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.
About William Irwin Thompson
William Irwin Thompsonwas an American social philosopher, cultural critic, and poet. He received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986.
More quotes from William Irwin Thompson
Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.
American poet and social critic
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.
American poet and social critic
The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.
American poet and social critic
Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.
American poet and social critic
The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.
American poet and social critic
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.
American poet and social critic
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.
American poet and social critic
If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.
American poet and social critic
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.
American poet and social critic
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.
American poet and social critic
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.
American poet and social critic
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.
American poet and social critic
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.
American poet and social critic
In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.
American poet and social critic
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.
American poet and social critic
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.
American poet and social critic