How England Sees Itself

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
As with the allegedly free market, in the sense that when the actual free market doesn't do what its proponents really want (give them as much power/money as possible), they simply ignore it, as with bank bailouts etc etc, and massively intervene.

This is crucial, I think. People blame capitalism for the current global recession and the way it's being (mis)handled - with justification, of course - but the system we have isn't even 'proper' capitalism, is it? I mean, a truly laissez-faire capitalist government would have said to the stricken banks, "You've made your bed, now you've got to sleep in it". Instead we have "socialism for bankers, the free market for everyone else", as some people have put it.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
This is crucial, I think. People blame capitalism for the current global recession and the way it's being (mis)handled - with justification, of course - but the system we have isn't even 'proper' capitalism, is it? I mean, a truly laissez-faire capitalist government would have said to the stricken banks, "You've made your bed, now you've got to sleep in it". Instead we have "socialism for bankers, the free market for everyone else", as some people have put it.

very neat way of putting it, that, will be using it! David Harvey (who I think should be taught in schools, personally, thought here's an obvious reason why he's not) couched it that governments were in fact being partially Keynesian, though my knowledge of 'who said what' in economics is not good enough to comment on that.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/06/some-big-things-ha-joon-chang-doesn’t-tell-you-about-capitalism/ this looks like very interesting reading - haven't had chance to read it all yet.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
While it’s true that some of our culture and social structure can be explained by bad faith expressions of class interests, I think it's a mistake to view people as being insincere in general. Liberals are liberals because they believe in it, and they believe in it because it is believable. Equality, tolerance, inclusiveness—aren’t these good things? I certainly think so.

No one wakes up in the morning and decides to orchestrate evil. Even bogeymen-type characters like Dick Cheney proceed on the basis that they are doing good. The psychic costs of doing otherwise are simply too great to bear.

You are right to note that it is unlikely that elites would ever voluntarily give up power, but I don’t know that there is anything wrong with this in and of itself. The social order has always been organised around hierarchies. Instead, it’s the particular form that this order takes that has the most profound implications for us as people who want to live as humans in a human society.

This is super-interesting territory, where politics meets personal psychology.

I agree that 'evil' is too easy a word to bandy about. I think Dick Cheney is, rather, probably insane, as are many politicians, and many involved in big business.

Wrt big business, this is not too much of a surprise, as many capitalist systems encourage what I think could best be described as an addiction to making money. Whereas other addicts (obviously the similarity of some recent forms of finance to gambling can come up here) are, for good reason, understood to be acting in a way that is out of control, those addicted to making money have laws twisted in their favour (trickle-down bullshit etc etc), and often end up at the top of our society. This state of mind typically results in one privileging making even more money (when one could never even spend the amount one has) above damaging the lives of other human beings, is to my mind a sick one, and totally divorced from any vision of what human beings are and could achieve. It's addict behaviour, and it ruins a hell of a lot of lives. (The interesting thing is super-rich people who go more to the left as they attain that status)

Returning to liberalism, the issue of sincerity as regards one's beliefs is incredibly difficult in itself. What does sincerity mean, when most people simply block out evidence to the contrary, that might force them to examine their opinions/lifestyles more closely. Everyone does this to greater or lesser extent out of concerns for ego, integrity etc, but how much more would someone like Cheney do it; to renege on any of his views would be political suicide, for one thing? Never underestimate how much people lie to themselves about how they are 'honest', 'moral', 'generous' etc etc, whereas they stopped collecting actual evidence on this a long time back, so it just assumes the form of a mantra to keep the 'bad thoughts' away.

Equality, tolerance, inclusiveness in themselves are beautiful things, but surely very far from what most of those who would describe themselves as liberals actually do in practice (whatever the rhetoric)? Certainly equality of opportunity (to me the most important type of equality) is only ever paid lip service; tolerance and inclusiveness are only adhered to when it suits (and the initial attainment of many societal inclusivenesses (?) have involved pitched battles with the authorities).
 

viktorvaughn

Well-known member
This is crucial, I think. People blame capitalism for the current global recession and the way it's being (mis)handled - with justification, of course - but the system we have isn't even 'proper' capitalism, is it? I mean, a truly laissez-faire capitalist government would have said to the stricken banks, "You've made your bed, now you've got to sleep in it". Instead we have "socialism for bankers, the free market for everyone else", as some people have put it.

Bit off topic but has anyone done a thoughtpiece type article on what would have happened had the govt done nothing and the banks failed. I genuinely have no idea what that model would look like knowing not much about economics but would be interested.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
well, there was a run on Northern Rock, so probably similar things up and down the country -the issue with fractional reserve banking. Most people would 'lose' their money, lose in inverted commas because it wasn't there int he first place, it was invested (often badly/incredibly riskily).

A situation exacerbated by the eradication of walls between retail and investment banking, which is one of the craziest things ever.

I don't know enough about it, but in a fractional reserve system where the public every salary-time gives money to the banks for free (and most current accounts give zero interest or near as dammit), people are beholden to them, hence where the 'too big to fail' idea comes from. And if laws governing the banks are inadequate to curb their excesses/gambling on risky investments, then your money (if in a bank) is only safe insofar as you are constantly running the risk of paying money through taxes to bail them out. If they're not bailed out, where's your money?

So if government is in the pockets of the banks in any way, the public are screwed.

I think this is (roughly) right, but far from sure.
 
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vimothy

yurp
During the Great Depression, there were widespread bank failures in the US, as banks were run on and collapsed. A natural consequence of bank failures is the collapse of the supply of money, a natural consequence of which is deflation and probably depression. Though of course opinions differ as to exactly what it was that caused the downturn to be so persistent.

In any case it was generally believed to have been disastrous enough for the economy to motivate the US govt to create the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation--the FDIC--via the Glass-Steagall Act in '33.

The UK govt also guarantees deposit accounts--and, it turns out, a whole lot more besides--so the run on NR didn't reflect any real risk of loss of consumer savings.

Instead, in the current financial crisis, runs didn't happen on the govt insured, retail-side, but in wholesale, uninsured and unregulated markets like the all important tri-party repo market, which is a kind of deposit account equivalent for the financial system.

After the failure of Lehman Bros., as these markets were run on, systemically important credit markets started to shut down. For example, if you watched HBO's film of Sorkin's Too Big To Fail, you might have noticed a scene in which, following Lehman's collapse, the CEO of General Electric is on the phone to Hank Paulson, complaining that they can no longer find buyers for their commercial paper. In other words, even the biggest corporations in the world were unable to access the credit needed to fund their day-to-day operations.

The unfortunate upshot is, it really did seem as though these guys were too big to fail. Given the systemic effects of one failure, the collapse of the entire sector looks like it could have resulted in apocalyptic levels of destruction.
 
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vimothy

yurp
I agree that 'evil' is too easy a word to bandy about. I think Dick Cheney is, rather, probably insane, as are many politicians, and many involved in big business....

As with hierarchies, I don’t think that there is anything wrong with “big business” or making money per se. Rather, it’s that the market and govt bureaucracy shouldn’t dominate society to the extent that they do. Britain had its own unique culture, the expression of a unique community (or intersection of a family of communities), once upon a time. What happened to it? Well, it got razed to the ground and concreted over, to make way for Tescos, dance music, internet porn, and everything else that is now familiar.

It's true that businesses are complicit in the hollowing out of our culture, but then so are a lot of other people: intellectuals, technocrats, politicians, and so on, all the way down the chain to the lowliest individuals.

Of course in some sense I must believe, as you do, that people lie to themselves about the condition of society. Otherwise its continued existence doesn’t make sense, except in terms of some evil and nefarious plot—and I think that is too easy an explanation to be wholly true.

In Soviet Russia, you were taught to be a Communist. In Liberal England, you are taught to be a Liberal. Modern man, as we all know, gives birth to himself—or at least pretends to—so this should not be a surprise. And who can say, probably in Soviet Russia I would be a dedicated Party member, just like everyone else.

Most people are not philosophers or revolutionaries, and shouldn't be expected to act as such. They don’t want to be engaged in some eternal struggle for the Ownership of the Means of Production, or Grand Luminous City at the End of the Dark Historical Tunnel. They want to live in a world that is greater than they are, to have a place within it where they can raise a family in peace, and to be able to establish a meaningful relationship between the two.

Measured against the unrealistic and inhuman demands of modern hyper-liberalism, it goes without saying that they are failures and hypocrites—just as they were failures and hypocrites in Communist Russia and failures and hypocrites in Fascist Italy. The problem here is not with the people, but with the unrealistic demands that are placed upon them. People are not like that; life is not like that. If you drain meaning from all social institutions, so that everything can occupy the same sphere equally, the result is not utopia, but a kind of post-human nihilistic limbo.

I often think of this passage from de Tocqueville’s The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution:

Every public passion was thus wrapped up in philosophy; political life was violently driven back into literature, and writers, taking in hand the direction of opinion, found themselves for a moment taking the place that party leaders usually hold in free countries… Above the real society… there was slowly built an imaginary society in which everything seemed simple and coordinated, uniform, equitable, and in accord with reason. Gradually, the imagination of the crowd deserted the former to concentrate on the latter. One lost interest in what was, in order to think about what could be, and finally one lived mentally in the ideal city the writers had built.

History rhymes, as Mark Twain observed. Unfortunately its song is not always a pleasant one...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Vim, I think your posts in this thread are very lucid and well-argued, and I kind of agree to a large extent with what you're saying, but...all this the-end-times-are-upon-us stuff, the whole eschatological forboding - we've been here countless times before, haven't we? I mean, there's that famous passage in Socrates where he basically goes "Tsk, kids today, eh? I don't know..."; there's a well-known treatise from mediaeval Japan in which someone bemoanes the comprehensive inferiority of the current generation of young 'uns to their fathers' generation - it's kind of a universal tendency to see things this way, and it's by no means limted to the Right, either (though probably more common among conservative people generally, by definition).

Then again, societies do sometimes collapse or go into serious decline, that's undeniable. A Roman proconsul in a western province in 300 AD who thought to himself "Things are going tits-up and no mistake" would ultimately have been proved right, even if the final collapse took another century or more.

Another thing that's a bit disturbing is the question of what (if anythin) can be done about all this. The responses to the development of "decadent" societies seem to follow a few well-trodden paths, viz. getting everyone back into the church/mosque/temple in a big way (uh, not so keen on that one myself), abolishing class and private ownership so we can all live together as one big happy family (an admirable idea in principle, doesn't exactly have an unblemished record in historical fact though) or re-awakening the true Urkultur of the Volk (enough said). To put it very bluntly, is there an alternative to your atomised, po-mo pseudo-utopia where the only good is pleasurable consumption, other than theocracy, totalitarian socialism or fascism?

Interesting, too, that the breakdown of culture, tradition, public religion (or Christianity, at least), well-defined class boundaries, family ties and all other things that conservatives have traditionally stood for has been accelerated by Tory policies, and New Labour's more Tory-ish policies, over the last 30+ years. Wasn't Thatcher hugely unpopular with the Tory old guard, not just out of petty prejudice against her sex but because they knew her policies would have just these effects, despite all her rhetoric about tradition and history? I mean a huge part of her support came not just from the obvious public-schooled classes who'd voted Tory for generations but also a generation of young working-class people who made good in the '80s boom and didn't give two shits for tradition because the tradition they'd come from was one of growing up in a small house in a grotty area and doing poorly-paid jobs or being unemplyed...
 

vimothy

yurp
I kind of agree to a large extent with what you're saying, but...all this the-end-times-are-upon-us stuff, the whole eschatological forboding - we've been here countless times before, haven't we?

Ha! I suppose that I’m naturally drawn to the gloomy and portentous—it adds a kind of cheap aesthetic weight to the argument. But short cuts make for long delays, as any wizzid would tell ya, so probably it’s something I should wean myself out of.

On the one hand, I hope that I’m saying something more than merely “kids today don’t know they’re born”—perhaps that kids today are born into something, but they don’t realise that it’s there; or perhaps that kids today are not born into something, but they don’t realise that it’s absent, because they don’t realise that it ever existed.

On the other hand, however, I do believe that the current generation is inferior to its antecedents. Technology has improved; men have declined. In fact, I think that one measure of the success of a culture is the quality of the people it produces, so that you can observe this decline in real time in the ongoing collapse of our intellectual and cultural life. Perhaps someone could design a smartphone app, or something.

In any case, it’s fair to note as you do that people have been saying that society is going down the tubes for a while now. And you even pre-empt me by adding the important caveat that this doesn’t mean ipso facto that the people who say this are always wrong. One of the problems with this line of thought, though, is that the standards used when making this judgement are not stable, and have got progressively more unstable in recent years. It’s like trying to gauge the speed of an object coming towards you when you’re standing on a train. You need to somehow factor into your calculations the trajectory of the train itself.

I’m certain that if you were able to go back in time to the year 1911, and show people in Britain the state of their country one hundred years hence, very few of them would be enthusiastic about it. In fact, I can’t imagine that they would be anything other than horrified and appalled at the nightmare vision of the future placed before them. It is impossible to overstate the gap in values between now and then. So I think that it’s fair to say that if two people were arguing about the prospects for progress in 1911, and you could show them exactly how the century would turn out, the argument would be settled in favour of the pessimist in short order. Carried out on a significant scale, the experiment would completely bury progressive-idealism as a going concern.

As to “what is to be done”—well, I’m sure I wouldn’t know. I do have some thoughts on theocracy, totalitarian socialism and fascism, though.

One way to define modernity is an age in which man is no longer understood to partake in some kind of higher order [*]. Since he does not possess a transcendent nature, man is instead strictly limited to history, or biology, or something similar.

Totalitarian ideologies all share in the modernist conception of man. If there is no power higher than the individual, there is no greater good than the satisfaction of individual desire. But in order to give society structure, there has to be some way to resolve the problem of conflicting desires. Totalitarianism takes the arbitrary desiring principle, puts it on a pedestal and demands that society bends its knee before it. The power that enables the collective to subsume all individual desires beneath its own becomes the principle about which society is ordered; power becomes not simply a means to an end but an end as such.

Quite apart from the sterility of all of the actually existing totalitarian societies, it’s clear from the above that totalitarianism can’t in principle solve the deeper problems facing mankind any better than liberalism can. So the choice between the two is indeed a depressing one, if that is what we are faced with.

On the subject of theocracy, it is possible to view all the modernist ideologies as secular religions. (See, for a highly readable argument in this vein, Michael Burleigh’s Earthly Powers). Liberalism is a kind of secular, state religion. It has its own taboos, rituals, saints, myths and so on. When you write that the idea of resurrecting religion doesn’t appeal I get the feel that what you mean is that you don’t like the idea of spending your Sunday morning in a church. Which is fair enough—neither do I. But I think that something similar to religion or the religious worldview is necessary to balance out the more extreme tendencies of modernism in general and liberalism in particular. It doesn’t have to be explicitly theistic, though—e.g., Confuciusism, Buddhism, etc. And I don’t think it’s obvious that we end up in vastly different place give that we already have a kind of para-state religion anyway.

*This principle in and of itself is not new. Writing in the 3rd Century AD, Plotinus criticised a similar tendency:

What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It?

The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process, and in the primal differentiation with the desire for self-ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this freedom and largely indulged their own motion; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting further and further, they came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine. A child wrenched young from home and brought up during many years at a distance will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself: the souls, in the same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own nature; ignorance of their rank brings self-depreciation; they misplace their respect, honouring everything more than themselves; all their awe and admiration is for the alien, and, clinging to this, they have broken apart, as far as a soul may, and they make light of what they have deserted; their regard for the mundane and their disregard of themselves bring about their utter ignoring of the divine.

Admiring pursuit of the external is a confession of inferiority; and nothing thus holding itself inferior to things that rise and perish, nothing counting itself less honourable and less enduring than all else it admires could ever form any notion of either the nature or the power of God.
 

lanugo

von Verfall erzittern
Excellent post, Vimothy.

I especially liked the bit where you muse about the precise nature of the bereavement that has befallen contemporary culture and how most people are (blissfully?) unaware of the fact that they have been deprived of something fundamentally important.

Reminded me of Baudrillard's metaphor of the "agony of the real", denoting the - somewhat mysterious - breakdown of 'reality' itself in the wake of (interrelated) processes such as rapid technologisation, hyper-acceleration of capitalist transactions and violently assimilative globalisation.

What, in my opinion, attests most strikingly to the accuracy of this diagnosis is the inevitably farcical character of every and all of today's proceedings, be it art, politics or personal life, wherein one can't help but see lacklustre, increasingly grotesque and almost necrophilic-seeming impersonations of a dead past.

I'd like to note one thing regarding your remarks on the possibility that modernist ideologies might be viewed as secular remodellings of religious belief systems. I take this to mean that new world views, despite the conviction of their proponents that they have created something entirely new, actually preserve and retain essential functions and concepts of previous paradigms thought to be overcome. Western liberal democracies, apart from possibly incorporating 'theocratic' elements, as you have already pointed out, also seem to be to made up of certain totalitarian and fascist components. For one, the drive for eventual planetary hegemony, characteristic of totalitarian ideologies, is also a basic feature of the expansion of Western consumerism. In conjunction with the interventionist US-NATO military bloc, this ideology has already come much closer to achieving this objective than any of the past 'totalitarian' regimes - a 'globalised' goverment structure under Western auspices could even be understood to be the first fully realised form of 'totalitarianism' in the true sense of the word. In addition, Western mass media is a more powerful propagandistic instrument than, say, Goebbels could ever have dreamed of. Far from being the "Fourth Estate", i.e. a democratic institution set up to to watch over and regulate the government, the media overwhelmingly serves to disseminate and imprint the current ideological catch phrases on people's minds ("democracy", "human rights", "freedom") which are then used for the justification of wars of aggression (see Libya).

The Posthumanist movement with its crypto-eugenicist agenda is another potentially unrecognised fascist inheritance of the enlightened West.

But I think that something similar to religion or the religious worldview is necessary to balance out the more extreme tendencies of modernism in general and liberalism in particular. It doesn’t have to be explicitly theistic, though—e.g., Confuciusism, Buddhism, etc. And I don’t think it’s obvious that we end up in vastly different place give that we already have a kind of para-state religion anyway.

Interesting. Your wording kind of suggests that you consider this 'spiritual renewal' to be called for from a pragmatic point of view in order to orient the disaffected public and its potentially destructive excesses toward a certain desired state of societal equilibrium. As if some kind of elite could reverse the effects of modernism by administering the people a surrogate system of values. Wouldn't that be the bleakest outgrowth of modernism of all?

And if, as you say, what has been lost is not necessarily the bond between man and divinity - then what exactly is it that has been lost?
 
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luka

Well-known member
haha, this thread is amzing... vimothy with his spectator-lite musings and languo with his david icke shtick in harmonious and very touching agreement!
i reckon if the bloke from 1911 was a gaylord he'd be encouraged by the progress society has made. if he was very poor he may well b impressd to. if it iwas not a bloke but a lass, again, may wll be keen. if he was a feature writere for the spectator he may well as you assert, be horrified.
 

lanugo

von Verfall erzittern
haha, this thread is amzing... vimothy with his spectator-lite musings and languo with his david icke shtick in harmonious and very touching agreement!
i reckon if the bloke from 1911 was a gaylord he'd be encouraged by the progress society has made. if he was very poor he may well b impressd to. if it iwas not a bloke but a lass, again, may wll be keen. if he was a feature writere for the spectator he may well as you assert, be horrified.

Yeah, Marcel Proust would have a blast at Christopher Street Day.

Now why don't you piss off and post a poem on some facebook wall?
 

luka

Well-known member
Now why don't you piss off and post a poem on some facebook wall?

o! lanuguo, your eyes are like the night
as lustrous and sinful
your perfume is like that of Arabia
it follows at your heels like a black cat
O! languo your mind hath truly seen past the seven veils
what shall become of you?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
o! lanuguo, your eyes are like the night
as lustrous and sinful
your perfume is like that of Arabia
it follows at your heels like a black cat
O! languo your mind hath truly seen past the seven veils
what shall become of you?

Times like this I wish Dissensus was one of those forums where you can give people 'rep'.

Seven veils indeed, hahaha.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"i reckon if the bloke from 1911 was a gaylord he'd be encouraged by the progress society has made. if he was very poor he may well b impressd to. if it iwas not a bloke but a lass, again, may wll be keen. if he was a feature writere for the spectator he may well as you assert, be horrified."
There's a lot of truth in that isn't there?

"I’m certain that if you were able to go back in time to the year 1911, and show people in Britain the state of their country one hundred years hence, very few of them would be enthusiastic about it. In fact, I can’t imagine that they would be anything other than horrified and appalled at the nightmare vision of the future placed before them."
Depends what you showed them I reckon. Hard to encapsulate the state of the country and some bits have got better just as some have got worse. And a lot of the horror would be due to the change in views of morality which might be some of the things that you actually like.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Western liberal democracies, apart from possibly incorporating 'theocratic' elements, as you have already pointed out, also seem to be to made up of certain totalitarian and fascist components. For one, the drive for eventual planetary hegemony, characteristic of totalitarian ideologies, is also a basic feature of the expansion of Western consumerism. In conjunction with the interventionist US-NATO military bloc, this ideology has already come much closer to achieving this objective than any of the past 'totalitarian' regimes - a 'globalised' goverment structure under Western auspices could even be understood to be the first fully realised form of 'totalitarianism' in the true sense of the word. In addition, Western mass media is a more powerful propagandistic instrument than, say, Goebbels could ever have dreamed of.

If only the Nazis had won WWII, how much more free we'd all be! National Socialism had its faults, of course, but it was so much more honest, so much more vital than the lacklustre, decadent, degenerate, one might in fact say Jew-infested liberal-secular-capitalist democracies we have today.

You really are a prize prat.
 

vimothy

yurp
There's a lot of truth in that isn't there?

Well, obviously I disagree, which is why I wrote all that stuff above it.

Of course, everyone is supposed realise that all their aims are one with modern super-Protestantism, and their needs are best met by it, so that to support it is really to advance one’s own interests. Consequently, anyone would prefer to live in a situation where it was more advanced than less. I mean, it’s just self-evident, right? We discussed this earlier in the thread. Everyone is on a trajectory of gradual and inevitable convergence towards the ideal, and any short-term discrepancies in values or preferences are exactly that and will settle down into nothing in the long-run.

Partly, the ability of people to make this sort of claim in a historical context rests on the deliberate confusion of technological and social progress. I’m sure that if you asked anyone—“hey there, would you like to have a higher standard of living?”—they’d probably say yes. I know how I’d answer.

If there was no technological growth, then what would a poor person say? What would anyone say? If there was technological growth, but different social change, which would they prefer?

The second thing that this rests on is taking marginal gains to some particular person or subgroup, but ignoring the whole effect. Sure, a “gaylord”, or a woman, or a poor person, might prefer to have the individual gains that they made in a straight offer, but would they take them in exchange for the total change in society over the last hundred years? I’m pretty sure that the answer for most people would be “no”. That’s simply a matter of judgement. And yes, a lot of this rests on the differences in morality and values between now and then. What else would it rest on?

And note that it doesn’t really matter whether you agree with them in this, if you’re looking at the idea that society is going down the tubes in a dispassionate way. In the past, pessimistic people said it was. If they could be brought into the present, do you think they would they feel refuted, or vindicated?

And I haven't even mentioned all of the industrialised death and other unfortunate wrinkles that the 20th century threw up while we were creating that Ideal City...
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
What's the question again? ;)

One area I'd say in which minimal progress has been made since 1911 is in people's ability to make themselves happy, or to 'deal with their shit'. I'm always impressed by how radical psychotherapeutic and some sociological texts from at least the 1940s still are (and probably from before).
 
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