After all, no one can dispute that in the 20th century more advances were made in technology than in all the previous centuries put together. How, then, can we account for the fact that more people were slaughtered in the 20th century, including as many as ten million children, by wars and mayhem than in all the previous centuries? How can we account for the fact that the three most influential ideologies of the 20th century were Nazism, Fascism, and Communism, each of which reduced the significance of the human spirit so that people fled from them whenever they could? Is it not possible that behind the noon-day brightness of technological ingenuity there lurks something dark and sinister, something that casts a terrible shadow over the better angels of our nature?
Category: Quotes
VÃ FILOSOFIA…
Falas muito de Marx,
de divisão de tarefas,
de trabalho de base,
mas quando te levantas
nem a cama fazes…
Vain Philosophy
You talk a lot about Marx,
About the division of labor
About grass-roots organizing
But when you get up
You don’t even make the bed.
Leila Miccolis cited in: Contracultura : alternative arts and social transformation in authoritarian Brazil. Christopher Dunn, 2016.
Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, much less listened to Beethoven. Any restriction on this way of life, on the name of the rights of the community, appears to the former oppressor as a profound violation of their individual rights⏤although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair.
Paulo Freire, 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
