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    Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
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    Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
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    Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
    Ebook86 pages1 hour

    Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

    By Doris Lessing

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "One of the most important writers of the past hundred years." — The Times (London)

    In this perceptive collection of essays, Doris Lessing addresses directly the prime questions before us all: how to think for ourselves, how to understand what we know, how to pick a path in a world deluged with opinions and information, and how to look at our society and ourselves with fresh eyes.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 7, 2013
    ISBN9780062295019
    Unavailable
    Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
    Author

    Doris Lessing

    Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". She died in 2013.

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    Reviews for Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

    3.5/5

    56 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Lo más importante es la reflexión posterior que nos demanda. Una reflexión sincera y profunda para quienes debemos educar a nuestros hijos en la independencia y la opiniones personales.
    • 4/5
      Prisons We Choose To Live Inside by Doris Lessing 1986These essays are taken from a series of five lectures given by Doris Lessing under the auspices of the Canadian Broadcasting Company in 1985. The overriding themes of of these lectures are that we do not learn from history, we as a civilization keep repeating the same mistakes, despite being better informed and we fail to take notice of the developing sciences of psychology and anthropology. Lessing makes her case persuasively and asks the questions that continue to baffle some people. Why do we continue to go to war, why do we elect leaders that we know or at least suspect are telling us lies.“ I think it is sentimental to discuss the subject of war or peace, without acknowledging that a great many people enjoy war - not only the idea of it but the fighting itself……… people who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an almost invisible drum is beating……….an awful, illicit, violent excitement is abroad….. everyone is possessed by it.” “ We have now reached the stage where a political leader not only uses, skilfully, time-honoured rabble rousing tricks - see Shakespeare's Julius Caesar - but employ experts to make it even more effective. But the antidote is that, in an open society, we may also examine these tricks being used on us. If, that is, we choose to examine them”My favourite of the five short essays (they are all good) is her one on Group Minds: nothing scientific here and nothing particularly new but she gets across her points as to how difficult it is to stand apart from the majority, whether it is a social group, an income level group, or even a protest movement. How easy it is to be carried along by emotions instead of examining the evidence at hand in the light of reason. The Wind Blows Away our Words by Doris Lessing 1987This is reportage and stories following Lessing’s trip to Peshawar and Chitral in Pakistan in 1986. She had for some time been involved in the Resistance to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan through the aid organisation Afghan Relief. Peshawar in Northern Pakistan is as near as many people could get to the front line resistance in Afghanistan and was at that time the home to a huge number of refugees. She got to interview some of the leaders of the Muhjahadin, but her primary focus in this extended essay is the plight of the refugees, particularly the women, who having fled the bombing found themselves imprisoned in camps where their freedom was curtailed by the rising power of the Mullahs She bemoans the fact that the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the plight of the refugees received little coverage in the Western press; famine in Africa was much higher in the list of priorities, in spite of the fact that there were an estimated five million Afghan refugees and over a million civilians killed by the Russians. There is no doubt that Lessing had points to make from her own perspective, but I see them as particularly valid. I had stayed in Peshawar and Chitral ten years earlier and had spent a little time in Afghanistan as well staying in the same hotels that Lessing was reporting from and so her descriptions of the towns and villages brought them back vividly to life. I have no reason to doubt that her descriptions of the border regions on the edge of conflict are no less accurate. Both of these collections of essays are well worth reading, 4 stars.
    • 5/5
      A clear-sighted, well-argued plea for individuality of thought in an age of mass emotions and social conditioning.Doris Lessing has faith in the power of writers to stay detached from these mass emotions and "enable us to see ourselves as others see us." I like the image she gives of writers as a collective organism, constantly evolving but always providing this same crucial function of detached examination of the human condition.There are some fascinating passages on the way mass emotions are constructed by governments and leaders, for example pointing out how often "blood" is invoked when calling people to war or revolution - this, she says, is a harking back to our long ancestral history of ritual sacrifice, cleansing through blood. Also the constant projection of an Enemy to rally people together.It's refreshing to hear Lessing's account of how often majority opinion has been completely wrong, and the most seemingly unchangeable opinions have changed completely - for example the white minority in the Rhodesia of her childhood thought that their racist regime would last forever, but it didn't. Also in World War Two, Britons revered friendly, pipe-smoking Uncle Joe Stalin, their ally against Hitler, but then a couple of years later he was their worst enemy (I remember my grandmother talking about this as well).There are lots of fascinating psychological experiments showing how much we will do to agree with authority or with the group - only a small minority (she puts it at 10%) is usually prepared to go against the group opinion, often at great individual cost. She says that all of us are, to some degree, brainwashed by the society we live in, and that "There is nothing much we can do about this except to remember that it is so."She goes on: "It seems to me that we are being governed by waves of mass emotion, and while they last it is not possible to ask cool, serious questions. One simply has to shut up and wait, everything passes." This reminds me of living in New York through 9/11 and the hugely irrational responses to it. In that time, there were certain things you simply couldn't say.Lessing gives several examples of this group thinking, from classic psychological experiments (such as the one where people are divided into prisoners and warders, and the warders quickly become sadistic and authoritarian) to the world of literature, where certain writers are praised by everyone, then suddenly fall out of fashion (Lessing herself wrote a couple of novels under a pseudonym to see if they got the same reaction as her other work, and of course they were rejected by her two regular publishers and ignored by the critics).This book was written in 1987, before the arrival of technologies like the internet. The methods of control and manipulation are surely stronger now than in 1987, but so are the possibilities for resistance. It's easier now to find the information that undercuts official propaganda, or to publish your own individual views, or to connect with other people who dissent from the majority opinion. Not following the herd is a challenge at any time, but, as Lessing says, it's vital:"Of course, there are original minds, people who do take their own line, who do not fall victim to the need to say, or do, what everyone else does. But they are few. Very few. On them depends the health, the vitality of all our institutions."

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