It is refreshing to encounter the empty “counter-cultural” blather of Brint, for it reminds us that there are still people in existence who do not realize their “dissent” was comodified by market researchers long before they had achieved sentience.

School Psychologists and other disreputable persons speak of small children being “narcissists,” that is, they think they are everything and everything else is nothing. That seems unlikely. Small children, following the intuitions of the order of perception, simply see the everything around themselves and assume they are a seamless part of it. Their tantrums are not symptoms of self-possession but the slow awakening to their condition of being less than fully possessed by, and harmoniously one with, the world.

It is not childish, therefore, to establish that rigid, persistently modern liberal, dicotomy between the self and the world, the “collective,” the “state,” etc. It is, however, the psychosis of a malformed imagination.

But yeah, society unraveling, dogs and cats sleeping together, blah, blah…

I know most have commented on the book placement but it seems that you are really talking about a society that does not have a basis in anything. Your statement that there must be an orthodoxy for there to be rebellion seemed to imply to me that we have are a society adrift. If this is your point and that without the orthodoxy we have nothing to be responsible for (nothing to be accountable to) it seems that move in that direction would have to happen in more than this generation.

As one takes a step of a steep slope the first step is easy but when you are at the bottom the climb back up is not. When generations have been moving in the direction of personal freedom and not of society well being how do you stop it? A man standing on a train track may stop the train but who is going to be the first to do that? The climb back to a responsible society based on societial wellbeing is similar to the climb up the slope. easy to get rid of but very very difficult to go back to.

“WHAT….evvver”.

Anyone attempting to draw comparisons between things these days should come to their senses and embrace the new age wherein anything goes and the more in-flagrante it is, the better because everything is now just a data point, here today, gone tomorrow and if we think about something too much, we’ll miss the rest of the cascade tumbling by in the ongoing flood of gran mal idiocy. Twitter suits this mindset to a tee. It is not so much what is said as it is just good enough to be said.

It can and will always get worse. The eldest progeny is over in Japan on the latest documentary and it seems they’ve stumbled upon one of the current big mass cultural phenoms of that highly ritualized society. Knowing my flammability, they sent me a new book entitled “”Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno” for my birthday. Seems the Japanese youth and their adult followers have a manic fixation on costumes and make-up where the young girls adopt the seductive fashions of the Lolita and add to that, a kind of Minstrel Show make-up of light brown face paint, whitened eyes and graphic decals. My own particularly favorite is the Gothlolita. Apparently, they are pondering whether this might not be a fine cultural export. An awful lot of water has flown under the bridge when raked sand and rigid rules of rock placement have been subsumed by face decals and pubescent eros in minstrel face.

If for no other reason, Fraud — er, I mean Freud — does at least have relevance to intellectual history.

If the book you had next to the Gospels were an anthology containing “Tales From the Leather Nun”, or a confessional entitled “My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands” then — why, yes, I think it *would* signify something about you.

Were they all new releases? Were they all on the discount rack?

As I glance at my bookshelf I see, right beside the Gospels, Freud’s “Totem and Taboo.” A shameless act of impropriety? The cause of our financial crisis?

Surveying the rubbish typically offered therein, I inevitably wind up questioning whether widespread literacy is such a great educational achievement after all. I figure a healthy oral tradition would be vastly preferable to the brain-candy most gobble up.