Words get in the way

Sometimes we have to say the opposite of what we mean to convey our intentions more gently. David Graeber:

"The English “please” is short for “if you please,” “if it pleases you to do this” – it is the same in most European languages (French si il vous plait, Spanish por favor). Its literal meaning is “you are under no obligation to do this.” “Hand me the salt. Not that I am saying that you have to!” This is not true; there is a social obligation, and it would be almost impossible not to comply. But etiquette largely consists of the exchange of polite fictions (to use less polite language, lies). When you ask someone to pass the salt, you are also giving them an order; by attaching the word “please,” you are saying that it is not an order. But, in fact, it is."

When we are forbidden by others from saying what we want to say, the seized opportunity to speak our truth becomes precious. Anne Michaels:

"On the way home we passed walls scrawled with a huge V – Vinceremo, we shall overcome – in black paint. Or M – Mussolini Merda. Kostas explained why no one wanted to erase those symbols. During the occupation, graffiti required swiftness and courage. Graffitos who were caught were executed by the Germans on sight. A single letter was exhilarating, it was spit in the eye of the oppressors. A single letter was a matter of life and death."

All the fuss about verbal communication can obscure other ways of absorbing information and understanding the world. Lily King:

"You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an over dominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing."

Physical interaction with others in real time is an essential part of much of our communication. Barbara J. King:

”Our posture, our gesture, our facial expression, and the direction and intensity of our gaze all affect our partner moment by moment, and not just in a linear way. Co-regulation is not a stimulus-response chain of events. It's not ‘He looked away and then I softened my voice tone,’ but rather ‘As he began to shift his gaze away, I dropped my voice and spoke more softly.’ It's not ‘She turned to me, and then I smiled,’ but rather, ‘As she began to turn her torso in my direction, I started to smile.’ A web of contingencies, overlapping in time, characterizes co-regulated communication.”

The ancient sage Chuang-Tzu said that meaning is independent of words, with words being merely a tool to help one grasp it.

“The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten the words so that I can talk with him?”

Sources

David Graeber. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Quoted by Maria Popova for BrainPickings.org.

Anne Michaels. Fugitive Pieces: A Novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. p 78.

Lily King. Euphoria. (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2014.) Amazon Kindle edition. p. 79.

Barbara J. King. Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion. New York: Doubleday, 2007. p. 44.

Chuang-Tzu (c. 200 B.C.E.). Quoted in Robert A. Burton. On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2008. p. 35.

Quotes on therapeutic consumerism

Hannah Arendt:

"It is also true that there is a certain element of violence in the imaginative exaggerations of publicity men, that behind the assertion that girls who do not use this particular brand of soap may go through life with pimples and without a husband, lies the wild dream of monopoly, the dream that one day the manufacturer of the 'only soap that prevents pimples' may have the power to deprive of husbands all girls who don't use his soap.
"

Erich Fromm:

"This situation is still more emphasized by the methods of modern advertising. The sales talk of the old-fashioned businessman was essentially rational. He knew his merchandise, he knew the needs of the customer, and on the basis of this knowledge he tried to sell. To be sure, his sales talk was not entirely objective and he used persuasion as much as he could; yet, in order to be efficient, it had to be a rather rational and sensible kind of talk. A vast sector of modern advertising is different; it does not appeal to reason but to emotion; like any other kind of hypoid suggestion, it tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually. This type of advertising impresses the customer by all sorts of means: by repetition of the same formula again and again; by the influence of an authoritative image, like that of a society lady or of a famous boxer, who smokes a certain brand of cigarette; by attracting the customer and at the same time weakening his critical abilities by the sex appeal of a pretty girl; by terrorizing him with the threat of “b.o.” or “halitosis”; or yet again by stimulating daydreams about a sudden change in one’s whole course of life brought about by buying a certain shirt or soup. All these methods are essentially irrational; they have nothing to do with the qualities of the merchandise, and they smother and kill the critical capacities of the customer like an opiate or outright hypnosis. They give him a certain satisfaction by their daydreaming qualities just as the movies do, but at the same time they increase his feeling of smallness and powerlessness."

Jim Wallis:

”If you just drink this beer, use this toothpaste, drive this car, wear this perfume, or buy these jeans, this can be your life, too. Is this not the essence of idolatry--a misdirected form of worship?

But these promises are an illusion, a mirage that is very dangerous. All of life has been reduced to consumption. We sacrifice our souls for the mirage of glittering images, and all we get is a mouthful of sand. We have run after mirages in the desert, and now the desert is in us.”

Sources

Hannah Arendt. The Burden of Our Time. London: Secker and Warburg, 1951. Published in the US as The Origins of Totalitarianism. p 336.

Erich Fromm. Escape from Freedom. New York: Avon, 1941. p. 149.

Jim Wallis. The Soul of Politics: Beyond "Religious Right" and "Secular Left". New York: Harvest, 1995. p. 168.

Quotes on our relationships with money and our relationships with people

Andrew Potter:

“Cars are an almost perfect metaphor for the pervasive atomism that denies the very existence of the webs of interdependence that make civil society possible.”

Henry D. Thoreau:

"It is a grand fact that you cannot make the fairer fruits or parts of fruits matter of commerce, that is, you cannot buy the highest use and enjoyment of them. You cannot buy that pleasure which it yields to him who truly plucks it. You cannot buy a good appetite even. In short, you may buy a servant or slave, but you cannot buy a friend."

David Callahan:

"The great promise of consumer culture – promoted around the clock by $150 billion a year in advertising – is that we need never be discomforted or inconvenienced; that we need never put any him or burning desire on the back burner, or accept anything less than an optimal experience; that we always have more choices, new choices, better choices.

Whatever else you may say about consumerism, whether you’re pro-mall or anti-mall, one thing is certain: This outlook is fundamentally at odds with the vows of marriage and the realities of parenthood. In even the best family life we are often discomforted and inconvenienced, and we are stuck with what we have – the jock we married when we were twenty-four and just a kid, the children who share our blood but not our temperament, the in-laws whom we might happily send on a cruise around the world. Family may be about any number of things; unlimited choice is not one of them."

Alfred DePew:

"Consider this. What if we treated our lovers the way we treated money? Imagine periods of wild, passionate attention, obsession even. Then nothing. ("You never call. You never write!") Neglect. Irresponsibility. Avoidance. Followed by periods of remorse, resolving to do better. Balance the checkbook. Be more mindful of spending. No more debt. And even if your relationship to money is not this dramatic, chances are it's inconsistent and a cause of worry. In short: an energy drain."

Francis P. Cholle:

Experts say that no other generation [in the United States] has ever mentioned time and flexibility among their first three motivators. Millennials' approach to life is more personal and subjective and takes precedence over what we would see as the rule of the game: money. They have reconceptualized money; it is for them just one currency among many that are available to get them the things and experiences that they value. For example, in the preceding list, millennials say that time and flexibility are more important than money when seeking employment. Time and flexibility are currencies to be weighed in the same way as money when they think about compensation for their work.

Sources

“Walking the Line.” Andrew Potter. Adbusters, June-July 2000. p. 79.

David Callahan. The Moral Center: How We Can Reclaim our Country from Die-Hard Extremists, Rogue Corporations, Hollywood Hacks, and Pretend Patriots. USA: Harcourt, 2006. pp. 35-36.

Henry D. Thoreau. “Wild Fruits.” Printed in Faith in a Seed: The First Publication of Thoreau’s Last Manuscript. Edited by Bradley P. Dean. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993. p. 182.

Alfred DePew. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Money." White Crane Journal, Issue #64, Spring 2005, p 22.

Francis P. Cholle. The Intuitive Compass: Why the Best Decisions Balance Reason and Instinct. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012. p. 209.

Quotes on seeking happiness through consumer power

Arthur Miller:

"Years ago a person, he was unhappy, didn't know what to do with himself, he'd go to church, start a revolution – something. Today you're unhappy? Can't figure it out? What is the salvation? Go shopping."

Isak Dinesen:

"Nowadays when people do not allow themselves to be burned or expelled from society for the sake of Paradise, it is not because our more refined nerves cause us to fear the stake or poverty or expulsion more than our forebears did, nor because we are in doubt that our sufferings will gain us entrance to Paradise – for in any case such a belief could easily spring up at any time at all – but because the Paradise that is promised us in connection with these sufferings does not appeal to us. We have no desire for it and would have no wish to go there even if access to it were free.

On the other hand, when people began to believe fervently that bliss was to be found in motorcars, a good cellar, and so on, then the majority were prepared to undergo frightful sufferings for years, in offices, factories and stock exchanges, in the hope of finally attaining that bliss. At this moment probably fifty percent of civilized humanity would be reconciled to enduring all the pangs of the early Christians if they knew they would emerge on the other side with an annual income of L$50,000 [$200,000 in 1923] for the rest of their lives, and so for them there is no reason to envy the victims of Nero – with eternal bliss in store for them – their strength of character."

Amitai Etzioni:

"Several studies have shown that, across many nations with annual per capita incomes above $20,000, there is no correlation between increased income and increased happiness. In the United States since World War II, per capita income has tripled, but levels of life satisfaction remain about the same, while the people of Japan, despite experiencing a sixfold increase in income since 1958, have seen their levels of contentment stay largely stagnant. Studies also indicate that many members of capitalist societies feel unsatisfied, if not outright deprived, however much they earn and consume, because others make and spend even more."

Michael Lerner:

"What spiritual wisdom teaches us is that happiness cannot be obtained through the accumulation of goods and that therefore creating a society whose highest priority is to stimulate endless consumption is a spiritual error."

Sources

Arthur Miller. Quoted on the "Sunbeams" page of The Sun, February 2006, p. 48.

Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen]. On Modern Marriage and Other Observations (1924). Translated by Anne Born. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986. p. 36.

"Get Rich Now." Amitai Etzioni. Excerpted from The New Republic (June 17, 2009). Reprinted in UTNE Reader (Jan-Feb 2010), p. 39.

Michael Lerner. The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. p. 315.

On sexual freedom

Beverly Harrison said, "If greater genital expression were really the solution to our social miseries, we would expect ours to be the happiest society around."

What would make us a happier society? Rod Dreher said that sexual liberation can go too far: "Liberals believe that what consenting adults do in bed with their bodies is immune from moral judgment. Social conservatives recognize the falsity of this view, understanding that immoderation in sexual matters corrupts individual character and can have deleterious social consequences." Mary Daly, on the other side, suggested that sexual liberation in itself does not go far enough: "The lifting of taboos on genital sexuality does nothing to liberate from sex roles."

Pssst: Rod Dreher is homophobic and transphobic. Mary Daly was transphobic.

"More recently, Rod Dreher fled the “collapsing imperium,” as he once put it, to seek refuge in Victor Orbán’s Hungary. Dreher was a long-time columnist and still is editor at The American Conservative. He is a prominent figure on the reactionary religious Right. Dreher has always been staunchly anti-liberal; since 2020, he has radicalized to a new level – and is now constantly raging against the 'moral horror' of 'trans totalitarianism,' in particular. He is the biggest fan aspiring European autocrats have among American reactionaries. Find someone in your life who admires you half as much as Rod Dreher admires Viktor Orbán. In 2022, Dreher moved to Budapest and keeps sending his dispatches from a place called “Hungary” that exists solely in the reactionary imagination, a kind of white Christian patriarchal wonderland, where men still get to be real men, where the 'woke' hordes and 'globalist' enemies are still being kept in check by 'the people.'"

— Domination or Dissolution, Rule or Ruin: The Right is fantasizing about secession, “national divorce,” and civil war – because they will not, under any circumstance, accept pluralism. Thomas Zimmer, Democracy Americana (Substack), Feb 7, 2024

"The best example of this rather bizarre [pro-Orbán] fixation might be Rod Dreher, a very prominent figure in the reactionary intellectual scene. Dreher, a long-time columnist and still editor at the rightwing magazine The American Conservative has been an interesting bellwether for that particular sphere of far-right thinkers: He has always been begrudgingly pro-Trump, because he is so enthusiastically anti-liberal. Dreher was properly reactionary even during the first Trump presidency. But since 2020, he has radicalized to a new level – and is now constantly raging against the “moral horror” of “trans totalitarianism,” in particular.

* * *

In 2021, he received a fellowship from the Danube Institute in Budapest – a rightwing think tank funded by the Orbán government. The next year, Dreher left the United States and moved to Hungary’s capital full-time. He had long dreamed about “fleeing the collapsing imperium,” as he dramatically put it (although one suspects that his wife leaving him might have also had something to do with his plans to relocate). From Hungary, Dreher has acted as a full-on propagandist for Orbánism: “We are living, right now, through an ongoing societal catastrophe with gender confusion and transgenderism,” Dreher claims. “Viktor Orbán wants to save his nation from this ideological toxin and does not hesitate to use the power of the state to do so, even if it might violate the spirit of liberalism.” Orbán, Dreher believed, offered the best chance to “stem this horrible global tide of wokeness,” as he put it."

Why Hungary Matters: Six big-picture conclusions from Orbán’s smashing defeat – and what it all means for the transnational struggle against rightwing authoritarianism, Thomas Zimmer, Democracy Americana (Steady), April 13, 2026

I wrote about his "trans totalitarianism" essay here.

Criminal Charges Pressed Against Budapest Mayor After Hundreds of Thousands Defy Pride Ban: “Despite threats or punishment, I will continue to fight. Freedom and love cannot be banned.” s. baum, Erin in the Morning, Jan 29, 2026

Conversion therapy:

Alan Watts, in his day, reflected that these sorts of answers are opposite poles of the same question, and the question may not always be the right one to ask. That is: Since sex is not entirely good nor entirely evil in itself, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to whether and how it should be permitted.

"But if puritanism and cultivated licentiousness are not fundamental deviations from nature, they are simply the opposite poles of one and the same attitude — that, right or wrong, sexual pleasure is the great delight....When sexuality is set apart as a specially good or specially evil compartment of life, it no longer works in full relation to everything else. In other words, it loses universality. It becomes a part doing duty for the whole — the idolatry of a creature worshipped in place of God, and an idolatry committed as much by the ascetic as the libertine."

People take sex differentiation most seriously when they have sex, wrote John Stoltenberg, "as if their identities or lives depended on it. For males, generally, it tends to be their identities; for females, often, it is more a matter of their lives." Elizabeth Abbot wrote that many sex therapists "say (or they mean), in Carolyn Gage's bitter words, 'We just want to help you get to the place where you will want to fuck,' instead of the words that would begin to heal a woman's chronic pain: 'You don't have to fuck. You never have to fuck.'"

Sources

Beverly Harrison, quoted by Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990. p 206.

Rod Dreher, "Porky Populism," The American Conservative, Aug 6, 2012 (archive 2022)

Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman, p 156-7

Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973. p 176.

John Stoltenberg. Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. New York: Meridian, 1989. p 28.

Elizabeth Abbot. A History of Celibacy. Da Capo Press, 2001 (originally 1999). p 414.

Quotes on masculinity and feeling and expressing emotion

"It is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them 'care' is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail."

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, p. 129

"It is very much in style today to urge men to feel. However, this urging is partially reminiscent of taunting a crippled man to run."

Herb Goldberg, quoted by Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, p. 108

"But a man who is emotionally paralyzed cannot be male, that is, he cannot be male in relation to female, for if he is to relate himself to a woman there must be something of the woman in his nature."

Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman, New York: Vintage Books, 1991 (Copyright 1958). p. 113

"Genetic men, it seems, are taught to deal with the onset of this chemical [testosterone] that makes our feelings so much harder to ignore by getting rigorous, brutal, almost crushing training that frequently forces them out of contact with all their feelings. This is akin to using a nuclear warhead to restrain a werewolf...surely there is a better way?"

Raven Kaldera. Hermaphrodeities: The Transgender Spirituality Workbook. XLibris Press, 2001. p 177.

"Want to tell people about your problems? Get a sex change."

BusterB, http://themenscenter.com/busterb/mythsand.htm, Accessed Dec. 16, 2001.

Quotes on the human attempt to dominate nature

Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan:

Human beings are not particularly special, apart, or alone. A biological extension of the Copernican view that we are not at the center of the universe deprives us also of our place as the dominant form of life on the planet. It may be a blow to our collective ego, but we are not masters of life perched on the final rung of an evolutionary ladder. Ours is a permutation of the wisdom of the biosphere. We did not invent genetic engineering, we insinuated ourselves into the life cycles of bacteria, which have been directly trading and copying genes on their own for quite some time now. We did not "invent" agriculture or locomotion on horseback, we became involved in the life cycles of plants and animals, whose numbers increased in tandem with ours. ... The reality and recurrence of symbiosis in evolution suggests that we are still in an invasive, "parasitic" stage and that we must slow down, share, and reunite ourselves with other beings if we are to achieve evolutionary longevity.


R. W. Fevre:

"The real truth is that, not only has man failed to overcome nature in any sphere whatsoever but that at best he has merely succeeded in getting hold of and lifting a tiny corner of the enormous veil which she has spread over her eternal mysteries and secret. He never creates anything. All he can do is discover something. He does not master nature but has only come to be the master of those living things who have not gained the knowledge he has arrived at by penetrating into some of nature's laws and mysteries. Apart from all this, an idea can never subject to its own sway those conditions which are neessary for the existence and development of mankind; for the idea itself has come only from man. Without man there would be no human idea in this world. The idea as such is therefore always dependent on the existence of man and consequently is dependent on those laws which furnish the conditions of his existence.
"

George Alfred Wilkens:

"All nature stands on a par with man. I do not take too kindly to that portion of the first chapter of Genesis which puts into the mouth of God the injunction for man to subdue the earth and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over everything that moveth above the earth. ... However, my quarrel is not really with Genesis and that it has God give to man dominion over all the earth, as it is with the implication that because of dominion we are 'better.' Whether one's lot is dominion or subjection doesn't really matter.
"

Mary Oliver:

"Nature...is the wheel that drives our world; those who ride it willingly might yet catch a glimpse of a dazzling, even a spiritual restfulness, while those who ... insist that the world must be piloted by man for his own benefit will be gathering dust but no joy.

"

Alan Watts:

"The rush of waterfalls and the babbling of streams are not loved for their resemblance to speech; the irregularly scattered stars do not excite us because of the formal constellations which have been traced out between them; and it is for no symmetry or suggestion of pictures that we delight in the patterns of foam, of the veins in rock, or of the black branches of trees in wintertime.


"

Sources

Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan. Microcosmos. California: University of California Press, 1986, 1997. pp. 195-196

R. W. Fevre. The Demoralization of Western Culture: Social Theory and the Dilemmas of Modern Living. London: Continuum, 2000. p 28.

George Alfred Wilkens. Justice of the Universe: A Philosophy in Accord with Science. Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1957. p 131-132.

Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman, New York: Vintage Books, 1991 (Copyright 1958). p 124.