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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.

William Irwin Thompson

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William Irwin Thompson
Age: 82 †
Born: 1938
Born: July 16
Died: 2020
Died: November 8
Critic
Historian
Mythographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Chaos
Roots
Unbalanced
Danger
Amidst
Dangerous
Reformers
Simply
Idealistic
Order
Hysterical
Love
Idealism
Rage

More quotes by William Irwin Thompson

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In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.
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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.
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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.
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We are the climactic generation of human cultural evolution, and in the microcosm of our lives the macrocosm of the evolution of the human race is playing itself out.
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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.
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The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.
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Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.
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When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before.
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The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.
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Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.
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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.
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But the time has come the revelation has already occurred, and the guardian seers have seen the lightning strike the darkness we call reality. And now we sleep in the brief interval between the lightning and the thunder.
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It should be possible to say that there really is such as thing as genius and that what it is, is precisely a surprising and unexpected movement away from collective patterns of behavior and received wisdom.
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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.
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Like a shadow that does not permit us to jump over it, but moves with us to maintain its proper distance, pollution is nature's answer to culture. When we have learned to recycle pollution into potent information, we will have passed over completely into the new cultural ecology.
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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.
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In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.
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That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.
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If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.
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I don't think anyone now really understands the planetisation of mankind, really understands the new world order emerging through all this period of strain and pain and contradiction, so more than ever, we need to have an internal sense of navigation.
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