Philip Slater

Philip Elliot Slater (May 15, 1927 – June 20, 2013) was an American sociologist, social critic, and author.

Quotes

• [E]very morning all 200 million of us get out of bed and put a lot of energy into creating and re-creating the social calamities that oppress, infuriate and exhaust us.
  • The Pursuit of Loneliness (1976)[1970], p. 2. Note: content only appears in the 1976 revised and subsequent editions, not in the original.
• It is easy to produce examples of the many ways in which Americans attempt to minimize, circumvent, or deny the interdependence upon which all human societies are based. We seek a private house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and do-it-yourself skills of every kind. An enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his daily business.
  • The Pursuit of Loneliness (1970), p. 7.
• The key flaw in the old culture is, of course, the fact that the scarcity is spurious–man-made in the case of bodily gratifications and man-allowed or man-maintained in the case of material goods. It now exists only for the purpose of maintaining the system that depends upon it, and its artificiality becomes more palpable each day. Americans continually find themselves in the position of having killed someone to avoid sharing a meal which turns out to be too large to eat alone.
  • The Pursuit of Loneliness (1970), p. 118.
• Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they'll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.
  • The Pursuit of Loneliness (1990)[1970], p. 165.
• The troubles we're experiencing didn't arise because someone made the wrong economic prediction, or used the wrong economic indicator or the wrong theory of corporate investment. They arose because we've been using our energies mindlessly for decades; we've put our labor and resources into activities that have brought us nothing back.
  • The Pursuit of Loneliness (1990)[1970], p. 173.
• The idea that everybody wants money is propaganda circulated by wealth addicts to make themselves feel better about their addiction.
  • Wealth Addiction (1980). New York: Dutton. p. 25.
• Instead of using money to serve ourselves, we use ourselves to serve money.
  • Wealth Addiction (1980). New York: Dutton. p. 11.
• [If] the purposes for which money were designed were fulfilled completely, there would be no reason for humans to exist as decision-making beings.
  • Wealth Addiction (1980). New York: Dutton. p. 7.
• As a society, we encourage selfishness. We expect people to be interested primarily in their private or family welfare, with little concern for community needs. The care of the sick, old, disturbed, or poor, for example—a task that most societies take for granted—is carried out grudgingly, carelessly, or not at all.
  • The News Tribune. October 5, 1980. p. E10.
• [If] you brainwash people into forgetting that they're part of each other, you can manipulate them...that's how individualism leads to fascism - divide and conquer.
  • As cited by the New York Times. From the documentary film Paradox on 72nd Street (1982).
• Conflict will never be eliminated from human affairs. Conflict is simply the active expression of difference, and an essential part of human development. Without conflict change would be impossible. Our goal as a species at this point in our development is to mold a world in which conflict can be contained within a larger embracing understanding—the realization that we share certain goals and aspirations in common, no matter how much we scream at each other about procedures.
  • A Dream Deferred: America's Discontent and the Search for a New Democratic Ideal (1992). Boston: Beacon Press. p. 29.
• Americans need to wake up to the fact that right-wing Republicans don't believe in democracy and never have. They have always admired military dictatorships and seem to be working hard to set up the equivalent here in the United States. Their goal is to create an authoritarian government, with control of the media and the judiciary; to weaken all restraints on executive power and eliminate democratic freedoms; to undermine the public education system through fiscal starvation and rote learning, so that the poor will learn only enough to follow orders; and to create the kind of economic inequality so many Third World countries enjoy--by filling the pockets of a tiny group of extremely rich individuals and impoverishing the rest, thereby providing a mass of cheap labor.
  • "Why America's First Major Terrorist Attack is Forgotten, and what it Shows us". HuffPost. May 25, 2006.

• Control Culture was a warrior culture—competitive, belligerent, macho. And a culture based on war has to be authoritarian. Slaves and serfs have to be kept in line, while fighting men—trained to be competitive and quarrelsome—have to be controlled. So rigid hierarchies with rigid rules of behavior became the norm...And since women weren't doing soldierly things—which were more highly valued—they wound up at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Even the lowest serf was expected to dominate his wife, and was looked down on if he didn't...This demotion of women is the foundation of the entire system. You cannot have an authoritarian, war-like society unless women are devalued and oppressed. It is an axiom of Control Culture that a woman must not be allowed freedom of choice—not just about whether to bear a child or not, but about what she does with her life, who she sleeps with, how she looks—everything....Misogyny is cultural, not religious or ethnic."
  • The Chrysalis Effect (2009), pp. 10-11.