Words to Ponder #49

18 Apr Words to Ponder #49

Today’s words are from Belgian radical philosopher Raoul Vaneigem’s influential (in the 1960s) book The Revolution of Everyday Life.

“People are far too unperturbed, it seems to me, by the way in which the world, in certain periods, assumes the forms of the prevailing metaphysics.  No matter how bizarre belief in God and the Devil may be, this phantom pair become a living reality the moment a social group deems them sufficiently present to inspire the text of its laws. In the same way, the obtuse distinction between cause and effect has been able to govern societies where human behavior and phenomena in general are analyzed in such terms.  Even now nobody should underestimate the power of the misbegotten dichotomy between thought and action, theory and practice, real and imaginary … Such ideas have organizational force. The world of falsehood is a real world; people kill and get killed there, and we had best not forget it.”