The Self Destruction Of The West

Voilà désormais plus de 10 000 ans que la civilisation occidentale s'est installée et voilà 10 000 ans qu'elle viole le sens même de la nature : la vie. En s'appropriant sans concession ce qui l'entourait, l'homme de l'Ouest a vu son horizon ployer sous la charge de la destruction qu'il lui avait lui-même réalisée. Sommes-nous des lycanthropes ou des vampires? Ces monstres si terrifiants qui sortent de notre imagination sont-ils en réalité la copie de notre comportement dévastateur? Prédateurs, nous pompons sans remords les énergies qui nous entourent. Jusqu'où ira-t-on?.

For the first time, Appetite for Self-Destruction recounts the epic story of the precipitous rise and fall of the modern recording industry, from an author who has been writing about it for more than ten years. With unparalleled access to those intimately involved in the music world’s highs and lows—including Warner Music chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr., renegade Napster creator Shawn Fanning, and more than 200 others—Steve Knopper is the first to offer such a detailed and sweeping contemporary history of the industry’s wild ride through the past three decades. From the birth of the compact disc, the explosion of CD sales, and the emergence of MP3-sharing websites that led to iTunes, to the current collapse of the industry as CD sales plummet, Knopper takes us inside the boardrooms, recording studios, private estates, garage computer labs, company jets, corporate infighting, and secret deals of the big names and behind-the-scenes players who made it all happen. Just as the incredible success of the CD turned the music business into one of the most glamorous, high-profile industries in the world, the advent of file sharing brought it to its knees, and Knopper saw it all.

“The 21 artists, who share their stories of madness, trauma, addiction, abuse and self-destruction, and their relationship to art, leave no vulnerable detail unwritten.”—Shameless A visceral look at the bizarre entanglement of destructive and creative forces, Live Through This is a collection of original stories, essays, artwork, and photography. It explores the use of art to survive abuse, incest, madness and depression, and the often deep-seated impulse toward self-destruction including cutting, eating disorders, and addiction. Here, some of our most compelling cartoonists, novelists, poets, dancers, playwrights, and burlesque performers traverse the pains and passions that can both motivate and destroy women artists, and mark a path for survival. Taken together, these artful reflections offer an honest and hopeful journey through a woman's silent rage, through the power inherent in struggles with destruction, and the ensuing possibilities of transforming that burning force into the external release of art. With contributions by Nan Goldin, bell hooks, Patricia Smith, Cristy C. Road, Carol Queen, Annie Sprinkle, Elizabeth Stephens, Carolyn Gage, Eileen Myles, Fly, Diane DiMassa, Bonfire Madigan Shive, Inga Muscio, Kate Bornstein, Toni Blackman, Nicole Blackman, Silas Howard, Daphne Gottleib, and Stephanie Howell.

"Political correctness" involves much more than a restriction of speech. It represents a broad cultural transformation, a shift in the way people understand things and organize their lives; a change in the way meaning is made. The problem addressed in this book is that, for reasons the author explores, some ways of making "meaning" support the creation and maintenance of organization, while others do not. Organizations are cultural products and rely upon psychological roots that go very deep. The basic premise of this book is that organizations are made up of the rules, common understandings, and obligations that "the father" represents, and which are given meaning in the oedipal dynamic. In anti-oedipal psychology, however, they are seen as locuses of deprivation and structures of oppression. Anti-oedipal meaning, then, is geared toward the destruction of organization.

Jihadi ideologues mobilize Muslims, especially young Muslims, through an individualist, centered Islam. Appealing to a classical defense doctrine, they argue that the mandates of jihad are the individual duty of every Muslim and therefore transcend and undermine both the authority of the state and the power of parental control. Yet emphasizing the duty and right of individually initiated jihad is just one side of do-it-yourself Islam. The other involves protecting the purity of doctrinal beliefs against deviation, even by fellow jihadis. The pursuit of doctrinal purity has led some jihadis to resort to takfir, a pronouncement that declares fellow Muslims unbelievers and makes it legal to shed their blood. Set against the background of the Kharijites, Islam's first counter-establishment movement, this book explores the religious philosophy underlying jihadism. The Kharijites's idealistic and individualistic ideology forces members to deploy takfir against one another, thus hastening their extinction as a group.

Spengler's work describes how we have entered into a centuries-long "world-historical" phase comparable to late antiquity, and his controversial ideas spark debate over the meaning of historiography.

We were immersed in our own self-destruction, which is why an attack in the middle of Europe took us off guard. A long period of cultural disarmament had come before the West's strategic disarmament. We must destroy our self-esteem, place the blame on ourselves, and punish ourselves in order to adhere to the dominant worldview, which the elites propagate through academia, the media, popular culture, and entertainment. We no longer have ideals to offer the world and the next generation; instead, this ideological dictatorship claims that we only have misdeeds to atone for. Western suicide would be this. The fact that the autocrats of the new imperial powers are aware of our self-sabotage is another result of Putin's aggression against Ukraine, which was supported by Xi Jinping. It is already happening in America, the cradle of an extreme experiment. This pamphlet is a guide to exploring the unfolding disaster; it is a warning and an alarm. Europeans still struggle to understand all the excesses of the United States, yet the contagion of the Old Continent has already begun. Fierce censorship against those who do not adhere to politically correct thinking dominates universities, the list of silenced, hunted, fired personalities is getting longer. Only ethnic and sexual minorities have rights to enforce; and no duty. Extreme environmentalism, a neo-pagan religion of our time, demonizes economic progress and predicts a future of painful sacrifices or the imminent Apocalypse. The billionaires of digital capitalism control the young people social networks have made their slaves. Political correctness serves as a catharsis for the radical chic elite. That partnership between financial capitalism and Big Tech planned a globalisation that decimated the working class and impoverished the middle class, resulting in legions of the fallen. It is the method to escape one's obligations. By supporting the fight for minorities and the environment, the unpunished world has now joined forces with the intellectual elites. The social quiz is dismissed. Mass disparities in wealth access no longer exist. There is only "one world to save" and a variety of sexual orientations or ethnicities to incite to seek restitution. In America this is the Gospel of the multinationals, in Hollywood and among the millionaire sports celebrities. In Europe, conformism has the seductive face of Greta Thunberg and Carola Rackete. The radical fringes don't need a mass consensus; they have learned to seduce the establishment, to hoard university professorships, to occupy the media. They can impose a new value system from above. Most of us suffer what is happening: we have not consented to suicide.

The conventional approach to suicide is psychiatric: ask the average person why people kill themselves, and they will likely cite depression. But this approach fails to recognize suicide’s social causes. People kill themselves because of breakups and divorces, because of lost jobs and ruined finances, because of public humiliations and the threat of arrest. While some psychological approaches address external stressors, this comprehensive study is the first to systematically examine suicide as a social behavior with social catalysts. Drawing on Donald Black’s theories of conflict management and pure sociology, Suicide presents a new theory of the social conditions that compel an aggrieved person to turn to self-destruction. Interpersonal conflict plays a central but underappreciated role in the incidence of suicide. Examining a wide range of cross-cultural cases, Jason Manning argues that suicide arises from increased inequality and decreasing intimacy, and that conflicts are more likely to become suicidal when they occur in a context of social inferiority. As suicide rates continue to rise around the world, this timely new theory can help clinicians, scholars, and members of the general public to explain and predict patterns of self-destructive behavior.

The first volume of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West is a milestone in historiography. It is not a standard history book. Instead, it tries to explain the mechanisms that make different cultures tick. While classical culture had no concept of the past or future and was only fixated on the present, Western culture is focused on the past as memory and the future as unconquered territory. Like organisms that are born, mature, and die, cultures are the blossoming youth while civilizations usher in senility, decay, and demise. When a culture becomes a civilization, decadence sets in and the ensuing downward spiral becomes an inevitable whirlwind of self-destruction. The West is in terminal decline, desperately trying to revive the dead forms and traditions that animated the Faustian spirit in its exuberant heyday. It is all in vain as the West has become tired of itself and is unable to innovate in either the arts or philosophy. The West is on its way to the grave and what will see the light next must be something completely new and not just a corpse reanimated.

The New York Times best-selling author of Race Matters and Democracy Matters offers open-hearted wisdom for our times in this courageous collection of quotations, speech excerpts, letters, philosophy, and photographs that reflect the profound humanity that fuels the passionate public intellectual. In a world that seesaws between unconditional love and acceptance and blind hatred and exclusion, Hope on a Tightrope will satisfy readers in search of deep wells of inspiration and challenge that marries the mind to the heart. This gift book features an original CD that highlights Dr. West's outstanding spoken-word artistry. His August 2007 CD release Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations that featured collaborations with best-selling artists Prince, Jill Scott, and Andre 3000 topped the charts as Billboard's #1 Spoken Word album.