Cognitio

"What the soothing people at Alco­hol­ics Anonymous don’t or won’t understand is that suicide or self-destruction would probably have come much earlier to some people if they could not have had a drink.

We are born into a losing struggle, and nobody can hope to come out a winner, and much of the intervening time is crushingly tedious in any case...

Such wicked thoughts are almost verboten in our new, therapeutic, upbeat, boring idiom, where there is always some mediocre jerk who knows what’s best for you...

The very word “spirit” preserves the initial in­tuition of the “inspired” that was detected by the Greeks when they hit upon fermentation and employed it to lubricate their symposia. In moderation, of course, yes, if you insist ... but how was “moderation” established except by tran­scend­­ing itself just a bit?…

But something in the Puritan soul is committed to making and keeping people miserable, even when it is not for their own good. Some of us have at least an inkling of the pursuit of happiness, as well as of happiness as a pursuit."

Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Claude Lévi-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point. One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

“I believe, just like you, that the simplicity of natural laws has an objective character, that it is not just the result of thought economy. If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty — by forms I am referring to coherent systems of hypotheses, axioms, etc. — to forms that no one has previously encountered, we cannot help thinking that they are ‘true,’ that they reveal a genuine feature of nature. It may be that these forms also cover our subjective relationship to nature, that they reflect elements of our own thought economy. But the mere fact that we could never have arrived at these forms by ourselves, that they were revealed to us by nature, suggests strongly that they must be part of reality itself, not just of our thoughts about reality.”

This is Hossam’s team, and we are sharing his final message :

“If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed—most likely targeted—by the Israeli occupation forces. When this all began, I was only 21 years old—a college student with dreams like anyone else. For past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury. I slept on pavements, in schools, in tents—anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people’s side.

By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest—something I haven’t known in the past 18 months . I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause. I believe this land is ours, and it has been the highest honor of my life to die defending it and serving its people.

I ask you now: do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories—until Palestine is free.”

— For the last time, Hossam Shabat, from northern Gaza.