A Quote by Noam Chomsky

One of the real problems of society is that its far too atomized, what sociologists call secondary associations. — © Noam Chomsky
One of the real problems of society is that its far too atomized, what sociologists call secondary associations.
[T]here are, at bottom, basically two ways to order social affairs, Coercively, through the mechanisms of the state - what we can call political society. And voluntarily, through the private interaction of individuals and associations - what we can call civil society. ... In a civil society, you make the decision. In a political society, someone else does. ... Civil society is based on reason, eloquence, and persuasion, which is to say voluntarism. Political society, on the other hand, is based on force.
We don't value food in Britain, so therefore the cheaper it is the better it is. We all eat far too much, we all pay far too little for our food. We have environmental problems, we have health problems, we have food transport problems.
People don't talk to each other. You're alone with your television set or internet. But you can't have a functioning democracy without what sociologists call "secondary organizations," places where people can get together, plan, talk and develop ideas. You don't do it alone.
[Facebook and Twitter] aren't the real problems in the office. The real problems are what I like to call the M&Ms, the Managers and the Meetings.
I think we are all interested in end-times ideas and also in the current climate that we are all living in, where money is a little harder to come by, things continue to get expensive; gas prices are not too far from people's heads. There are more and more people. Human society's going to have real problems.
There are few women in America that don't want to lose 5 pounds, but I refuse to let that thought dominate my life. And there are too many other real problems in the world - real obesity problems and real hunger problems - to worry that much about a few pounds that I'd like to lose.
The Left, in a general sense, is very much atomized. We live in highly atomized societies. People are pretty much alone; it's you and your iPad.
I think that far too often we let those who commit crimes in our society off far too lightly.
Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by association of con cretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain.
Society is doing a great deal for the workingman, for the lower classes; but it seems to me, sometimes, as if it formed associations to obtain for them toys, and then formed other associations to teach them to play with them.
This love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman.
I think comics should test people, I think it's our job to go too far. That way we know as a society what too far is. Where else are you going to hear it?
You are frightened of everything. You call it caution. You call it common sense. You call it practicality. You call it playing the odds, but that's only because you're afraid to call it by its real name, and its real name is fear.
Each child is made neurotic by the parents, by the society; and we know that we are doing it, and we know that others have done the same to us. Stop doing it to yourself and stop doing it to others. Become alert. Just be real. I emphasize reality more than truth. Because truth has been used by the anti-life people so much, it has wrong associations. Be real. If you are real, one thing will start disappearing from your heart, and that is guilt.
We have a lot of secondary market problems in the U.K.; it's really bad there. And lots of artists are starting to participate in it, because they put the tickets up at a certain price, then the tickets get marked up by the secondary sellers, and someone else gets twice as much as you.
There are far too many self esteem problems in the world as it is. No sense taking on plant guilt, too.
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