In a world of global dependencies with no corresponding global polity and few tools of global justice, the rich of the world are free to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest.
Category Archive: Zygmunt Bauman
The carrying power of a bridge is not the average strength of the pillars, but the strength of the weakest pillar. I have always believed that you do not measure the health of a society by GNP but by the condition of its worst off.
Happiness needs one-upmanship.
We live in a world of communication – everyone gets information about everyone else. There is universal comparison and you don’t just compare yourself with the people next door, you compare yourself to people all over the world and with what is being presented as the decent, proper and dignified life. It’s the crime of humiliation.
We live in a globalising world. That means that all of us, consciously or not, depend on each other. Whatever we do or refrain from doing affects the lives of people who live in places we’ll never visit.
We already have – thanks to technology, development, skills, the efficiency of our work – enough resources to satisfy all human needs. But we don’t have enough resources, and we are unlikely ever to have, to satisfy human greed.
This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You’re not lower class, you are excluded – outside.
As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.
Human attention tends to be focused on the satisfactions relationships are hoped to bring, precisely because somehow they have not been truly satisfactory. And if they do satisfy, the price of this satisfaction has often been found to be unacceptable.