To the eyes of a god, mankind must appear as a species of bacteria which multiply and become progressively virulent whenever they ...find themselves in a congenial culture, and whose activity diminishes until they disappear completely as soon as proper measures are taken to sterilise them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The entire construct of the "medical model" of "mental illness"Mwhat is it but an analogy? Between physical medicine and psychiatr...y: the mind is said to be subject to disease in the same manner as the body. But whereas in physical medicine there are verifiable physiological proofs--in damaged or affected tissue, bacteria, inflammation, cellular irregularity--in mental illness alleged socially unacceptable behavior is taken as a symptom, even as proof, of pathology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am more and more convinced that the ant colony is not so much composed of separate individuals as that the colony is a sort of i...ndividual, and each ant like a loose cell in it. Our own blood stream, for instance, contains hosts of white corpuscles which differ little from free-swimming amoebae. When bacteria invade the blood stream, the white corpuscles, like the ants defending the nest, are drawn mechanically to the infected spot, and will die defending the human cell colony. I admit that the comparison is imperfect, but the attempt to liken the individual human warrior to the individual ant in battle is even more inaccurate and misleading. The colony of ants with its component numbers stands half way, as a mechanical, intuitive, and psychical phenomenon, between our bodies as a collection of cells with separate functions and our armies made up of obedient privates. Until one learns both to deny real individual initiative to the single ant, and at the same time to divorce one's mind from the persuasion that the colony has a headquarters which directs activity ... one can make nothing but pretty fallacies out of the polity of the ant heap.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it w...as a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Eit...her the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »