We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.
Interpretation
The quote critiques society's fixation on materialism and power dynamics.
Cornel West's quote highlights the pitfalls of a market-driven society that prioritizes consumerism, power, and pleasure above all else. It suggests that this obsession can lead to a devaluation of deeper values such as community, empathy, and ethical responsibility, urging individuals to reflect on what truly matters in life beyond material possessions.
In practice
In a discussion on the impact of materialism on mental health.
King's response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.
You've got to love yourself enough, not only so that others will be able to love you, but that you'll be able to love others.
Profound music leads us beyond language...to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.
And when I talk about love, I'm talking about something that's great, though, brother. I'm talking about something that will sustain you.
Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.
I feel as if I have been blessed to undergo a transformation from 'gangster' to 'redeemed sinner with gangster proclivities.'
The more things I threw away, the more I found.
Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.
I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.
I don't do formal debates, because formal debates where you have two people up on a stage in equal status, and each of them is given 20 minutes to give their point of view, and then 10 minutes for a rebuttal, or whatever, that creates the illusion that you really do have here two equal points of view of equal scientific standing.
Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.
The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.
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