William Irwin Thompson quotes

For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture. (William Irwin Thompson)
The conscious process is reflected in the imagination; the unconscious process is expressed as karma, the generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
One way to find food for thought is to use the fork in the road, the bifurcation that marks the place of emergence in which a new line of development begins to branch off. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration of time and the rate of change. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
The interface between an industrial economy and the biosphere is what the industrial nation state can't handle. So the new culture isn't based on nation state turf; it's based on biological, ecological processes, so the atmosphere is more the model than the land. And the science that would describe the processes of the atmosphere are more the new complex dynamical sciences, chaotic systems of clouds, rather than the clods. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
In Europe, you do philosophy by performing discourse on another guy's text, and so Derrida will go over Heidegger, and Habermas will extend Marx's corpus; but in America you could never get away with kinky stuff like that, for you have to generate philosophy from real things-like computers or television. You need to look at Omni magazine to get a feel for this new kind of mail-order, Popular Mechanics science of mind. It's full of articles about meditation helmets and downloading the soul into computers so that when your body wears out you can live forever. What is completely missing in Europe is precisely what you will find in America: namely, an electronic Umwelt in which history is replaced with movies, education is replaced with entertainment, and nature is replaced with technology. This peculiar wedding of low kitsch and high tech generates a posthistoric world that no European literary intellectual can quite fathom. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
In the shift from direct democracy to representational democracy, the printed book became an embodiment of thought for the physically absent author; and so the popular art form of the popular book and the pamphlet re-presented ideas and contributed to the public space of political philosophies of the Enlightenment. Television, however, now brings forth this new kind of public space, and it calls into being this new world, not of the educated citizenry in a republic, but of the electropeasantry in the state of Entertainment. Recall how people stopped singing in pubs when they brought in the TV set, and you will appreciate the new passivity in which people stop voting for their representatives as TV takes over the electoral campaigns. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos. (William Irwin Thompson)
A World is not an ideology nor a scientific institution, nor is it even a system of ideologies; rather, it is a structure of unconscious relations and symbiotic processes. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
Not all intelligence can be artificial now, so if we make a mistake, the consequences are no longer simply located within an institution or a national culture. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
The teacher of history's work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries. View quote
William Irwin Thompson
Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own chaos. View quote
William Irwin Thompson