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A review by cb_reads_reviews
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside by Doris Lessing
4.0
Doris Lessing’s 1985 Massey Lecture, entitled, “Prisons We Choose to Live Inside” is almost prescient in its application to the challenges our societies face around the globe today, and most poignantly, in our all too vulnerable social democracies.
Lessing frames five lectures around the patterns of behaviour we exhibit as humans, in particular as it relates to crowd phenomena. With many parallels to Elias Canetti’s “Crowds and Power”, she analyses the particular situations in which we find ourselves and calls out our hubris for believing ourselves to be above falling victims to the crowd and the crowd mentality.
The Massey Lectures, a Canadian institution since 1961, sets out each year to feature prominent ideas pertinent to the time. As I make my way further and further back into the archives, I am confronted with notions, propositions, and questions which seem as relevant today as they did when they were first proposed across the airwaves of the CBC into the living rooms of past generations of Canadians. The CBC has many past lectures available on their web page, and many of the lectures are also in print. In this case, I listened and read Lessing’s lectures.
Lessing frames five lectures around the patterns of behaviour we exhibit as humans, in particular as it relates to crowd phenomena. With many parallels to Elias Canetti’s “Crowds and Power”, she analyses the particular situations in which we find ourselves and calls out our hubris for believing ourselves to be above falling victims to the crowd and the crowd mentality.
The Massey Lectures, a Canadian institution since 1961, sets out each year to feature prominent ideas pertinent to the time. As I make my way further and further back into the archives, I am confronted with notions, propositions, and questions which seem as relevant today as they did when they were first proposed across the airwaves of the CBC into the living rooms of past generations of Canadians. The CBC has many past lectures available on their web page, and many of the lectures are also in print. In this case, I listened and read Lessing’s lectures.