“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, September 4, 2014

Žižek on ....?

Awesome, nice to Buddhism (though nb, Tibetan Buddhism is a path of bliss but whatever), and so forth. Insert the insecure true believer of your choice:

But are the terrorist fundamentalists really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the United States — the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the nonbelievers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by nonbelievers. Why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the nonbelievers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. This is why the so-called fundamentalists of ISIS are a disgrace to true fundamentalism.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I cant see how I.S. can be ‘fundamentalist’ –
weapon of choice = AK47 – product of Atheist Materialism…
means of dissemination – WWW and youtube! Makes them
more parasitic- which of course means they should never
overwhelm the host. But perhaps more a symbiotic relationship
with the security services and drone manufactures, ones that maybe
will produce yet more intelligent machines…. Is this then some
cyber-Darwinian process?

Unknown said...

I cant see how I.S. can be ‘fundamentalist’ –
weapon of choice = AK47 – product of Atheist Materialism…
means of dissemination – WWW and youtube! Makes them
more parasitic- which of course means they should never
overwhelm the host. But perhaps more a symbiotic relationship
with the security services and drone manufactures, ones that maybe
will produce yet more intelligent machines…. Is this then some
cyber-Darwinian process?