Tao Te Ching

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War and Peace in the Global Village

By Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore

A mosaic of a book that communicates not just through concepts but as more of a gestalt using pictures, poems, and text laid out in creative forms, War and Peace posits that we now live in an electronic environment that undermines all fixed goals and solid situations while trapping the unaware into lives like preconditioned robots. Called “the most prophetic of McLuhan’s books,” it’s insights into the effects of radio and television on culture, civilization, and war prove even more insightful, prescient, and applicable to our world of smart phones, social media, and electronic inundation.

Themes

Quotes from War and Peace in the Global Village

“Advertisers discovered that real news is bad news, that good news gets very little attention.”

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Themes: Consumerism

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“All human progress is a result of standing on the shoulders of our predecessors.”

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Themes: Progress

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“Along with the computer it [the television] has altered every phase of the Amerian vision and identity.”

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“any man-made environment is a conditioner that creates non-perceptive somnambulists.”

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“Darwin and Marx ignored the man-made environments in their theories of evolution and causality in favor of the 18th century and romantic idea of nature as environment.”

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“electronic information systems are live environments in the full organic sense. They alter our feeling and sensibilities, especially when they are not attended to.”

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“Napoleon's dream of a continental system makes him father of the European Common Market... Where his armies went, right-hand driving has remained... He never got to England and they still drive on the left-hand side.”

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“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water.”

Chapters: 36. The Small, Dark Light

Themes: Water

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“Perhaps Napoleon felt a certain sympathy for the semi-literate, since he was semi-literate himself. He was unable to spell or write correctly in any language. His culture was totally unacceptable to the establishment.”

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“Song itself is a slowing down of speech... There is no melody in primiteive or Oriental music because the road of song is a continuum known only to literate man.”

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Themes: Music Continuity

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“The anesthetic made possible fiendish human torments that transferred all the human pain to convalescence. With anesthetics, what was really new was convalescence.”

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Themes: Medicine Health

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“The Civil War delayed the abolition of slavery.”

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Themes: Slavery

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“the social effects of fighting a war by railway... just as every citizen had been a worker, every citizen became a soldier. Previous wars had had no such scope.”

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Themes: Warriors

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“The United States is by far the most visually organized country in the history of the world. It is the only country that was ever founded on the basis of phonetic literacy for all. All of its political and business institutions assume the ground plan of this literacy.”

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“The way to keep up is to be ahead. (Start with the 'other' man's ignorance–not his knowledge.)”

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Themes: Competition

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“The world of advertisements has for a century been a frank declaration of war on the community of customers... masochistic self-immolation on the part of advertisers.”

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“These self-amputations which we call new technologies generate vast new environments against which the individual organism is quite helpless.”

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Themes: Technology

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“To mention the Beatles is to evoke an image of non-melodic, Oriental, and environmental resonance.”

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“To the Russian, the exciting event in Pavlov's experiment was not the conditioning of the dogs but of the laboratories. But to the Westerner, the revelation that he was a preconditioned robot... was a most disagreeable discovery.”

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Themes: Slavery Free Will

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“War is the principle motivational force for the development of science at every level... all the significant discoveries about the natural world have been inspired by the real or imaginary military necessities of their epochs... war has always provided the basic incentive.”

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Themes: War Science

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“When a new technology strikes a society, the most natural reaction is to clutch at the immediately preceding period for familiar and comforting images.”

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Themes: Change

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Apostles of Doubt

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