“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind,” said Winston Churchill. And judging by the state of education in America, it seems both of those empires could soon crumble. The dysfunction is evident from top to bottom: from Ivy League outposts down to the secondary schools. Both are producing a generation that is ill-informed, illiterate and innumerate. In other words, a generation increasingly ill-suited to function as productive citizens in a democracy.
Thursday, February 29, 2024
A different definition of discipline......
In the spiritual life, the word 'discipline' means 'the effort to create some space in which God can act'. Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you're not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied … to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn't planned or counted on.
-attributed to Henri Nouwen
savor.......................
We are obsessed with optimization. Professionally, most of us are under considerable pressure to produce. Do more, better. Faster. Regardless of your line of work, you likely have a to-do list. And, if you’re anything like me, it is never-ending. There is always unfinished business. Another opportunity. Something important needing my attention. But our lives should be more than a list of tasks that we just trying to power through. Instead, we need to treat our days for what they are: fleeting gifts to savor.
-Joy Lere, from here
powerless......................
Older age gives us the knowledge of how powerless we are — not helpless so much but with little control over life’s results. I don’t love this.
-Anne Lamott, from here
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Fifty years ago................................
.
Edwin Starr.....................Hell Up in Harlem album
haunted by riddles...........
Contemporary humanity is a child lost in the woods, haunted by riddles at every turn. How did we get here? Where are we headed? Amid the affluence and luxury, given global communication and cheap travel to iconic places, what is the right path as individuals and as a people—and why?
-Martin Gurri, from here
a desire for a desire..................
One thing that distinguishes human beings from other animals is that we are evaluative creatures. We can take a critical stance toward our own activities, and aspire to direct ourselves toward objects and projects that we judge to be more worthy than others that may be more immediately gratifying. Animals are guided by appetites that are fixed, and so are we, but we can also form a second-order desire, "a desire for a desire," when we entertain some picture of the sort of person we would like to be—a person who is better not because she has more self-control, but because she is moved by worthier desires.
-Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
fun with languages..................
We have here, in other words, a unique phenomenon in the history of religion: a religion whose sacred texts are written in what to its founder would have been a foreign and largely unintelligible language.
Had the languages in question been closely related, part of the same linguistic family, this might have been of little consequence. But first-century Greek and Hebrew were not just different languages. They represented antithetical civilisations, unlike in their most basic understanding of reality. In terms of the last chapter, Greek philosophy and science—the Greece of Thales and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle—was a predominantly left-brain culture, the Israel of the prophets a right-brain one.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
Lincoln......................
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
-Abraham Lincoln, from his second Inaugural Address 1865
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
luxury beliefs..................
White privilege is the luxury belief that took me the longest to understand, because I grew up around a lot of poor white people. Affluent white college graduates seem to be the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege, yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. Rather, they raise their social standing by talking about their privilege. When policies are implemented to combat white privilege, it won’t be Yale graduates who are harmed. Poor white people will bear the brunt.
-Rob Henderson, from here
in relationship................................
That means that the original basis of Abrahamic monotheism remains, whatever the state of science. For religious knowledge as understood by the Hebrew Bible is not to be construed on the model of philosophy and science, both left-brain activities. God is to be found in relationship, and in the meanings we construct when, out of our experience of the presence of God in our lives, we create bonds of loyalty and mutual responsibility known as covenants. People have sought in the religious life the kind of certainty that belongs to philosophy and science. But it is not to be found. Between God and man there is moral loyalty, not scientific certainty.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
A mind is a terrible thing to waste...........
In Finnish schools, a popular mantra is "We can't afford to waste a brain." This ethos makes their educational culture distinct. They know that the key to nurturing hidden potential is not to invest in students who show early signs of high ability. It's to invest in every student regardless of apparent ability.
-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
The more things change.....................
Because of the high wartime inflation—the cost of imports was six times higher than usual—Henry found it difficult to fill the civilian jobs at the arsenals despite offering exorbitant wages of $30 a month along with a suit of clothes and another suit every year along with the normal army rations. He wrote Washington that he would add an allotment of half a pint of rum per day to sweeten the deal.
-Mark Puls, Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution
Life its ownself......................
 |
| George Bellows Cliff Dwellers 1913 Oil on canvas |
I am always very amused with people who talk about lack of subjects for painting. The great difficulty is that you cannot stop to sort them out enough. Wherever you go, they are waiting for you. The men of the docks, the children at the river edge, polo crowds, prize fights, summer evenings and romance, village folk, young people, old people, the beautiful, the ugly.
Monday, February 26, 2024
If only...............................
We are crossing a perilous landscape. The surface seems frozen solid, but tremendous energies churn below. An angry public’s distrust of, and discontent toward, our system of government feels like a movement seeking a label. Unforeseen events can trigger a shift from repudiation to positive action. Americans, historically sensible, may recover from their temporary derangement and demand an accounting of the politicians and bureaucratic despots who have violated their ancestral rights. The will to freedom, I believe, can overcome the will to power.
-Martin Gurri, from this essay
Compare this...................
In its early Buffett years, Berkshire had a big task ahead: turning a tiny stash into a large and useful company. And it solved that problem by avoiding bureaucracy and relying much on one thoughtful leader for a long, long time as he kept improving and brought in more people like himself.
Compare this to a typical big-corporation system with much bureaucracy at headquarters and a long succession of CEOs who come in at about age 59, pause little thereafter for quiet thought, and are soon forced out by a fixed retirement age.
-Charlie Munger, as culled from here
Might be why he lives in Omaha..........
Wall Street’s love affair with this hocus-pocus intensified as the 1960s rolled by. The Street’s denizens are always ready to suspend disbelief when dubious maneuvers are used to manufacture rising per-share earnings, particularly if these acrobatics produce mergers that generate huge fees for investment bankers. Auditors willingly sprinkled their holy water on the conglomerates’ accounting and sometimes even made suggestions as to how to further juice the numbers. For many, gushers of easy money washed away ethical sensitivities.
-Warren Buffett, from this recent letter
Some new quotes.......................
...................................from Warren Buffett:
. . . it is madness to risk losing what you need in pursuing what you simply desire.
Cash, though, is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent.
Periodically, financial markets will become divorced from reality – you can count on that.
Our suggestion: Whatever their line, never forget that 2+2 will always equal 4. And when someone tells you how old-fashioned that math is --- zip up your wallet, take a vacation and come back in a few years to buy stocks at cheap prices.
My successor will need one other particular strength: the ability to fight off the ABCs of business decay, which are arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency. When these corporate cancers metastasize, even the strongest of companies can falter.
Where does he find this stuff...................?
...................take a scroll through Rob Firchau's blog to find more wondrous music you have never heard before than you ever thought possible.
Sunday, February 25, 2024
ties that bind....................
A civilization can survive only if its members, especially those with the greatest influence, believe in its basic values. Today our key institutions—the academy, the media, the corporate hierarchy, and even some churches—reject many of the fundamental ideals that have long defined Western culture. Activists on both left and right, instead of emphasizing what binds a democratic society together, have focused on narrow identity politics that cannot sustain a pluralistic society.
-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
power.........................
What is needed today is a new kind of politics that focuses primarily on fulfilling the aspirations of the Third Estate—on expanding opportunities for the middle and working classes. The current emphasis on social justice through redistribution and subsidies does not increase opportunities for upward mobility, but instead fosters dependency while consolidating power in a few hands.
-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
those pesky "other people"............
As Irving Kristol wrote almost two decades ago, the fundamental problem is that technological and scientific elites "have the inclination to think that the world is full of 'problems' to which they should seek 'solutions.' But the world isn't full of problems; the world is full of other people." Of course, he adds, "there is no 'solution' to the existence of other people. All you can do is figure out a civilized accommodation with them."
-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
heads up...........................
The new urban paradigm elevated efficiency and central control above privacy, local autonomy, class diversity, and broad-based property ownership. The same oligarchs who dominate our commercial culture, seek to profit from manipulating our moods, and influence the behavior of our children want to structure our living environment as well.
-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
Beware the planners................
In most high-income countries—including Canada, Australia, and the United States—suburban living still predominates. Among Americans under 35 who buy homes, four-fifths choose single-family detached housing. . . . Since 2010, a net 1.8 million people have moved away from the urban core counties of major metropolitan area, mainly to lower-density counties where single family houses are the norm.
Despite the continuing appeal of suburbia, planners, academics, and pundits sneer at this lifestyle. "The suburbs are about boredom, and obviously some people like being bored and plain and unpredictable," said Elizabeth Farrelly, an Australian urbanist and architectural critic. She continued: "I'm happy for them . . . even if their suburbs are destroying the world."
-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
the missing ladder......................
Unlike earlier newcomers, today's immigrants find it difficult, in rapidly deindustrializing economies with slow growth, to secure the kind of work that might provide a ladder to the middle class. Mass migration has not created the vibrant multicultural future expected by some, but instead has created much of the poverty and social disorder that characterized large European cities in the nineteenth century.
-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
the "great question"................
But the issue boils down to whether people—not just those with elite credentials and skills—actually matter in a technological age. Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-based poet and novelist, observed that the "great question" hovering over society is "what are people for?" By putting an "absolute premium on labor-saving devices," we may be creating more dependence on the state while undermining the dignity of those who want to do useful work.
-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
Saturday, February 24, 2024
Words fail........................
 |
| Edward Hopper Soir Bleu 1914 oil on canvas |
If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.
On getting............................
...............................an "A" in life:
Realizing that education begins after graduation is a vital first step.
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
expanded minds...........................
Lucy was especially homesick for her family and the gaiety of her life of just a few years earlier. She felt out of place in Connecticut, where the people, she thought, lacked gentility and displayed coarse manners and unrefined behavior. Henry advised her: "Take care, my love of permitting your disgust to the Connecticut people to escape your lips. Indiscreet expressions are handed from town to town and a long while remembered by people not blessed with expanded minds. The want of that refinement which you seem to speak of is, or will be, the salvation of America; for refinement of manners introduces corruption and venality. . . . There is a kind of simplicity in young states as in young children which is quite pleasing to an attentive observer."
-Mark Puls, Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution
Them................................
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.
-Terry Pratchett, Jingo
a mad intoxication..................
 |
| The Cathedral Rodin 1908 Stone original/Bronze casting |
For him life is an endless joy, a perpetual delight, a mad intoxication. Not all seems good to him, for suffering, which must often come to those he loves and to himself, cruelly contradicts his optimism. But all is beautiful to him because he walks forever in the light of spiritual truth.
Fantasy..........................
Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Opening paragraphs..........
My mother says I reopened Uncle Jake's private investigation agency because I'm always losing men, so it's natural for me to search for things that are missing. This would offend some women my age, but she had a stroke two years back and now her damaged brain relies on honesty instead of good manners, so I've got no choice but to take it in stride. One thing I've learned is, don't argue with the truth on those scarce occasions when you're lucky enough to know what the truth is.
-Randy Wayne White, Gone
Meaning...........................
People who are confident in their beliefs feel no need to pillory or caricature their opponents.
Curiosity leads to science, but it also leads to questions unanswerable by science.
A mood is not a truth; a feeling is not a fact.
Meaning is a phenomenon not of nature but of culture.
Nature is sublimely indifferent to who we are and what we deserve.
Science deals in explanation. Meaning is always a matter of interpretation.
Homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal.
-all quotes taken from The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Delacroix................................
Eugene Delacroix La Liberté guidant le peuple 1830 Oil
They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other.
surpassingly.........................
Today you did things that humans 50 years ago wouldn't believe and 200 years ago would struggle to imagine.
You know the names of planets
and the shapes of the bones inside you.
and the shapes of the bones inside you.
You comprehend death and make art.
You are a surpassingly strange animal, worthy of study.
You are a surpassingly strange animal, worthy of study.
I love you.
Jarod K. Anderson, Crush from Field Guide to the Haunted Forest
a natural upshot.....................
What sort of ecology can preserve a robust intellectual biodiversity? We often assume that diversity is a natural upshot of free choice. Yet the market ideal of choice and attendant preoccupation with freedom tends toward a monoculture of human types: the late modern consumer self. At least the market seems to have this effect when we are constantly being addressed with hyperpalatable stimuli. What sort of outlier would you have to be, what sort of freak of self-control, to resist those well-engineered cultural marshmallows?
-Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
Monday, February 19, 2024
Fifty years ago.............................
responsibilities...................
It's more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants. Too many people spend their lives being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future. We worry about making our parents proud when we should be focused on making our children proud. The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors—it's to improve conditions for our successors.
-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
Homer...........................
Sunset Fires Winslow Homer 1880 Watercolor
The life that I have chosen gives me my full hours of enjoyment for the balance of my life. The sun will not rise, or set, without my notice, and thanks.
Sunday, February 18, 2024
an uncompromising man..............
What made him truly original was that he presented himself as the embodiment of the two central figures of African-American folk culture, simultaneously the hustler/trickster and the preacher/minister. Janus-faced, the trickster is unpredictable, capable of outrageous transgressions; the minister saves souls, redeems shattered lives, and promises a new world. Malcolm was a committed student of black folk culture, and to make a political point he would constantly mix animal stories, rural metaphors, and trickster tales—for example, refashioning the fox vs. the wolf as Johnson vs. Goldwater. His speeches mesmerized audiences because he could orchestrate his themes into a narrative that promised ultimate salvation. He presented himself as an uncompromising man wholly dedicated to the empowerment of black people, without regard to his own personal safety. Even those who rejected his politics recognized his sincerity.
-Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
native freedom...............
[24] Consider how we apply the idea of freedom to animals. [25] There are tame lions that people cage, raise, feed and take with them wherever they go. Yet who will call such a lion free? The easier its life, the more slavish it is. No lion endowed with reason and discretion would choose to be one of these pet specimens.
[26] The birds above us, when they are caught and raised in a cage, will try anything for the sake of escape. Some starve to death rather than endure their condition. [27] Those that survive - barely, grudgingly, wasting away - fly off in an instant when they find the least little opening to squeeze through, so great is their need for their native freedom, so strong the desire to be independent and unconfined. [28] 'Well, what's wrong with you here in your cage?' 'You can ask? I was born to fly wherever I like, to live in the open air, to sing whenever I want. You take all this away from me and then say, "What's wrong with you?"
-Epictetus, The Discourses, Book IV
Partners............................
. . . religion and science are to human life what the right and left hemispheres are to the brain. They perform different functions and if one is damaged, or if the connections between them are broken, the result is dysfunction. . . .
Science is about explanation. Religion is about meaning. Science analyses, religion integrates. Science breaks things down to their component parts. Religion binds people together in relationships of trust. Science tells us what is. Religion tells us what ought to be. Science describes. Religion beckons, summons, calls. Science sees objects. Religion speaks to us as subjects. Science practices detachment. Religion is the art of attachment, self to self, soul to soul. Science sees the underlying order of the physical world. Religion hears the music beneath the noise. Science is the conquest of ignorance. Religion is the redemption of solitude.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning
honest amusement..........................
I should certainly like to have a more perfect knowledge of things, but I do not want to buy it as dear as it costs. My intention is to pass pleasantly, and not laboriously, what life I have left. There is nothing for which I want to rack my brain, not even knowledge, however great its value.
I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 10
Saturday, February 17, 2024
Saturday, February 10, 2024
Fifty years ago.............................
Coaching.........................
Coaching is the opposite of what we usually do when we need help. In trying times, our first instinct is to pick up the phone and ask for advice. We're better off pausing to reflect on the advice we've provided in the past or calling someone in a similar situation and offering them some suggestions. We should listen to the advice we give to others—it's usually the advice we need to take for ourselves.
-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
ignored.........................
So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
-Eric Arthur Blair, channeling George Orwell
searching.......................
We tend to teach, and study, "Great Men." All over the world, people are in search of figures who can lead them past crises and catastrophes. Yet all over the world, people feel repeatedly let down by their leaders. Perhaps that is why leaders from a supposedly glorious past continue to loom so large in the gloomy present.
-Moshik Temkin, Warriors, Rebels & Saints: The Art of Leadership from Machiavelli to Malcolm X
Perhaps the most
..............................significant outcome of our recent experience with Covid-19, was the ruination of any expectation of competency or integrity from our "elites." These days it pays to question the "data:"
We’ve been hearing that the rise in inflation has been defeated and how it’s falling like a rock. Data seems to be heading in a positive direction. But this week some very important early indicators have flipped into the other direction.
-excerpted from this Spilled Coffee post
The very picture of..............................
.......................................public service.
Optimistic infection..................
Much of modern society, including our endlessly fragmented media, protects us from having to truly engage with those who don’t share our politics.
That’s why the development of a political rift between the genders is so promising. What’s the most compelling common project of all? Sex - sex and love. Short of a mass conversion to homosexuality, many or most of these people are still going to hook up together and form partnerships and families, caveats about declining birth rates aside. Conservative-leaning young men who only seek out conservative-leaning young women will be fishing in a small pool; liberal women will only diminish the size of their pool if they stick to men who are as liberal as they are. Both sides therefore have a powerful incentive to forge relationships with people who hold political views different to their own. They can then infect each other with their different ideas, generating new syntheses, and moving us all along.
-as culled from this Ian Leslie post
Friday, February 9, 2024
Fifty years ago........................
Thursday, February 8, 2024
choices...........................
Now that the proposition of crossing Antarctica by myself had taken hold, my choices were to see it through or to live with regret for the rest of my life. . . .
I wasn't sure what worried me more; skiing 1,700 kilometers or spending two months alone.
-Felicity Aston, Alone In Antarctica
connections................
By being truly alone I had seen how deeply reliant I am on human ties and in ways that were unexpected. It was not simply a matter of having company to pass the time, or backup in case of emergency. During the expedition, I found that the absence of others had shaped my behaviour, my thoughts, my actions, my reasoning. I had seen for myself that it is human relationships that bind us to places, time, and purpose, human relationships that make us who we are as individuals and that our contentment, and our happiness, depend on those precious human connections.
-Felicity Aston, Alone In Antarctica
alone-ness..................
Now that my alone-ness was coming to an end, I could enjoy the solitude and the isolation. I had Antarctica to myself and I liked it that way. I let my mind explore the prospect of seeing other people, of being back at Union Glacier surrounded by company, and I became aware of my instincts shying away from the idea.
I had to laugh out loud at my own caprice, shaking my head in exasperation. I had struggled with alone-ness for all this time and now here I was sentimentalising it.
-Felicity Aston, Alone In Antarctica
On perseverance.....................
It was clear to me that the success of my expedition had not depended on physical strength or dramatic acts of bravery but on the fact that at least some progress—however small—had been made every single day. It had not been about glorious heroism but the humblest of qualities, a quality that perhaps we all too often fail to appreciate for its worth - that of perseverance. Critical to skiing across Antarctica had been the distinctly unimpressive and yet, for me, incredibly demanding challenge of finding the will to get out of the tent each and every morning. If I had failed in that most fundamental of tasks, then my expedition would have been over. . . .
Keep getting out of the tent.
-Felicity Aston, Alone In Antarctica
laughter.............................
"Laughter," he says, "and a lot of it, is the right response to the things which drive us to tears."
-William B. Irvine, channeling Cato in A Guide to the Good Life
deny..........................
We must deny that there is any appropriate time for an inappropriate action.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 8
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
While checking in with.............
...........................friend Greg at Sippican Cottage, this beauty was found:
Some people nail it. And nail it to the church door, too.
Which led me to find Beatty's monologue. Enjoy.
The script is here:
Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.
Beale: But why me?
Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.
Beale: I have seen the face of God.
Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.
Checking in...................
................................with Alain de Botton:
Maturity: The confidence to have no opinions on many things.
The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.
Being a good listener is one of the most important and enchanting life skills anyone can have.
Soberingly, despite all our advances in technology and material resources, we are not much more advanced in the art of delivering emotionally healthy childhoods than generations before us.
Fifty years ago..........................
Bob Seger................................Seven (the album)
a loose connection...............
They were convinced that what stands between most of us and happiness is not our government or the society in which we live, but defects in our philosophy of life—or our failing to have a philosophy at all. It is true that our government and our society determine, to a considerable extent, our external circumstances, but the Stoics understood that there is at best a loose connection between our external circumstances and how happy we are.
-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (the ancient art of stoic joy)
some capacity...............
Since it has pleased God to give us some capacity for reason, so that we should not be, like the animals, slavishly subjected to the common laws, but should apply ourselves to them by judgment and voluntary liberty, we must indeed yield a little to the simple authority of Nature, but not let ourselves be carried away tyrannically by her: reason alone must guide our inclinations.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 8
On not playing small........................
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
-Marianne Williamson, as transcribed from here
raison d'etre........................
People who tell children that their school days are their best days must, I think, be very unhappy themselves and terribly frustrated.
The world is a school. "He has put eternity into a man's mind"; and we seem to "know" that our destiny, indeed our true raison d'etre, is something bigger and finer and more splendid than what this world can offer.
On theories............................
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
-attributed to Karl Popper
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