A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
The old system said: “Obey.” The new system says: “Realize your potential,” which can be a much crueler thing because potential’s infinite, and people, last time I checked, are not. There’s no stopping point in an achievement society. “Potential” is the modern world’s term for whatever you haven’t done yet and, frankly, should already kinda feel bad about.
-Eric Barker, from this post
The skill can’t be ‘learn the fixed answer,’ because there is no fixed answer. The skill has to be continuous judgment.
Speed matters, but speed without judgment is just fast failure.
-Nicholas Bate, from here
Their every day will be caught in the wheels of mechanized society, to the point where I wonder how they will find the time to enjoy the most simple pleasures we had at our disposal: silence, calm, solitude. Having never known them, they shall not be able to miss them. As for me, I do—and I pity them.
-Albert Robida, from his short story "1965," written in 1920
To devise a method of barring incompetence and knavery from public office, and of selecting and preparing the best to rule for the common good—that is the problem of political philosophy.
-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy
Utopianism always begins as an awakening. It ends, if it is allowed to run through its phases, as a tyranny of the pure. There is a slower path. It lacks ecstasy and salvation. It is not rough or revolutionary. It can feel like a letdown, particularly to the young and the impatient. It accepts imperfection as the price of freedom. It chooses a decent polity over a redeemed one. History suggests this is the wiser bet. Its lesson is unromantic and, for that reason, trustworthy: whenever we try to storm heaven, we tend to wake up in a very familiar place, counting the costs and wondering how the rope we thought we could use to pull ourselves up became a noose.
Dustin Sharp, as he concludes this essay
Societies are much more fragile than the elite seems to think. One of the things our Founders and the people who built our country understood was that building and maintaining a free society was hard and took real maintenance. Our current elite has inherited a society that was built over generations and is squandering the inheritance at an alarming rate, assuming that it exists as a permanent structure, and not a carefully balanced practical project.
-David Strom, from here
If you walk down the street and there are a thousand people in the street, all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point. They're constantly judging everything they see. They're playing back moves of things that happened to them yesterday. They're living in fantasy worlds of what's going to happen tomorrow. They're just pulled out of base reality. That can be good when you do long-range planning. It can be good when you solve problems. It's good for us as survival-and-replication machines.
I think it's actually bad for your happiness. To me, the mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master. My monkey mind should not control and drive me 24/7.
I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking, which is hard.
....................to go with that look:
Declining conversation
skills, attention spans, courage, and patience are four areas that deserve a
hard look.
The money I have accumulated I will give away, in due time, through sources that will do the least amount of harm and the greatest possible good; but my real wealth—that portion of it which I wish to donate for the good of mankind—consists of the principles of personal achievement which I am entrusting to you.
-Napoleon Hill, quoting Andrew Carnegie in How to Raise Your Own Salary
The hard part isn't knowing what to do; it's doing it daily,
whether you feel like it or not.
-from the Farnum Street blog
Our society is what we make it. We can shape our institutions. Physical and human characteristics limit the alternatives available to us. But none prevent us, if we will, from building a society that relies primarily on voluntary cooperation to organize both economic and other activity, a society that preserves and expands human freedom, that keeps government in its place, keeping it our servant and not letting it become our master.
-Milton & Rose Friedman, Free To Choose: A Personal Statement
Look beneath the surface: never let a thing's intrinsic quality or worth escape you.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Six
Look beneath the surface: never let a thing's intrinsic quality or worth escape you.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6:3
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