Relations / Classes / Globalization / Crisis | Zygmunt Bauman, 1925 – 2017

Relations

“Real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you.”

“For one to be free there must be at least two.” >

“Desire and love act at cross purposes. Love is a net cast on eternity, desire is a stratagem to be spared the chores of net weaving.

True to their nature, love would strive to perpetuate the desire. Desire, on the other hand, would shun love’s shackles.” #

“The relations individuals enter into with other individuals nowadays have been described as ‘pure’ – meaning ‘no strings attached’, no unconditional obligations assumed and so no predetermination, and therefore no mortgaging, of the future. The sole foundation and only reason for the relationship to continue is, it has been said, the amount of mutual satisfaction drawn from it.” *

Classes

“A society notorious for effacing the boundary which once separated the private from the public, for making it a public virtue and obligation to publicly expose the private, and for wiping away from public communication anything that resists being reduced to private confidences, together with those who refuse to confide them.” ^

“People are cast in the underclass because they are seen as totally useless; as a nuisance pure and simple, something the rest of us could do nicely without. In a society of consumers – a world that evaluates anyone and anything by their commodity value – they are people with no market value.” ^

“Occupying the bottom end of the inequality ladder, and becoming a ‘collateral victim’ of a human action or a natural disaster, interact the way the opposite poles of magnets do: they tend to gravitate towards each other.” }

“The liquid modern variety of adiaphorization is cut after the pattern of the consumer–commodity relation, and its effectiveness relies on the transplantation of that pattern to interhuman relations.” *

“The carrying power of a bridge is not the average strength of the pillars, but the strength of the weakest pillar. I have always believed that you do not measure the health of a society by GNP but by the condition of its worst off. ”

Globalization

“The population of every country is nowadays a collection of diasporas. Every sizable city is now an aggregate of ethnic, religious, and lifestyle enclaves in which the line dividing insiders from outsiders is a hotly contested issue, while the right to draw that line, to keep it intact and make it unassailable, is the prime stake in the skirmishes over influence and battles for recognition that follow.” <

“The main point about civility is…the ability to interact with strangers without holding their strangeness against them and without pressing them to surrender it or to renounce some or all the traits that have made them strangers in the first place.” ~

“Globalization is the last failed hope that, somewhere, there still exists a land where one can escape and find happiness. Or the last failed hope that, somewhere, there still exists a land different from yours in terms of being able to oppose the sense of meaninglessness, the loss of criteria and, ultimately, moral blindness and the loss of sensitivity.” *

“Postmodernity means the exhilarating freedom to pursue anything, yet mind-boggling uncertainty as to what is worth pursuing and in the name of what one should pursue it.”

Crisis

“The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.” {

“Rigidity of order is the artefact and sediment of the human agents ‘ freedom.” ~

“The economic crisis, so conveniently operated and driven by the markets, by financial groups, by the needs of a globalized economy, faces the task of restoring social control, which the crisis of modernity lost sight of.” –

“What happens is never unpredictable: there are always breaches, carelessness, incompetence, omissions, which have not prevented the occurrence.” –

“As can be seen, ‘crisis’, in its proper sense, expresses something positive, creative and optimistic, because it involves a change, and may be a rebirth after a break-up. It indicates separation, certainly, but also choice, decisions and therefore the opportunity to express an opinion.” –

> Freedom, 1988 / { Modernity and the Holocaust, 1989  / ~ Liquid Modernity, 2000 / # Liquid Love, 2003 / ^ Consuming Life, 2007  / < Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?, 2008 / }  Collateral Damage, 2011 / * Moral Blindness, 2013 / – State of Crisis, 2014