Zitat des Tages von Zygmunt Bauman:
Civilisation, the orderly world in which we live, is frail. We are skating on thin ice. There is a fear of a collective disaster. Terrorism, genocide, flu, tsunamis.
The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.
Unlike 'real relationships', 'virtual relationships' are easy to enter and to exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use, when compared with the heavy, slow-moving, messy real stuff.
I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.
Like the phoenix, socialism is reborn from every pile of ashes left day in, day out, by burnt-out human dreams and charred hopes.
Relationships, like cars, should undergo regular services to make sure they are still roadworthy.
The consumerist culture insists that swearing eternal loyalty to anything and anybody is imprudent, since in this world new glittering opportunities crop up daily.
As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
I was leftwing, I am leftwing, and I will die leftwing.
Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.
Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming - all such things sound the death knell to love.
Partnerships are increasingly seen through the prism of promises and expectations, and as a kind of product for consumers: satisfaction on the spot, and if not fully satisfied, return the product to the shop or replace it with a new and improved one! You don't, after all, stick to your car, or computer, or iPod, when better ones appear.
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.
There are other ways of finding satisfaction, recipes for human happiness, enjoyment, dignified and meaningful, gratifying life, than increased consumption that increases production.
In our world of rampant 'individualisation', relationships are mixed blessings. They vacillate between a sweet dream and a nightmare, and there is no telling when one turns into the other.
Capitalism proceeds through creative destruction. What is created is capitalism in a 'new and improved' form - and what is destroyed is self-sustaining capacity, livelihood and dignity of its innumerable and multiplied 'host organisms' into which all of us are drawn/seduced one way or another.
