Jetsetting is now not the privilege of the elite so much as a veritiginous mundanity for a permanently dispossessed global workforce.
Mark FisherRead
What many students most want from college, although they would never admit it, is an authority structure. There is a demand for an authority which they can then reject; they want to be told what to do, so they can disobey. It is a textbook case of bad faith, a flight from freedom.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Students often seek guidance in their education to later assert their independence.
In this quote, Mark Fisher suggests that many students crave an authority figure in college, as it provides them with a framework within which they can operate. However, this desire for guidance is paradoxical; it reveals a wish to rebel against the very authority they seek, indicating a tension between the need for structure and the pursuit of personal freedom. Fisher argues that this behavior exemplifies 'bad faith,' where individuals escape from genuine freedom by adhering to a system, only to ultimately reject it.
Themes
AuthorityFreedomEducationRebellionStructure
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the educational system, this quote can highlight the paradox of student behavior.
More from Mark Fisher
All quotes →If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation.
Mark FisherRead
The most powerful love songs always turn on the discrepancy between the act of declaring love and the knowledge that the ostensible addressee is no longer there, was never there, and could never be there.
Mark FisherRead
Little Axe's records are wracked with collective grief. Spectral harmonicas resemble howling wolves; echoes linger like wounds that will never heal; the voices of the living harmonise with the voices of the dead in songs thick with reproach, recrimination and the hunger for redemption.
Mark FisherRead
If people dying as a consequence of the implementation of measures cannot count as evidence that the legislation has detrimental effects, what would?
Mark FisherRead
Sometimes a disappearance can be more haunting than an apparition.
Mark FisherRead
Similar quotes
Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.
Lewis ThomasRead
I read a lot of highly unsuitable books for an 11-year-old. I was desperate to read as widely as possible. I thought, 'There are so many places I am never going to get the chance to visit, but I can if I read them.' And I did. I could go anywhere in the world - and off it - by reading.
Malorie BlackmanRead
The child is an enigma… He has the highest potentialities, but we do not know what he will be.
Maria MontessoriRead
Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay an author.
Samuel JohnsonRead
Back when I was in school, few people understood dyslexia and what to do for it. My teachers thought I was lazy and not very clever, and I got bored easily... thinking of all the things I could do once I left school. I couldn't always follow what was going on.
Richard BransonRead
They're all so highly educated, you know. Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there's a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the lives of your betters. It makes you wise in some ways, but it can make you a blindfolded fool in others.
Robertson DaviesRead