This is the age of the slogan, the soundbite, the snappy phrase in place of considered argument. Thought is dying; reason’s gone critical. In bookshops and magazine racks we’re told only what we want to hear: we’re told it in neat, bullet-pointed affirmations of our own worth.

No more. This is the fightback. The resuscitation. This is the slogan as explainer of the world. One a day for a year. Three hundred and sixty five phrases, soundbites and bullet points with which to make sense of the way things are now and point to how things could be tomorrow. Read them and weep.


Tuesday

15. Opium is the religion of the people

Aldous Huxley’s skewing of Karl Marx’s famous quote (“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”) is not just a smirking stoner catchphrase. Opium is a hallucinogenic drug, sure – but it’s also a painkiller, a sedative, and instrumental in combating cholera. If it’s a bad thing for society, it is also undeniably a good thing too. If it wastes lives in blissed-out visions of alternate reality at the expense of actual reality, it also saves lives that would otherwise fall as needless victims of wasting diseases. It destroys and it heals. And it does so with an effectiveness and on a scale comparable only to religion, that other great destroyer and grand healer.
Posted by at