quotables

"Will There Be Zombies?" is an interesting article about the coming collapse of the modern world. A few quotes to get you going:

"...self-interest is never something known in advance, but rather something discovered by experience. Who among us has not had the experience of getting exactly what we wanted only to find that it wasn’t what we wanted at all? And who has not feared the worst, only to find that it was all for the best? No, self-interest is revealed to us, not known in advance."

"...we have all been turned into zombies; we are in proximity, but not in community. Like the zombies, we pursue the same goal, our supposed “self-interest,” but we pursue it mindlessly and without cooperation with each other, or at least, not outside of the forced and formal cooperation of the workplace. The zombies gain their power not from cooperation, but from having their goals limited to one thing, which they pursue relentlessly and without regard for others. But when the government and the corporations can no longer provide these workplaces, when we have to solve our problems in absence of these institutions, then self-interest, as understood by the modern world, will no longer serve. You might say that self-interest is no longer in our best interests, if it ever was."

"Men for the last 200 years or more have filled themselves with empty ideologies; the zombies alone are truly empty and waiting to be filled with truth."

"...we must admit to ourselves, that we are all zombies, to some degree we are influenced by the technologies of persuasion and “need-creation.” We are all people who feel a need to work to buy what we don’t need, and then to discover new needs, which we must work even harder to fill. The modernist project ends with post-modernism, and with the true zombie, that is, with the creation of emptiness."

"We need to be looking around our neighborhoods and areas for resources to solve all the problems when the professional problem-solvers no longer can. If we look closely, we are likely to find more than we suspect. But mostly, we need to be looking at our neighborhoods to find our neighbors; all too often our neighborhoods are not at all neighborly, but rather anonymous and temporary housing, not real places but only real estate. By finding real neighbors, we will find real solutions. And here I make the assertion that to find anything real is to find something genuinely Christian. And only in a real Christianity will we build a real world."