A Quote by Simon Critchley
There is something desperately lonely about Barack Obama's universe. One gets the overwhelming sense of someone yearning for connection, for something that binds human beings together, for community and commonality, for what he repeatedly calls "the common good". This is hardly news.
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The very definition of news is something that hardly ever happens. If an incident is in the news, we shouldn't worry about it. It's when something is so common that its no longer news - car crashes, domestic violence - that we should worry.
At the present moment in our culture this yearning for meaning and consciousness, this yearning to give and serve something higher than ourselves, is breaking through the hard crust of our widespread cultural materialism and pseudo-scientific underestimation of what a human being is meant to be together with an equally tragic overestimation of what we human beings are capable of in our present everyday state of being. The intensity of the present confusion about the nature and existence of God is a symptom of this yearning within the whole of our modern culture.
In the beginning, I want to say something about human greatness. Some time ago, I was reading texts of Kungtse. When I read these texts, I understood something about human greatness. What I understood from his writings was: What is greatest in human beings is what makes them equal to everybody else. Everything else that deviates higher or lower from what is common to all human beings makes us less. If we know this, we can develop a deep respect for every human being.
If you start with community and want to be faithful to community, you have to realize that what binds you together is not mutual compatibility or common tasks, but God. In order to stay in touch with that call to community, we always have to return to solitude.
If you want to write something completely unique, you will probably fail or at best write something without redeeming value. The mind works in certain patterns: the mind organizes facts in story form; it is your commonality with that body of human thought that makes a good book, not its estrangement from the common values that humans share.
All the eight years of [Barack] Obama when [George W.] Bush was asked repeatedly, "I don't do that. I had my time. It's his time now." The protocols and the history, the traditions say that past presidents don't comment. That didn't work for Bill Clinton. He couldn't help himself. Obama is not commenting, but Obama is actively engaged in the sabotage of the [Donald] Trump administration, with all of these community organizing uprisings.
Love is the only thing that counts. Love is what keeps the star and the human beings and the world turning around. Love is the force that binds the whole universe together.
The Universe is a unity, an interacting and genetically-related community of beings bound together in an inseparable relationship in space and time... The human is that being in whom the Universe activates, reflects upon, and celebrates itself in conscious self-awareness.
I think there is that very basic yearning for something or someone to be looking after us, for there to be a framework holding the universe together that is benign and intelligent. We're not going to get rid of that; it's just too scary to be that molecule flying around briefly in a vacuum.
What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything else of that sort. Christians come together because they have all been loved by Jesus himself. They are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus' sake.
Indian films are like our food or our sense of dress or our languages: there's a great variety, and it changes every 100 miles, but there is something in common, a national Indian essence, that binds them all together.
Some films clearly seem to divide people. And I do think there's something incredibly exciting about the commonality of us as human beings, which some films are lucky enough to tap into.
Donald Trump has a unique connection with his voters. There aren't that many people personally invested in Barack Obama. The people invested in Obama are invested in an idea that it's about time white America took it on the chin. That it's about time the people that founded this country found out what it's like to not be in a majority. That's the kind of people Obama has a connection to.
We've increasingly lost that sense of community, of the notion that there is something we contribute to and benefit from that is called the common good.
The common thread in all of my climbing is it was something new, something never done before. That commonality is more important than the discipline.
The question is now do you have the authority in the hands of someone that other media is going to cooperate with, that he`s going to selectively decide to punish you if you decide to come with something? True or false? I mean, who had more fake news than President [Barack] Obama?
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