypse is our work. But we know not what we are doing’. We really don’t know, nor do they who control the Apocalypse: for they too are ‘we’, they too are fundamentally incompetent. That they too are incompetent, is certainly not their fault; rather […]
“Like Rome—conqueror of its own people” (The Pale King, David Foster Wallace)
‘There’s something very interesting about civics and selfishness, and we get to ride the crest of it. Here in the US, we expect government and law to be our conscience. Our superego, you could say. It has something to do with liberal individualism, and something to do with capitalism, but I don’t understand much of […]
Albert Camus’ Banquet Speech
Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself. ☛ Nobel Prize: Albert Camus’ speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1957 Here’s the […]
Responsibility, power and fault
☛ Amazing Fantasy #15 by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, August 1962 (image source) © Thinking about the concept of responsibility lately (I wrote about it here), I found myself wondering why it seems nowadays to be so intimately related to the concept of fault (and guilt). In a very broad legal understanding of it, […]
