Tao Te Ching
Politics of Experience
By R. D. Laing
Laing’s best know book and iconoclastic challenge to the status quo, conventional, and orthodox; Politics of Experience questions traditional conceptions of sanity and describes the “madness of morality.” Taking up the theme Dostoevsky narrates in The Grand Inquisitor—the desire to be told what to do and be part of a herd rather than thinking for ourselves,—he chronicles modern "inquisitions," the insanities modern society accept as normal. He also maps journeys away from our common, non-thinking delusions and the possibility of truly knowing ourselves.
Themes
Quotes from Politics of Experience
“A social norm may come to impose an oppressive obligation on everyone, although few people feel it as their own... Everyone will be carrying out orders—always from elsewhere... This human scene is a scene of mirages, demonic psuedo-realities, because everyone believes everyone else believes them. How can we find our way back to ourselves again?”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“Disagreement shakes us out of our slumbers and forces us to see our own point of view through contrast with another person who does not share it”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“Each person, not being himself either to himself or the other… and haunted by the ghost of his own murdered self… is addicted to other persons, and the more addicted, the less satisfied, the more lonely.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“Society highly values its normal man… Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“The family’s function is to repress… to deny death by avoiding life… to promote respect, conformity, obedience; to con children out of play; to induce a fear of failure; to promote a respect for work; to promote a respect for ‘respectability.’”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“The group, whether We or You or Them… has no consciousness of its own. Yet we may shed our own blood and the blood of others for this bloodless presence.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“The Life I am trying to grasp is the me that is trying to grasp it.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience… The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“words, words, words—at best evocations, conjurations, incantations, emanations, shimmering, iridescent flares n the sky of darkness”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
Comments (0)