/lit/ - Literature

This is the most underrated book of all time. It explains how we got to where we are as a society. These are two random paragraphs taken from page 329:

"In the society just ahead, one profession has astonishingly good prospects. I'm referring to the various specialties associated with policing the angry, the disaffected, and the embittered. Because school promises are mathematically impossible to keep, they were, from the beginning, a Ponzi scheme like Social Security. The creative minority who unleashed this well-schooled whirlwind 100 years ago seems to have finally exhausted its imaginative power as it transmuted slowly into a dominant minority without much creative energy. Dr. Toynbee points to such a transition as an unmistakeable sign of society in decline. Another ominous sign for Toynbee: the increasing use of police and armies to protect private interests."

"The first Enlightenment as a false one. It merely transferred the right to direct our lives from a corporate Church and a hereditary nobility to a pack of experts whose minds were (and are) for sale to anyone with a checkbook. In the second Enlightenment we need to correct our mistakes, using what schools we decide to allow to help us strive for full consciousness, for self-assertion, mental independence, and personal sovereignty-- for a release from tutelage for everybody. Only in this way can we make use of our understanding without guidance from strangers who work for a corporate state system, increasingly impatient with human beings."