A Quote by Norman O. Brown
The money complex is the demonic, and the demonic is God's ape; the money complex is therefore the heir to and substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things.
Related Quotes
The 'religious spirit,' it's demonic, and it attempts to substitute a demonic power or a fleshly power for the power of the Holy Spirit. And the 'religious spirit' is more concerned with what we look like than what we really are.
Human behavior is an enormously complex set of things, and that mixture of underlying things is different for different people, so it's not just complex, it's meta-complex.
Normally, we see characters that have God complexes. How interesting, I thought, it would be to capitalize on that. And say, OK, well fine, you have a God complex, well this person has a Satan complex. And the doctor chooses to treat him scientifically.
The poem 'What Teachers Make' is not without its detractors. This one person wrote to me and said: 'Gee, Mr. Mali. You don't possibly have a teacher-God complex, do you?' And that was the first time I'd ever heard of that expression. So, yeah, I'm sure I have a teacher-God complex.
Even as they are now pointing to God and praising God for that victory, something terrible happens; there's a demonic spirit now that referees, and the officials, and they say Oh did you see that? He just referred to God. We need to stop that and we need to disqualify them! And they're punished for their righteousness by the demonic spirit that's inside the referees.
The prison-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex are here with us and are multi-billion dollar enterprises. We can make more money off the kid in Compton if he's a criminal instead of a scholar. It's business.
I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at one and the same time. The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine.
If this seems complex, the reason is because Tao is both simple and complex. It is complex when we try to understand it, and simple when we allow ourselves to experience it.
As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.
What is important is that complex systems, richly cross-connected internally, have complex behaviours, and that these behaviours can be goal-seeking in complex patterns.
I see nothing easy in Washington. I see either analytically simple things that are politically complex or those that are politically complex and analytically complex. I mean, look at immigration reform, you know? It is, I think, analytically easy, but politically very, very complex and very difficult.
Now, the topic of religion seems much more complex, and I have a more complex relationship with it myself because I love religious music. I often find myself wanting to be in a religious state of mind even though I don't intellectually believe it. I want to go to that place emotionally. So it doesn't feel like something that I really want to debunk in that way. It's just not where my interests lie at the moment.
Complexity has and will maintain a strong fascination for many people. It is true that we live in a complex world and strive to solve inherently complex problems, which often do require complex mechanisms. However, this should not diminish our desire for elegant solutions, which convince by their clarity and effectiveness. Simple, elegant solutions are more effective, but they are harder to find than complex ones, and they require more time, which we too often believe to be unaffordable
It's true that in France there is always this ridiculous complex about money. Money is cursed, shameful, money disqualifies you . . . In America, even though it is a Protestant country, it's the opposite.
Beware of people preaching simple solutions to complex problems. If the answer was easy someone more intelligent would have thought of it a long time ago - complex problems invariably require complex and difficult solutions.
Human problems are complex. If something isn't complex it doesn't qualify as problematic. Very simple bad things are not worth troubling ourselves about.
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