“A mammoth debt encourages fear, which is never revolutionary; a high level of unemployment ensures a ready pool of strike breakers, translates the curse of a bad job into a blessing.” Greil Marcus: Lipstick traces: a secret history of the twentieth century In full context: ‘The transformation of the family man from a responsible member of society, interested in all public affairs, Hannah Arendt wrote in 1945 in ‘Organized Guilt and the Universal Responsibility,’ ‘to a “bourgeois” “…concerned only with his private existence and knowing no civic virtue, is an international modern phenomenon…Each time society, through unemployment, frustrates the small man in his normal functioning and normal self-respect, it trains him for that last stage in which he will willingly undertake any function, even that of hangman.’ Arendt told a story: an SS member is recognized as a high-school classmate by a Jew upon the latter’s release from Buchenwald. The Jew stares at his former friend, and the SS man says: ‘You must understand, I have five years of unemployment behind me. They can do anything they want with me.’” As long as each feels indebted to the culture for their job the man can get each of us to do their bidding in order to secure our position, including killing our neighbors and friends.
Posted on: Sat, 23 Nov 2013 07:08:33 +0000
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