If Mamdani wants his affordability agenda to be more than a redistribution of this shrinking pie, he will need to recharge the private-sector engines of upward mobility. He can do that by confronting the occupational licensing and business regulations, land-use restrictions, and cost drivers that have made middle-class life in New York so hard to sustain.
-Michael Dresdale, from this essay
............................................conflict.
Well, today we’re gonna get some help from what may seem like an unlikely source: Carl von Clausewitz.
Yeah, the dead war guy. The 19th-century Prussian strategist who spent his time thinking about armies and violence, which sounds like it has nothing to do with you, a person whose most frequent combat scenarios involve passive-aggressive emails.
Given our ability to deny dangers - to stare at a lion and declare "That is not a lion" - the only moment when many matters are crystal clear are when they are being analyzed from inside of the lion's stomach.
From my infancy I was taught to love humanity and liberty. Enquiry and experience have since confirmed my reverence for the lessons then given me, by convincing me more fully of their truth and excellence. Benevolence toward mankind excites wishes for their welfare, and such wishes endear the means of fulfilling them. These can be found in liberty only, and therefore her sacred cause ought to be espoused by every man, on every occasion, to the utmost of his power. As a charitable but poor person does not withhold his mite because he cannot relieve all the distresses of the miserable, so should not any honest man suppress his sentiments concerning freedom, however small their influence is likely to be. Perhaps he “may touch some wheel” that will have an effect greater than he could reasonably expect.
-John Dickinson, from his first Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
Been reading The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding. More than a few historians are troubled by the contradiction between the sentiments of liberty inherent in the Founding and the reality of enslavement. 250 years and a bloody civil war later, we are still dealing with the echoes of that contradiction. Reading Dickinson's first letter, the question arose, "was Dickinson a slave owner?" Google says yes. Dickenson College puts it this way: "The founders of Dickinson College believed in the principles of the enlightenment and yet still found ways to rationalize ownership of other human beings."
I have always had, no matter the regime (I make no exceptions), a repugnance for bureaucracy. . . . I noticed that, to get ahead, one needed to be pliable and obsequious to those who gave you orders, and duplicitous or violent towards those who take orders from you. In France, the administrative state does not conduct itself with the general welfare in mind, but only in the interests of those who govern. And no one can hope to rise in the ranks without subordinating his interests to those of others. . . . And though many things I encountered in my judicial career displeased me, I embraced what seemed to me the only career in civil service that gave me any independence from the transient groups that cycle through power in our country, the only one where one can both be civil servant and oneself.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, from a letter to his nephew Hubert, 1854
Guizot would become both a major historian and formidable statesman; he was also, like Royer-Collard, a significant presence in the young Tocqueville's life. One of his first initiatives as Secrétaire général was to order what we would nowadays call a public opinion survey, pioneering a new role for local administrators. The Bourbons had been in exile, and thus out of power, for so many years that they had to rediscover France. In September 1814, Guizot instructed all prefects to inquire about the "hearts and minds of the masses, their general opinions, and general mentality and assumptions of each profession and each rank, and how they shaped public affairs in the département, especially regarding those opinions that are resistant to the authorities." Guizot would eventually think of "governance of the public mind" as "the great challenge of modern society.
-Olivier Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis De Tocqueville
A person was like a city. You couldn't let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don't like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.
-Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense. The discounted sociologist Jared Schmitz, who was packed off from Harvard to a minor religious college in Missouri before earning tenure when a portion of his doctoral dissertation was proven fraudulent, stated that in a culture in the seventh stage of rabid consumerism the peripheral always subsumes the core, and the core disappears to the point that very few of the citizens can recall its precise nature. Schmitz had stupidly confided to his lover, a graduate student, that he had in fact invented certain French and German data, and when he abandoned her for a Boston toe dancer this graduate student ratted on him, This is neither specifically here nor there to our story other than to present an amusing anecdote on the true nature of academic life. Also, of course, the poignant message of a culture spending its time as it spends its money; springing well beyond the elements of food, clothes, and shelter into the suffocating welter of the unnecessary that has become necessary.
-Jim Harrison, The Beast God Forgot to Invent
Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joy, builds for all.
-Albert Camus, from this collection of essays
People who depend too much upon the past have become almost useless in many professions. We need a new kind of human being who can divorce himself from his past, who feels strong and courageous and trusting enough to trust himself in the present situation, to handle the problem well in an improvising way, without previous preparation, if need be.
All of this adds up to an increased emphasis on psychological health and strength. It means an increased valuing of the ability to pay fullest attention to the here-now situation, to be able to listen well, to be able to see well in the concrete, immediate moment before us. It means that we need people who are different from the average kind of person who confronts the present as if it were a repetition of the past, and who uses the present simply as a period in which he prepares for future threats and dangers, which he doesn't trust himself enough to meet unprepared when the time comes.
-Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
We shall find, after earnest observation and reflection, that all, except those who have entered into the way of wisdom, believe that happiness is only to be obtained by the gratification of desire. It is this belief, rooted in the soil of ignorance and continually watered by selfish cravings, that is the cause of all the misery in the world.
One last point about laughter. As I described it laughter seems to have a beneficial effect on human communities: those who laugh together also grow together and win through their laughter a mutual tolerance of their all-too-human failings. But not everything that confers a benefit has a function. Entirely redundant behavior—jumping for joy, listening to music, bird-watching, prayer—may yet confer enormous benefits. By calling it redundant I mean that those benefits are the effect of the behavior, not its cause.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
Essential to sanctity, whether in the Palaeolithic or in our day, is a willingness to live ecumenically with all things—more essential to it is a willingness to live sympathetically with all things.
-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village
No matter how marvellous the mountain-top epiphany, no matter how deep the vigil in the forest, if you cannot craft a gift from the experience, in the end the encounter will never quite accomplish itself.
Emerson was a notorious freethinker, unburdened by the conventions of his time. He was basically a walking middle finger to the dumb traditions and sheeplike thinking that held people back. If he were alive today, he would be appalled at the educational uniformity, technological distraction, and immediate gratification that keep our most ambitious young people anesthetized and unable to find their life's meaning. He saw a version of the problem in his own time, in fact, and wrote a long essay called "Self-Reliance" on how, in seven steps, to rebel against the psychogenic epidemic.
-Arthur C. Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life
Diving in headfirst to explore the unknown is something humans were created to do and cannot resist. The unknown is where we feel the most alive. Although our minds crave certainty, our hearts desire freedom. We live in an illusion of certainty. Most of what we have can be lost or taken away at a moment's notice. We all know the only constant is change, yet we spend most of our energy trying to fight what is natural and inevitable and wonder why we are suffering so much. It is not change that we should fear but staying the same.
-Joseph Nguyen, Don't Believe Everything You Think
All times are mad, but some are madder than others. The grueling work of people of conscience is to portray through their words and actions a less mad reality—to show the route toward a better land that, admittedly, cannot be reached but that can be approached if enough of the oarsmen can be encouraged to pull in the same direction.
I did not expect to live in a peculiarly mad era, or to be caught up myself in the maelstrom. On the contrary, the lot of my generation seemed likely to be one of ironic detachment, banality, and order, the passions euthanized for the good of the species. But here we are. And here I am, working to crawl out of the clutches of the sea and up to the prow, hoping to become one of those pointing out the course, away from this and toward something else.
-Ryan Avent, In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies
I have attended a good many lectures in my time. I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers, and Other Essays
Let me tell you the secret to investing.
There is no secret.
Sorry to break it to you, but there is no Holy Grail that guarantees overnight riches in the markets. There's no confidential stock-picking scheme that will give you all of the upside with none of the downside. . . .
It has to be this way because risk and reward are attached at the hip. If you want to earn a return on your capital, you must accept risk in some form. One of the few iron laws of investing is there is no free lunch.
Ben Carlson, from his introduction to Risk & Reward
The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.
-G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
I think perhaps we have collectively been too eager to deny the relevance of 1776 to us today, too sure of our own superiority to listen to revolutionary leaders' advice about society, human nature, and government, and too quick to disparage or simply ignore the national past that began in those desperate and idealistic days 250 years ago.
-Brendan McConville, from his essay in The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding
Not everyone who supported the Revolution would necessarily see it as an opportunity to make wide-ranging changes in society. Dissolving the connections to Great Britain would be enough. People go go about their business in pretty much the same way as they had before. Of course, some changes would necessarily have to take place because the basic structure of a republic differs from that of a monarchy. Subjects become citizens with new responsibilities that would alter the contours of society. Men, though certainly not all of them, would have to get used to voting. . . .
If the Americans were not really operating with a tabula rasa after breaking from the British Empire, there was substantial opportunity to write a different story for the newly created United States, one that would help transform the world. Jefferson sounded this theme throughout his political career and until his death.
-Annette Gordon-Reed from her essay "Thomas Jefferson, Optimistic Visionary", as found in The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding
.............have been totally forgotten or ignored. None more so than this read-worthy one. A brief snippet:
Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we - you and I, and our government - must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
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