Most men feel alienated in their daily lives due to their subjugation to meaningless work, social isolation, and failure to create an alignment between their souls, personalities, and routines. It is impossible to hate one’s life and feel good about oneself.
Category Archive: Philosophy & Literature
While the most visible and egregious forms of government power exist in the form of the surveillance state, an aggressive military, and manipulative media, 1984’s most powerful and insidious means of exercising authority is by inscribing beliefs directly onto the mind by the control of language and by psychiatric tyranny.
Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust— what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns?
The novel is humanistic in its acceptance of dark, negative, and evil aspects of the human imagination, but nevertheless warns that those dark energies exhaust themselves; therefore, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a map of a restricted area.
Albert Camus’ The Fall specifies a new kind of self-flagellation. While Christians throughout history have flogged themselves to purify the world through their pain, believing that their sins cause civilization-wide catastrophes, Camus’ protagonist creates a closed circuit of vice and virtue: he confesses to his vices so that he many continue to enact them.
R.J. Slater 