There are other ways of finding satisfaction, recipes for human happiness, enjoyment, dignified and meaningful, gratifying life, than increased consumption that increases production.
Zygmunt BaumanRead
The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.
Interpretation
Sociology should support individual freedom, which is often overlooked.
Zygmunt Bauman emphasizes the role of sociology in aiding individuals by focusing on their freedom. He suggests that in contemporary society, the importance of individual liberty has been overshadowed, and it is the responsibility of sociologists to help restore and support this essential aspect of human existence.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of sociology at a university seminar.
There are other ways of finding satisfaction, recipes for human happiness, enjoyment, dignified and meaningful, gratifying life, than increased consumption that increases production.
Civilisation, the orderly world in which we live, is frail. We are skating on thin ice. There is a fear of a collective disaster. Terrorism, genocide, flu, tsunamis.
In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.
We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.
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.
As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Pythagoras used to say that life resembles the Olympic Games: a few people strain their muscles to carry off a prize; others bring trinkets to sell to the crowd for gain; and some there are, and not the worst, who seek no other profit than to look at the show and see how and why everything is done; spectators of the life of other people in order to judge and regulate their own.
The Behaviorist cannot find consciousness in the test-tube of his science.
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien As to be hated needs but to be seen; Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.
Live in the world as if only God and your soul were in it; then your heart will never be made captive by any earthly thing.
The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.
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