principles...................

 

     In sum, principles are the collective wisdom of our species.  They tell us what is valuable.  They warn us what is not.  Principles of law safeguard society and protect our rights.  Health principles guide us on nutrition, exercise, and the prevention of disease.  Scientific principles further technology and explain the natural world.  Spiritual principles guide our lives. Or should.

     There will always be arguments about doctrine, of course.  But there is little disagreement on core principles: honesty, compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, perseverance, justice, humility, charity, and gratitude.

     These principles aren't binding.  They're liberating.  They imbue life with meaning.  And, make no mistake, human beings are meaning-seeking creatures.  Without a reason to live, people easily fall into depression or despair.  In some sense, we are all spiritual seekers.

-Alexander Green, beyond Wealth: The road map to a rich life

a worthy goal....................

 

     "When I am reading a book, whether wise of silly," Swift once wrote, "it seemeth to me to be alive and talking to me."  The books he owned that have survived show that he constantly talked back, filling the margins with comments and objections, as he did when he referred to King William's morals.  Describing this period ten years later, he said of himself, "The author was then young, his invention at the height, and his reading fresh in his head.  By the assistance of some thinking, and much conversation, he had endeavoured to strip himself of as many real prejudices as he could."  That was his lifelong goal: to be faithful to firm principles, but only after thinking them through.

-Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

one basic principle.................

 

The University of Pennsylvania established the Grit Lab, a course based on Angela Duckworth's work, to help students learn the science behind passion and perseverance and to apply it to their own lives.  Duckworth tells students (and their parents) to consider the simple, single-celled paramecium.  The paramecium survives and thrives, using one basic principle:  If things are improving, continue in the same direction, and if not, change course.

     "Be like a paramecium," she says.  "Move in the direction of warmth and nutrients."

-Bill Gurley, Runnin' Down a Dream:  How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love

Us humans.....................

 

. . . the trends show how much more forceful the power of human inventiveness is relative to everything else.

-Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order

a good guess....................

So there's my guess at a set of principles to live by: take care of people and the world, and make good new things.

-Paul Graham

Harder than it looks..............

 

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

gather strength...........................

 

 I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

-Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 1, 1776

in principle versus in practice..............

 

If nature is placed above man, such that every brook has its transcendent spirit, then, man, women, and child are by necessity placed below nature.  This might mean in principle that the wonders of the environment would become rightly valued.  In practice, however, it all too often means instead that human beings are given no more shrift than weeds or rats.  This inversion of value enables not so much the stewardship of the earth as the exploitation of those deemed no more worthy than the lesser forms of life—exploitation by exactly the sort of people who eternally step forward to abuse such advantage.

-Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine

principles.................

 

In a democracy it is idle to praise the virtues of a statesman who can't persuade the public.  But we should not judge him entirely by that failure, either.  The voters turned against him, after all, for standing firm on the same beliefs he held when they elected him—sound money, freer trade, and limited government interference in the economy.  In some sense it was a testimony to his integrity: even at a moment of maximum political peril, Grover Cleveland's principles were not open for bidding.

-Troy Senik, A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland.

the chess-board.................

 The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.  He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or the strong prejudices which may oppose it.  He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful.  If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

On indecisiveness...........................

      What Washington's critics did not see then, and sometimes not even now, was that being indecisive was decidedly preferable to being decisively wrong.

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles

wise contrivance............................

      As the historian Daniel Howe puts it, the founding generation was "fed up with the Articles of Confederation and their reliance on uncoerced public virtue."  The moment had come, he continues, to consider whether "the vices could, through wise contrivance, be made to do the work of virtues."  Thinking through this apparent paradox would become the specialty of James Madison. . . .

       Not only was the structure of the United States flawed, but so was the classical conception behind it, he argued.  The time had come to accept that "all civilized societies are divided into different interests and factions, as they happen to be creditors or debtors—Rich or poor—husbandmen, merchants or manufacturers—members of different religious sects—followers of different political leaders—inhabitants of different districts—owners of different kinds of property etc etc"  But if "different interests and factions" were inevitable, then faction would have to be accepted and interest would have to be seen not as sinful but as natural.  What would a government designed to accommodate them look like?

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

feeling and following...........

 But even Maury thought that the purpose of learning a bit of history, literature, and geography was essentially social, in that a smattering of such knowledge would enable "a Virginia gentleman" to converse with confidence and thus same him from the embarrassment of making "a ridiculous & awkward Figure in Life."

     Indeed, judging by Jefferson's literary commonplace book, into which he copied passages from authors who had caught his attention, Maury immersed the young man in the classics. There are few better ways to study a literary passage than to write it out in one's own hand, feeling each word and following the flow of thought.  Not surprisingly for an intelligent fourteen-year-old who had just lost his father, Jefferson was especially inclined toward commentaries on mortality.  He began by copying several passages from Cicero's Tusculum Disputations about the inevitability of death.  Jefferson liked Cicero's essays, considering him "the first master" of style, but in notable contrast to the taste of the time, held the Roman's speeches in low esteem.  The best models of oratory, he wrote, were "Livy, Tacitus, Sallust, & most assuredly not in Cicero."

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

indelibly engraved.....................

 In 1750, Mayhew, fresh from receiving his Scottish divinity degree, preached a sermon in Boston celebrating, somewhat shockingly, the hundredth anniversary of the execution of King Charles I.  One of the lessons, the radical young man noted, was that "no civil rules are to be obeyed when they enjoin things that are inconsistent with the commands of God."  Indeed, such resistance to authority was "a duty, not a crime."

    Adams was paying attention to such thinking.  He would later note that this was the sermon that made Mayhew's reputation.  He studied it repeatedly before he went off to college.  "I read it, till the Substance of it was incorporated into my Nature and indelibly engraved on my Memory," he told Thomas Jefferson decades later.  "It was read by every Body, celebrated by Friends, and abused by Enemies."

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles

John Adams................

      The dominant political narrative of colonial American elites was the story of how the Roman orator Cicero put down the Catiline conspiracy to take over Rome.  John Adams aspired to be the Cicero of his time—that is, the key political figure in late eighteenth-century America.

      He would come very close to achieving that vaulting ambition, which is surprising, because he was in many ways the odd man out among the first four presidents.  He was the only one who spent time as a schoolteacher, working for wages.  The other three were emotionally reserved, while he wore his feelings on his sleeve and tended to wallow in them all his life.  They were Virginians, while he was a son of Massachusetts, a colony founded by Puritans in 1628.  He was also the only one of the four never to own an enslaved human being.

     Most significant of all, Adams also was the first of the four men to move towards revolt.  He was entertaining radical notions while still an adolescent—and while George Washington was striving to achieve rank and standing in the structure of the British empire.  Indeed, long before the adolescent Adams crossed the Charles River to Harvard, he was full of thoughts about how to better resist British authority.  It helped that he was both bright and naturally irascible.  He had been questioning authority for years.  More than most men, he was born to do so.

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

Quite the cast of characters..............

      The grew into distinctly dissimilar men: Washington a stiff-necked soldier; Adams a brilliant, honest, self-absorbed crank; Jefferson a dreamer of liberty who lived in hypocritical luxury off the sweat of captive humans; Madison already with one foot in the next generation, perhaps more American than a Virginian, and an unapologetic politician. Like Alexander Hamilton, he was more skeptical than his elders of the verities of the Enlightenment, with its core faith in human improvement.

-Thomas E. Ricks:  First Principles

principles...................

      The picture that I have been developing of the moral community translates easily into an attendant system of law—the common law whereby disputes and grievances are brought before an impartial judge and resolved according to the ancient principles of natural justice, which advocate the avoidance of bias and the right to a fair hearing.  The habit of settling our disputes in that way therefore seems to be the natural adjunct to the moral order.  Just those principles that underlie common-law practice in the English-speaking tradition emerge from our spontaneous ways of negotiating solutions to our conflicts.  All of the following principles, for example, seem to be accepted by those who lay down their weapons and reason toward solutions instead:

1. Considerations that justify or impugn one person, will, in identical circumstances, justify or impugn another,

2. Rights are to be respected.

3. Obligations are to be fulfilled.

4. Agreements are to be honored.

5. Disputes are to settled by negotiation, not by force.

6. Those who do not respect the rights of others forfeit rights of their own.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

Accountability and the impartial other............

 Those principles have been taken as defining the field of "natural law," for the reason that their validity depends only on the idea of negotiation itself and not on the circumstances of the one who embarks on it.

      Something like this was surely at the back of Adam Smith's mind when, in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he argued for the "impartial spectator" as the true judge of our moral duties.  When asking myself what should I do, I entertain the thought of what another would think of my action when observing it with a disinterested eye.  If, as I suggest, morality is rooted in the practice of accountability between self-conscious agents, this is exactly what we should expect.  The impartial other sets the standard that we all must meet.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

Rooting for "polarization".............

 “There are some encouraging signs of polarization.” Nothing flippant inheres in this remark; a long and risky life has persuaded him that only an open conflict of ideas and principles can produce any clarity. Conflict may be painful, but the painless solution does not exist in any case and the pursuit of it leads to the painful outcome of mindlessness and pointlessness; the apotheosis of the ostrich.

-from Marc Andreessen's substack

The Peshtigo Principle...................

 When you think you’ve got all the facts, look a little more.

When you think you’ve got a good solution to a problem, push on to see if there’s a better one.

When you think you’ve done your due diligence, take a deep breath and make one more call.

The important fact you need could be out there, just out of sight.

-Wally Bock

thanks Michael