Please ejaculate”, I silently urged the man, “so I can go to sleep”. (In this way I imagine I was like millions of women before me
Shame internalized can lead to agony. Whereas shame let out can lead to freedom, or at least a funny story, which is a sort of freedom too.
Psychopaths [make] the world go around…society [is] an expression of that particular sort of madness…I’ve always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn’t? What if it is built on insanity?
Oh, you know what bloggers are like, they write and write and write. I don’t know why, because they’re not being paid.
sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.
Shall we go?’ he murmured, perhaps regretting his decision to show me his army of plastic cartoon figurines.
I have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe.
What a brilliant cover story. In a success-obsessed society like this one, what’s the best rock to hide something under? It’s the rock called failure.
A terrified-looking bystander, a nerdy man in a sweater, calls the police and stammers into the phone: ‘A huge group of people are fighting and there’s pepper spray and superheroes and I don’t know.
[W]e need to think twice about raining down vengeance and anger as our default position.
The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.
This place is packed with beautiful hipsters. While the Coney Island bombast radiated sincerity, everything here seems more ironic. When someone in the crowd ironically chants, ‘USA!’ someone else ironically chants back, ‘Mother Russia.
Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I’ve always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn’t? What if it is built on insanity?
(On the communist regime of Ceaușescu)”Romania,” said Eugene, “was twenty million people living inside the imagination of a madman.
I wondered what sort of woman loved a man like that.
Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.
When shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes, nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.
The NSA is looking for terrorists. They’re not getting psychosexual pleasure out of their schadenfreude about you.”—
I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama.
I was much crazier than I had imagined. Or maybe it was a bad idea to read DSM-IV when you’re not a trained professional. Or maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.
There’s a societal push for conformity in all ways. There’s less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction. (interview with Allen Frances)