Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.
Interpretation
Negativity is stigmatized in society, often leading to an unrealistic expectation of perpetual positivity.
Terry Eagleton highlights the societal pressure to maintain a positive outlook, suggesting that negativity is viewed unfavorably, almost as if it were a crime. This commentary reflects on how a relentless pursuit of upbeat attitudes can result in an artificial facade that ignores the complexities and challenges of life, reminiscent of past artistic movements that prioritized an unrealistic portrayal of joy and optimism.
In practice
During a workshop on mental health, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of acknowledging negative feelings.
Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.
One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.
Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
Man who man would be, must rule the empire of himself.
But the fact a person denies that he is theorising is no reason for taking him at his word and failing to investigate what implicit theory is involved in his statements.
What use would wings be to a man bound in iron fetters? They would only drive him to even greater despair.
People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.
To say that Christ is the term and motive force of evolution, to say that he manifests himself as 'evolver,' is implicitly to recognize that he becomes attainable in and through the whole process of evolution.
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