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The issue is not whether people are 'good enough' for a particular type of society rather it is a matter of developing the kind of social institutions that are most conducive to expanding the potentialities we have for intelligence, grace, sociability and freedom.

Paul Goodman

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Paul Goodman
Age: 60 †
Born: 1911
Born: September 9
Died: 1972
Died: August 2
Lgbtiq+ Rights Activist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Political Scientist
Psychotherapist
Sociologist
Writer
the Village
Kind
Issues
Expanding
Good
Society
Developing
People
Rather
Issue
Whether
Institutions
Freedom
Intelligence
Social
Type
Sociability
Matter
Grace
Potentialities
Enough
Particular
Conducive

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The family is the American fascism.
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Because of their historical theory of the alienation of labor (that the worker must become less and less in control of the work of his hands) the Marxist parties never fought for the man-worthy job itself.
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Nothing could be more stupid than for the communications commission to give to people who handle the means of broadcasting the inventing of what to broadcast, and then, disturbed at the poor quality, to worry about censorship.
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We do not behave as if we believed that the affairs of our world were significant enough for the intervention of great men.
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The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations.
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What the devil to do with the sentence Who the devil does he think he's fooling? You can't write Whom the devil- .
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Humankind is innocent, loving, and creative, you dig? It's the bureaucracies that create the evil, that make Honor and Community impossible, and it's the kids who really take it in the groin.
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American society has tried so hard and so ably to defend the practice and theory of production for profit and not primarily for use that now it has succeeded in making its jobs and products profitable and useless.
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It is by losing himself in the objective, in inquiry, creation, and craft, that a man becomes something.
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Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!
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To want a job that exercises a man's capacities in an enterprise useful to society, is utopian anarcho-syndicalism it is labor invading the domain of management. No labor leader has entertained such a thought in our generation. Management has the sole prerogative to determine the products.
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A successful revolution establishes a new community. A missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. And a compromised revolution tends to shatter the community that was, without an adequate substitute.
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Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.
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A well-known magazine asks a man how they should refer to him, as Psychologist X, as Author X? He suggests man of letters, for that is what he is, in the eighteenth-century meaning. But they can't buy that because the word doesn't exist in Time-style he cannot be that, and presumably the old function of letters cannot exist.
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The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity.
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In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race, ... it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One's own products are likely to be personal or parochial.
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We live increasingly in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need but immense attention to the role, the procedure, prestige, and profit.
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There is only one curriculum, no matter what the method of education: what is basic and universal in human experience and practice, the underlying structure of culture.
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For mankind, speech with a capital S is especially meaningful and committing, more than the content communicated. The outcry of the newborn and the sound of the bells are fraught with mystery more than the baby's woeful face or the venerable tower.
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Comedy is something that we can all share, no matter what language we speak or our background, it has the power to unite us all.
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