Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

1st Essay
“This is what I want to talk about in these five essays: how often and how
much we are dominated by our savage past, as individuals and as groups.”
We do know more about ourselves now than people did in the past, but that
very little of this knowledge has been put into effect
What we live through, in any age, is the effect on us of mass emotions and of
social conditions from which it is almost impossible to detach ourselves. Often
the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful.
And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be
asking, “How could they have believed that?” because events will have taken
place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history
Novelist’s most valuable task: To enable us to see ourselves as other see us
“It is not too much to say that when the word ‘blood’ is pronounced, this is a
sign that reason is about to depart”
2nd Essay
We can stand in a room full of dear friends, knowing that nine-tenths of them,
if the pack demands it, will become our enemies-will, as it were, throw stones
through our windows. It means that if you are a member of a close-knit
community, you know you differ from this community’s ideas at the risk of
being seen as a no-goodnik, a criminal, an evil-doer. This is an absolutely
automatic process; nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically.
But there is always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our
future, the future of everybody, depends on this minority
The professionals, the possessors of a certain field of knowledge, never like it
when mavericks among them share it with the mob
The detached, curious, patient, investigative attitude that I think is the most
valuable thing we have in the fight against our own savagery, our long history
as group animals
When citizens join together to set up, they do not say, this organism we’re
setting up is likely to develop in one of several ways. Let us take this into
account and watch how we behave so that we control the society and the
society does not control us
Humans like certainties. More, they crave certainty, they seek certainty, and
great resounding truths
Opponents are never hated as much as former allies
Patterns of tyranny, for they are in us still, are the ones that we should study,
become conscious of, and recognize as they emerge in us and in the societies
we live in
3rd Essay
“In war-time the first casualty is truth”
We are all of us, to some degree or another, brain-washed by the society we
live in
Three pillars of brain-washing:
°Tension followed by relaxation, sadism to kindness
°Repetition, saying the same thing over and over again
°Slogans-reducing of complex ideas to simple sets of words
“It is the end of the Age of Faith; we will each one of us give up the flattering
and comforting idea that we, only we, only I am right”?
“It seems to me, more and more, that we are being governed by waves of mass
emotion, and while they last it is not possible to ask cool, serious questions.
These cool, serious questions and their cool, serious, dispassionate answers
could save us
The researchers of brain washing and indoctrination discovered that people
who knew how to laugh resisted best
Laughter is a very powerful thing, and only the civilized, the liberated, the free
person can laugh at herself, himself
In some countries in the ancient times, there was a checking mechanism.
There were government employees whose job it was to go about pretending to
be ordinary citizens, to check the behavior of officials. If an official was found
to be stupid, or offensive, or bullying, or unjust, then he was removed
4th Essay
What is dangerous is not the belonging to a group, or groups, but not
understanding the social laws that govern groups and govern us
It is the hardest thing in the world to maintain an individual dissident opinion,
as a member of a group
Perhaps we’re all more dependent on brand names and on packaging than
we’d like to think
Nearly all the pressures from outside are in terms of group beliefs, group
needs, national needs, patriotism and the demands of local loyalties, such as
your city and local groups of all kinds. But more subtle and more demanding-
more dangerous-are the pressures from inside, which demand that you should
conform, and it is these that are the hardest to watch and to control
“You must be on your guard against your own most primitive reactions and
instincts”
5th Essay
People who’ve lived under tyranny value democracy
Today’s treason is tomorrow’s orthodoxy
In the long run, what is useful is what survives, revives, and comes to life in
different contexts
Everything that has ever happened to me has taught me to value the
individual, the person who cultivates and preserves her or his own ways of
thinking, who stands out against group thinking, group pressures. Or who,
conforming no more than is necessary to group pressures, quietly preserves
individual thinking and development (She’s not talking about eccentrics,
eccentrics tend to be in love with the image of eccentricity)
Literature is a branch of anthropology, a branch of history, and we will make
sure that you will know how to judge an idea from the point of view of long-
term human memory. For literature and history are branches of human
memory, recorded memory
Understand your own behavior through psychology, social psychology,
sociology and son on
Akhnaton