illusions...............

 

The greatest menace to progress is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.

-Daniel Boorstin, Cleopatra's Nose

irremediable.......................

 

The guiding notion of the Enlightenment, and later of Marx and Lenin's "scientific" socialism, was that henceforth the alliance between happiness and justice would no longer come about through the individual quest for wisdom, but through the rebuilding of society as a whole.  And before building a new society, the old one first had to be completely destroyed.  It was at the end of the eighteenth century that the idea of revolution took on its modern meaning.  Personal salvation was from then on subordinate to collective salvation. . . . suffice it to say that somewhere between 1965 and 1970 I thought I'd seen the irremediable bankruptcy of this illusion, the progenitor of the great totalitarian movements that have ravaged the twentieth century.

-Jean-François Revel

And doing a mighty fine job of it..........

 

Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.

- Douglas Adams, via Chris Lynch

Post-truth....................

 

Truth isn’t the sum of many facts: It works the other way around. We erect frameworks of understanding which the facts must fit into or modify. A healthy society will debate the relationship between a given fact and its role in our understanding of the world. The catastrophic failure of the mediators means that we now debate the frameworks and their meanings among ourselves. In this rolling chaos, interpretations have turned tendentious and partial. Reality has splintered into a million pieces. That’s the post-truth condition. . . .

The 20th century’s illusion of narrative integrity is gone forever. We now stumble along in the dark, plagued by uncertainty—an accurate description, I note, of the human condition.

-Martin Gurri, from this essay

The slippery slope.................

Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. . . . Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane.  The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and - after some hesitation - the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical.  The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. 

-Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization: The Renaissance

On the importance of the whole picture.....

via

Two realms.....................

 In the realm of tradition, truth is something that precedes individual human beings, something we inherit and must hand down, in turn.  We can discover truth and reason about it, to be sure, but we can't change it.  In the realm of progress, however, truth is what individuals or groups can articulate or build on their own, through scientific inquiry and their acts in history.  Truth thus becomes an ongoing project, a malleable thing.  In our realm of progress, tradition is viewed as not only antiquated and inefficient, but as an impediment to achievement.

     But what if that confidence of the modern world is an illusion, the product of a determined resolution not to confront the fundamental dilemmas of what it means to be fully human?  Or what if beneath the moderns' complacency lurks a deep soul-soreness?

     Pick your favorite negatively trending social indicator—loneliness, alienation, addiction, polarization, etc.—and the dire message is the same: the realm of progress can't fulfill our soul's yearning or satisfy our urge to put ourselves right with the sacred.

-Sohrab Ahmari, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos

Covid as "mandatory panic".................

 It’s not just the serial overreactions, the threatening intensity, the constant reference to dramatically worse events supposedly yet to come. It’s the feeling of mandatory panic, the insistence that anyone who does not allow the crisis to dominate their internal life is somehow guilty of causing it, the desire to blame a disaster on people who are thought to not take it seriously enough.

-Freddie de Boer, as extracted from here

Illusion............................

 -Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

spiritual immune systems...............

 Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance.

-Henri Bergson

the fleeting illusion of permanence.......

................................that is the origin of all our suffering.

-Carlo Rovelli,  The Order of Time

Thanks Tony

A key step in the right direction............

     Charles Ellis once said, "Forecasting the future of any variable is difficult, forecasting the interacting futures of many changing variables is even more difficult, and estimating how other expert investors will interpret such complex changes is extraordinarily difficult."  It can make your head hurt just thinking about it, but its true.  No one is ever going to completely understand the exact forces that drive the markets for the simple fact that no one can predict the future.  A willingness to admit what it is that you don't know frees you up from the illusion of certainty in your predictive skills.

-Ben Carlson,  A Wealth of Common Sense

Risks.......................

“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” 


-Daniel Kahneman

The Emperor's new clothes............

Irony, paradox, contradiction, consternation -- these define the times in which we live. . . . 

Historians are never going to rate Trump as a great or even mediocre president. Even so, they may one day come to appreciate the Trump era as the moment when things long hidden became plain to see, when hitherto widely accepted falsehoods, fabrications, and obsolete assumptions about American democracy finally became untenable. For that, if for nothing else, we may yet have reason to thank our 45th president for services rendered.

-As extracted from this Zero Hedge post

This feels true....................

 “one key reason why the presidents of large corporations do not, as some radical critics believe, control the United States is that they do not even succeed in controlling their own corporations; that all too often, when imputed organizational skill and power are deployed and the desired effect follows, all that we have witnessed is the same kind of sequence as that to be observed when a clergyman is fortunate enough to pray for rain just before the unpredicted end of a drought.”

-Alasdair MacIntyre, as quoted in this John Kay essay on Ethical Finance

The reality is that we are all.....................

........................self-employed.  Even if somebody else signs the paycheck, we can't shirk that responsibility.

Traditional employment offers an illusion. Maybe that’s part of the deal: the regular pay cheque implies continuity, that the future is someone else’s concern. But, if you work for yourself, the future comes into sharper focus. Self-employment requires a more active engagement with tomorrow.

-The Sovereign Professional

Communications......................

    thanks sean

Illusions.....................................

One of the biggest illusions of life is that we humans are good at deducing the inner thoughts of both strangers and loved ones based on observing their actions. The truth is that we are terrible at knowing what others are thinking. We just think we are good at it. No one is good at it. No one.

-Scott Adams, as lifted from this post

Unearth it......................................

"Fear dressed up as wisdom provides poor counsel.  It lures you into thinking that if you will just trust it, it will afford you some level of control.
     But guess what?  You're not in control.  So I'm calling bull on that illusion.  It's time for a wake-up call.  Maybe a little cold water in the face wouldn't hurt.
     Life isn't safe, remember.
     But life can be wonderful if you choose adventure rather than fear.
     I get where these fearful tendencies are coming from, I really do.  Humanity has, by and large, come to the conclusion that the world is getting worse and worse every day and that people are ultimately bad.  No wonder everyone's scared to death.
     Life feels altogether different when your perception shifts, though.  It's amazing how gorgeous the landscape of life looks when we choose to believe that all people have good in them and every situation has potential for a positive outcome.  It may be buried or dormant, but I truly believe it's there - most likely waiting for someone to look for it, to help unearth it, to expect it, maybe even to demand it."

-Chip Gaines,  Capital Gaines:  Smart Things I Learned Doing Stupid Stuff

Illusions........................

     The fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9th 1989, was when history was said to have ended.  The fight between communism and capitalism was over.  After a titanic ideological struggle encompassing the decades after the second world war, open markets and Western liberal democracy reigned supreme.  In the early morning of November 9th 2016, when Donald Trump crossed the threshold of 270 electoral-college votes to become America's president-elect, that illusion was shattered.   History is back - with a vengeance.

-The Economist, as excerpted from this Leaders essay