Weil Thoughts
Yesterday, a friend asked me for a quote from Simone Weil. Searching my notes, I realized I've wanted to write much more about Weil's thought. Well, this isn’t that, but I pulled several of her thoughts I found exceedingly relevant to the here and now. They reinforce how if any 20th century thinker remains important for helping revitalize politics in the 21st, it is Weil. These are all from her book The Need For Roots (1943).
The first needs no comment.
“At the present time, wherever there are political parties, democracy is dead.”
The second, about publicity, PR and advertising, is exquisite. One of the great problems politics, all of society, faces is our inability to deal with the tsunami of information, most especially its manipulation and saturation by business machinations. The processes of business propaganda, you can’t call it communication, have now become the instruments of political propaganda, and yes, it is a crime.
“Publicity, for example, should be rigorously controlled by law and its volume very considerably reduced; it should also be severely prohibited from ever dealing with subjects which belong to the domain of thought.”
In contemplating Weil’s thought, you cannot be constrained by what is. For example, the idea of DC doing anything is a nonstarter. However, the question of how we deal with information, the new organization required, is essential to in anyway contemplate creating a necessary and vital politics.
Next, while the Trump family has brought corruption down to a new level, and it is obscene, this is a disease metastasizing for decades. Directly related, the crimes of finance have simultaneously grown in enormity. Obama sending no one to jail for 2008 financial crisis that brought down the economy assured even greater criminality. We got it.
“Criminal dishonesty in matters connected with the state on the part of men in public life must also be effectively punished, and more severely so than armed robbery.”
Finally, in regards to our tech-idiocy, Life in the 21st Century has spent a lot of time on history, an essential element for designing the future. Weil succinctly explains why.
“It would be useless to turn one’s back on the past in order simply to concentrate on the future. It is a dangerous illusion to believe that such a thing is even possible. The opposition of future to past or past to future is absurd. The future brings us nothing, gives us nothing; it is we who in order to build it have to give it everything, our very life. But to be able to give, one has to possess; and we possess no other life, no other living sap, than the treasures stored up from the past and digested, assimilated and created afresh by us. Of all the human soul’s needs, none is more vital than this one of the past.”