Seems to describe the right wingnuts very well. Especially after
Californians passed Prop 47 and now they are whining like banshees.
Illiterate slobs.
On 11/08/2014 05:40 PM, emptyb...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife] wrote:
The psychosis of urban life.
Georg Simmel writing in 1903, in “The Metropolis and Mental Life”
<http://www.altruists.org/static/files/The%20Metropolis%20and%20Mental%20Life%20%28Georg%20Simmel%29.htm>:
The same factors which have thus coalesced into the exactness and
minute precision of the form of life have coalesced into a
structure of the highest impersonality; on the other hand, they
have promoted a highly personal subjectivity. There is perhaps no
psychic phenomenon which has been so unconditionally reserved to
the metropolis as has the blasé attitude. The blasé attitude
results first from the rapidly changing and closely compressed
contrasting stimulations of the nerves. From this, the enhancement
of metropolitan intellectuality, also, seems originally to stem.
Therefore, stupid people who are not intellectually alive in the
first place usually are not exactly blasé. A life in boundless
pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it agitates the nerves
to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they
finally cease to react at all. In the same way, through the
rapidity and contradictoriness of their changes, more harmless
impressions force such violent responses, tearing the nerves so
brutally hither and thither that their last reserves of strength
are spent; and if one remains in the same milieu they have no time
to gather new strength. An incapacity thus emerges to react to new
sensations with the appropriate energy. This constitutes that
blasé attitude which, in fact, every metropolitan child shows when
compared with children of quieter and less changeable milieus. …
In the blasé attitude the concentration of men and things
stimulate the nervous system of the individual to its highest
achievement so that it attains its peak. Through the mere
quantitative intensification of the same conditioning factors this
achievement is transformed into its opposite and appears in the
peculiar adjustment of the blasé attitude. In this phenomenon the
nerves find in the refusal to react to their stimulation the last
possibility of accommodating to the contents and forms of
metropolitan life. The self-preservation of certain personalities
is brought at the price of devaluating the whole objective world,
a devaluation which in the end unavoidably drags one’s own
personality down into a feeling of the same worthlessness.
