That’s not everything but close enough.
-Ben Carlson, from this post
Thus a population of twenty-one millions depended for its government on more than two thousand separate authorities. The lesser nobility, the knights and free tenants of the Emperor formed confederations among themselves where they were thickest on the ground, or came to an understanding with the chief administrator of the surrounding province where they were few. Yet even making allowances for such arrangements there were over three hundred potentially conflicting authorities in Germany.
Imperial power rested ultimately not on the constitution but on force. . . .
Empty as was the imperial title in 1618, the dynasty had not abandoned the hope of restoring to it the reality of power. With a people as traditional as the Germans a lurking respect for the person of the Emperor was always to be found even among the most rabid exponents of the 'German Liberties'—a feeling which an intelligent Emperor could often exploit.
'The German Liberties' was a phrase which had become popular in the sixteenth century. It stood in theory for the constitutional rights of the individual rulers of the Empire, in fact for anything which the caprice or interest of the princes dictated, a bald truth which does not derogate from the personal sincerity with which most of them believed in their own motives. In the smaller group of authoritarians which centered about the Emperor, the corresponding rallying cry was 'Justice'; the emphasis was on government here, on independence there. Ultimately there must come a breaking point.
-C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War
................but since he asked, I might hastily add:
Grant by Ron Chernow
Trinity by Leon Uris
The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry
Watership Downs by Richard Adams
The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by E. C. Lathem
Mister Sharpe was in a bad mood. A filthy mood. He was looking for trouble in Sergeant Harper's opinion, and Harper was rarely wrong about Captain Sharpe, and Sergeant Harper knew well enough not to engage his Captain in conversation when Sharpe was in such a black temper, but on the other hand, Harper liked to live dangerously. "I see your uniform has been mended, sir," he said cheerily.
-Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe's Escape
Greatest hits, by their nature, are unusual. And if the media you’re absorbing is selected from a billion possible clips, don’t be surprised if you start to believe that the unusual is normal.
It’s not.
-Seth Godin, from here
........................................Or, as my young son used to say, "this cracks my head up."
And now I remind myself that I must heed William Blake's warning not to attempt to cling to a sublime experience, but rather allow it to come and go with grace. In another of his metaphysical poems, the four-line jewel called "Eternity," he writes:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity's sunrise.
I stand and raise my glass. "It is a great privilege to be here," I say. Then, smiling, I add, "In fact, it is a great privilege simply to be."
-Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus
For years I’ve been simultaneously amused and horrified at repeated efforts to replace the mouse and keyboard as the fundamental input devices of computers.
-Freddie deBoer, from here
A short lesson about kindness and generosity:
"I
heard my mom asking our neighbor for some salt. We had salt at home so I asked
her why she was asking.
She
told me, "They don't have much money and they sometimes ask us for things.
So I asked for something small that wouldn't burden them. I want them to feel
as if we needed them too. That way, it will be much easier for them to ask us
for anything they need."
-James Clear, from his June 15 newsletter
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
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
If you view progress as being driven by the genius of individuals, of course it’s hard to imagine a future where things are dramatically better, because no individual is orders of magnitudes smarter than average.
But when you view it as one person coming up with a small idea, another person copying that idea and tweaking it a little, another taking that insight and manipulating it a bit, another yet taking that product and combining it with something else – incremental, tiny bits, little ideas mixing, joining, blending, mutating, and compounding together – it’s suddenly much more conceivable.
-Morgan Housel, from here
Milton's allegory is not just a portrait of our kind; it is an invitation to kindness. It shows us what we are and what we must live up to. And it sets a standard for art. Take away religion, however, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this "living down," which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind—and with it our kindness.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
Creeping stagnation ought to be recognized as the central economic issue of our time. . . .
Why are we stagnating? In my view, the answer is simple: America has the people, the ideas, and the investment capital to grow. We just can’t get the permits. We are a great Gulliver, tied down by miles of Lilliputian red tape.
-Craig Newmark, channeling John Cochrane
I have a proto-theory: That our brains tend to produce dreams at all times, and that during waking hours, our brains tame the dream machine into perception and truthiness. At night, we let it run free to keep the brain areas occupied. The foundational mode of the intelligence is therefore dreaming.
Here’s how I got there: For a while I’ve been intensely exploring generative AI systems, creating both text and visual images almost daily, and I am increasingly struck by their similarity to dreams. The AIs seem to produce dream images and dream stories and dream answers. The technical term is “hallucinations” but I think they are close to dreams. I’ve come to suspect that this similarity between dreams and generative AI is not superficial, poetic, or coincidental. My unexpected hunch is that we’ll discover that the mechanism that generates dreams in our own heads will be the same (or very similar) to the ones that current neural net AI’s use to generate text and images.
-Kevin Kelly, from this post
I would urge everyone in and around the AI policy space to steer their thinking away from the idea that they can predict the economic impacts of future technologies, and toward the development of economic institutions that will minimize any downsides. Let’s stick with what worked in the last industrial revolution, and not try to be sci-fi prophets.
-Noah Smith, from this post
I no longer think that all wars are unnecessary; but some are, and I still think that the Thirty Years War was one of these. It need not have happened and it settled nothing worth settling. No doubt it assured the replacement of Spain by France as the dominant power in Western Europe, an event of some importance in the history of the western world. But the same result might have been achieved at far less cost and without a generation of war among the Germans who were only indirectly concerned in the matter at all. Several statesmen of genius outside of Germany from time to time dominated the course of the war; no statesman of genius inside of Germany appeared to put a stop to it. The dismal course of the conflict, dragging on from one decade to the next and from one deadlock to the next, seems to me an object lesson on the dangers and disasters which can arise when men of narrow hearts and little minds are in high places.
-C. V. Wedgwood, as she completes her Introduction to The Thirty Years War
History reflects the period in which it is written as much as any other branch of literature. Although the historian's material is much more rigidly circumscribed than that of the novelist or poet, he, like them, has to bring to the understanding and presentation of his material his own experience of life and the imaginative equipment peculiar to him and to his time. . . .
. . . When all allowance has been made for exaggeration, hard luck stories, and propaganda, the weight of the evidence still shows that the human suffering caused by the war was appalling. I feel now, as I did twenty years ago, the one task of the political historian is to show the repercussions of policy on the lives of the governed and to arouse in the reader imaginative sympathy with those multitudes of fellow beings who were victims as well as actors in the events of the past.
-Cicely Veronica Wedgwood, from her Introduction to The Thirty Years War
The core mistake the automation-kills-jobs doomers keep making is called the Lump Of Labor Fallacy. This fallacy is the incorrect notion that there is a fixed amount of labor to be done in the economy at any given time, and either machines do it or people do it – and if machines do it, there will be no work for people to do.
The Lump Of Labor Fallacy flows naturally from naive intuition, but naive intuition here is wrong. When technology is applied to production, we get productivity growth – an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs. The result is lower prices for goods and services. As prices for goods and services fall, we pay less for them, meaning that we now have extra spending power with which to buy other things. This increases demand in the economy, which drives the creation of new production – including new products and new industries – which then creates new jobs for the people who were replaced by machines in prior jobs. The result is a larger economy with higher material prosperity, more industries, more products, and more jobs.
-Marc Andreessen, from this Substack, why-ai-will-save-the-world
For all the books on all the shelves of all the world's libraries, life must in the end be lived as a series of discrete moments and individual decisions. What we face may be complicated, but what we do about it is simple. "Do the right thing," Laura White told her son. "Do unto others," a teacher told his disciples, "as you would have them do unto you." . . .
How does one thrive through a maelstrom of change? By standing on ground that is permanent.
The lesson, so simple yet so difficult, is that life can be savored even though it contains hardship, disappointment, loss, and even brutality. The choice to see its beauty is available to us at every moment.
-David Von Drehle, The Book of Charlie: Wisdom From the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man
Someone has insulted you? You mean, rather, that you allowed them to insult you.
Because regardless of their intention, what they say is just air moving between the two of you. Their words become an insult only if you regard them as such. Otherwise, they are the uttering of a fool.
Try, therefore, not to be bewildered by appearances, and instead take a break from the situation, put some distance between yourself and the immediate impression. That way you will find that it is easier to retain command of your ruling faculty, your ability to reason.
-Massimo Pigliucci, A Field Guide to a Happy Life
I don't know anything that a young business man ought to keep more entirely to himself than his dislikes, unless it is his likes. It's generally expensive to have either, but it's bankruptcy to tell about them. It's all right to say nothing about the dead but good, but it's better to apply the rule to the living, and especially to the house which is paying your salary.
-George H. Lorimer, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
It is impossible for you to become poor by giving. It is impossible for you to become wealthy without giving.
-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier
Allowing a small number of technologists and financiers to dominate a huge portion of the economy and the information pipeline, and to monetize every aspect of human behavior, seems incompatible with democratic self-determination.
-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
I now turn to another feature of the human condition that divides us from our simian relatives: the feature of responsibility. We hold each other accountable for what we do, and as a result we understand the world in ways that have not parallel in the lives of other species. Our world, unlike the environment of an animal, contains rights, deserts, and duties; it is a world of self-conscious subjects, in which events are divided into the free and the unfree, those that have reasons and those that are merely caused, those that stem from a rational subject, and those that erupt into the stream of objects with no conscious design. Thinking of the world in this way, we respond to it with emotions that lie beyond the repertoire of other animals: indignation, resentment, and envy; admiration, commitment, and praise—all of which involve the thought of others as accountable subjects with rights and duties and a self-conscious vision of their future and their past. Only responsible beings can feel these emotions, and in feeling them, they situate themselves in some way outside the natural order, standing back from it in judgment.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
Words are energy and cast spells, that’s why it’s called spelling. Change the way you speak about yourself and you can change your life.
-Bruce Lee, with more wisdom here
I grew up under the Cantor's gaze. The celebrated Haussmann portrait of Bach had been given to my parents for safekeeping for the duration of the war, and it took pride of place on the first-floor landing of the old mill in Dorset where I was born. Every night on my way to bed I tried to avoid its forbidding stare.
-John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
People often asked him the secret to longevity, and Charlie was always scrupulously honest: there's no secret, just luck. But if he knew no secrets to a long life, he knew plenty about a happy life. Through tragedy and loss, poverty and setbacks, missteps and blown chances, he maintained a steadiness, an evenness, and a self-reliance that today might be called resilience. He had a gift for seizing joy, grabbing opportunities, and holding on to things that matter. And he had an unusual knack for an even more difficult task: letting go of all the rest.
-David Von Drehle: The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man
We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day, and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade. Miraculous things can be accomplished if you give it ten years. A long game will compound small gains that will be able to overcome even big mistakes.
-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier
The complexity of problems facing our society—climate change, mass migration, or the effects of technology, for example—may often seem beyond the competency of elected representatives. If higher education made for better people with wiser judgment, it might be tolerable to hand great powers for controlling society to highly educated experts. But as Aldous Huxley observed, scientists and other experts do not own a monopoly on either virtue or political wisdom.
There are clear dangers in ceding too much power to unelected and unaccountable elites who claim moral authority or expertise backed by higher education. Rule by the most educated and highly credentialed people is profoundly illiberal, observes Yascha Motunk, a Harvard progressive. Many elite progressives—the core of the clerisy—might prefer such a model for society, but it would endanger political pluralism, especially when the credentialed elites are overly sure of their own correctness. A survey commissioned by the Atlantic notes that the highly educated are now arguably the least politically tolerant group in America.
-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of NEO Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
. . . we don't need to do great, powerful, spectacular things to make a genuine difference or to become heroes. Nor do we need to be powerful beings or important leaders. We simply need to do the best we can, even if it seems impossible that we'll end up doing anything special in the long run. It is purely our motivation and great-hearted Bodhicitta in action that counts, not any attachment to a specific outcome.
-Lam Surya Das, Buddha Is As Buddha Does
I dwell on this because I am a little disappointed that you should have made such a mistake in sizing up Milligan. He isn't the brightest man in the office, but he is loyal to me and to the house, and when you have been in business as long as I have you will be inclined to put a pretty high value on loyalty. It is the one commodity that hasn't any market value, and it's the one that you can't pay too much for. You can trust any number of men with your money, but mighty few with your reputation. Half the men who are with the house on pay day are against it the other six.
-George H. Lorimer, Letters From a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
.......................................does a Harvard commencement The American Way
Consider one of those features of people that set them apart from other species: laughter. No other animal laughs. What we call the laughter of the hyena is a species sound that happens to resemble human laughter. To be real laughter it would have to be an expression of amusement—laughter at something, founded in a complex pattern of thought. True, there is also "laughter at what ceases to amuse," as Eliot puts it. But we understand this "hollow" laughter as a deviation from the central case, which is the case of amusement. But what is amusement? No philosopher, it seems to me, has ever quite put a finger on it. Hobbes's description of laughter as "sudden glory" has a certain magical quality; but "glory" suggests that all laughter is a form of triumph, which is surely far from the truth. Schopenhauer, Berson, and Freud have attempted to identify the particular thought that lies at the heart of laughter: none, I think, with more than partial success. Helmuth Plessner has seen laughing and crying as keys to the human condition, features that typify our distinctiveness. But his phenomenological language is opaque and leads to no clear analysis of either laughter or tears,
One contention, however, might reasonably be advanced, which is that laughter expresses an ability to accept our all-too-human inadequacies: by laughing we may attract the community of sentiment that inoculates us against despair. . . . From that suggestion, however, another follows. Only a being who makes judgments can laugh. Typically we laugh at things that fall short or at witticisms that place our actions side by side with the aspirations that they ridicule.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
I know it will be said that in this work I have pointed out a deep malady, and only suggested a superficial remedy. I have tediously insisted that the natural system of banking is that of many banks keeping their own cash reserve, with the penalty of failure before them if they neglect it. I have shown that our system is that of a single bank keeping the whole reserve under no effectual penalty of failure. And yet I propose to retain this system, and only attempt to mend and palliate it.
I can only reply that I propose to retain this system because I am quite sure that it is of no manner of use proposing to alter it. A system of credit which has slowly grown up as years went on, which has suited itself to the course of business, which has forced itself on the habits of men, will not be altered because theorists disapprove of it, or because books are written against it.
-Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market
If we're going to prosper, we have to work. We have to have people subject to carrots and sticks. If you take away the stick the whole system won't work. You can't vote yourself rich. It's an idiotic idea.
Attention is not always within our control. The unexpected, the changeable, the novel, even the habitual in life abduct our focus, intrude upon our awareness, and pull us off course for a time. Attention is like a second skin, a meeting ground for our ever-present grappling with external and internal worlds. Yet well used and nurtured carefully, our networks of attention are our foremost means to shaping our lives. These networks give us extraordinary ways to master ourselves and our environment, offering the key to growth, connection, happiness. Accepting a culture of eroding attention relinquishes this potential for sculpting our individual and collective futures. To paraphrase Walter Mischel's caveat on will, we don't always want to exercise our highest powers of attention, yet if we cannot focus, observe, or judge well, the choice is lost. Will we slip into a dark age of distraction? At journey's end, I searched for final clues in contrasting realms of art and science where attention is nonetheless similarly dissected, rekindled, and venerated. To reverse a darkening time, we must understand, strengthen, and lastly value attention.
-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age
Although the revolution that is taking place in the social condition, the laws, the opinions, and the feelings of men is still very far from being terminated, yet its results already admit of no comparison with anything that the world has ever before witnessed. I go back from age to age up to the remotest antiquity, but I find no parallel to what is occurring before my eyes, as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book Four, Chapter VIII
. . . it is part of the wise man to recreate and refresh himself with pleasant food and drink, and also with perfumes, with the soft beauty of growing plants, with dress, with music, with many sports, with theatres, and the like, such as every man may make use of without injury to his neighbor. . . . Things are good only insofar as they assist a man to enjoy the life of the mind.
It is not only in science that this attitude of critical reflection is maintained. Matthew Arnold famously described culture as "a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thoughts upon our stock notions and habits." Like so many people wedded to the nineteenth-century view of science, Dawkins overlooks the nineteenth-century reaction—which said, "Wait a minute: science is not the only way to pursue knowledge. There is moral knowledge too, which is the province of practical reason; there is emotional knowledge, which is the province of art, literature, and music. And just possibly there is a transcendental knowledge, which is the province of religion. Why privilege science, just because it sets out to explain the world? Why not give weight to the disciplines that interpret the world and so help us to be at home in it?"
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
....................methinks he would be a lot like this.
The best reading strategy I’ve come across is the idea of a wide funnel and tight filter. Be willing to read anything that looks even a little interesting, but abandon it quickly and without mercy if it’s not working for you.
Be choosy about what you let into your attic.
-Morgan Housel, from this post, Paying Attention
Amsterdam in the seventeenth century was a city of bookshops. There were at the time as many as four hundred establishments dedicated to spreading the printed word. Under the tolerant eye of the civil authorities, authors from across Europe sent their wares to Holland for publication, and, as a result, Dutch publishers outproduced their continental rivals in several languages. An important part of the Amsterdam adventure for intellectual visitors as diverse as Leibniz and John Locke, was a visit to one or more of the city's bookshops, where one had the opportunity not just to browse the aisles for contraband literature, but also to sniff out new ideas among the freewheeling bibliophiles, who with the stimulus of coffee and Dutch-made pipes—for smoking had become a national sport— would while the afternoon away discussing novel theories, plotting revolution, and bantering about the latest developments in the republic of letter.
-Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the fate of God in the Modern World
It is one of the distinguishing characteristics of human beings, however, that they can distinguish an idea from the reality represented in it, can entertain propositions from which they withhold their assent, and can move judge-like in the realm of ideas, calling each before the bar of rational argument, accepting them and rejecting them regardless of the reproductive cost.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
Do not rely on the cooperation of those who will rarely give it. Search for a solution that is apart from such cooperation. You may be surprised by how easily such solutions can be found.
Pay attention to who you are around when you feel your best. Be with them more often.
It is our good fortune to live in an age when philosophy is thought to be a harmless affair. As the autumn of 1676 approached, however, Baruch de Spinoza had ample reason to fear for his safety. One of his friends had recently been executed, and another had died in prison. His efforts to publish his definitive work, the Ethics, had come to an end amid threats of criminal prosecution. A leading French theologian named him "the most impious and the most dangerous man of the century." A powerful bishop denounced him as "that insane and evil man, who deserves to be covered with chains and whipped with a rod." To the general public, he was known simply as "the atheist Jew."
-Matthew Stewart, Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World
Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage: for, when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.
We are territorial creatures, just like chimpanzees, wolves, and tigers. We claim our territory and fight for it, and our genes, which require just such an exclusive claim over habitat if their replication is to be guaranteed, depend on our success. Yet when we fight it is, as a rule, in the name of some high ideal: justice, liberation, national sovereignty, even God Himself. Once again, it seems that we are in the habit of telling ourselves stories that make no reference to the biological realities in which they are rooted.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
. . . that one of the deadly sins was how we humans mistake performance for competence.
-Rodney Brooks, from this article
My Sweetie and I visited the world-class Dawes Arboretum in suburban Newark this afternoon. A good time was had:
As I reflected on this subtle change, it occurred to me that after suffering a loss so enormous, and surviving it, Charlie decided he could get through anything. Brought face to face with the limits of his ability, of anyone’s ability, to master fate or turn back time, Charlie began reaching for the things he could control — his own actions, his own emotions, his outlook, his grit. As he put it: “We didn’t have time to be sad.”
Charlie was not a student of philosophy. Yet in those words, I recognized the essence of a credo that has served human beings for centuries: Stoicism, one of the most durable and useful schools of thought ever devised. It has spoken to paupers and presidents, to emperors and the enslaved. It’s the philosophy of freedom and self-determination, one that seeks to erase envy, resentment, neediness and anxiety. Its pillars are wisdom, courage, temperance and justice. It is a philosophy of radical equality and mutual respect.
-As redirected by this David Kanigan post. Book now residing in my B & N shopping cart.
To go from strength to strength requires learning a new set of life skills. We need to adopt a new formula, which I have laid out in detail in this book, chapter by chapter. But of course you are unlikely to memorize the last sixty thousand words. So let me summarize the whole book in seven—a formula that encapsulates all the lessons I have learned and now strive to live: Use things. Love people. Worship the divine.
Another skill is the recall of names and facts. By the time you are fifty, your brain is as crowded with information as the New York Public Library. Meanwhile, your personal research librarian is creaky, slow, and easily distracted. When you send him to get some information you need—say, someone's name—he takes a minute to stand up, stops for coffee, talks to an old friend in the periodicals, and then forgets where he was going in the first place. Meanwhile, you are kicking yourself for forgetting something you have known for years. When the librarian finally shows back up and says, "That guy's name is Mike," Mike is long gone and you are doing something else.
-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life
For most people, decline is just not an unwelcome surprise, it is also a huge mystery. We learn early on that practice makes perfect; there is plenty of research telling us that mastery comes from ten thousand hours of work, or some really high number like that. In other words, life has a formula: the more you do something, the better at it you become.
But then you don't. Progress isn't a straight line upward, . . . So what explains the downward portion? . . .
A better explanation involved structural changes in the brain—specifically, the changing performance of the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain behind your forehead). This is the last part of the brain to develop in childhood and the first to exhibit decline in adulthood. It is primarily responsible for working memory, executive function, and inhibitory mechanisms—that is, the ability to block out information extraneous to the task at hand, so we can focus and imp[orve our core skill. A big, strong prefrontal cortex makes it possible for you to get better and better at your specialty, whether it is making a legal case, doing surgery, or driving a bus.
In middle age, the prefrontal cortex degrades in effectiveness . . .
-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life
In my field of economics, we have something called "Stein's Law," named after the famous economist Herbert Stein from the 1970s: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Obvious, right? Well, when it comes to their own lives, people ignore it all the time. But you ignore this about your professional success at your peril. It will leave you falling further and further behind, shaking your fist at the heavens.
There is another path, though, instead of denying change in your abilities, you can make the change itself a source of strength. Instead of trying to avoid decline, you can transcend it by finding a new kind of success, better than what the world promises and not a source of neurosis and addiction: a deeper form of happiness than what you had before; and in the process, true meaning in life—maybe for the first time. . . .
A word of caution, though: This path means going against many of your striverly instincts. I'm going to ask you not to deny your weaknesses but rather to embrace them defenselessly. To let go of some things in your life that you worked hard for—but that are now holding you back. To adopt parts of life that will make you happy, even if they don't make you special. To face decline—and even death—with courage and confidence. To rebuild relationships you neglected on the long road to worldly success. And to dive into the uncertainty of a transition you have worked so hard to evade.
-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life
What I found was a hidden source of anguish that wasn't just widespread but nearly universal among people who have done well in their careers. I came to call this the "striver's curse": people who strive to be excellent at what they do often wind up finding their inevitable decline terrifying, their successes increasingly unsatisfying, and their relationships lacking.
-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life
Credit—the disposition of one man to trust another—is singularly varying.
-Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market
"You don't believe in reason," Sharpe let the conversation veer away from the painful subject of the Count of Mouromorto's loyalty.
"Reason is the mathematics of thinking, nothing more. You don't live by such dry disciplines. Mathematics cannot explain God, no more can reason, and I believe in God! Without Him we are no more than corruption. But I forget. You are not a believer."
Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe's Rifles
Ask anyone you admire: Their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal. So embrace detours. Life is not a straight line for anyone.
....................since he wrote these words:
The culture of repudiation is sometimes referred to (usually dismissively) as 'political correctness'—the assumption being that university gurus are involved in a kind of brain-washing exercise, to ensure that no political view will be transmitted or accepted on campus save those of a liberal-egalitarian kind. But, interesting though this assumption is, I doubt that it has any real bearing on the cultural phenomenon. The feminists, gay activists, new historicists, crypto-Marxists, Foucauldians and deconstructionists who thrive in humanities departments do not, as a rule, have much interest in the political view of their students.
-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture (1998)
In truth, unrealistic expectations tarnish our appreciation of life and weigh down the buoyancy of the present moment.
You'll find that education's about the only thing lying around loose in this world, and that it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much as he's willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and the screw-driver lost.
-George H. Lorimer, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
Light comes from the East. The Chinese sage Confucius, who lived five centuries before Christ, left no writings of his own, and is known to us, as Christ is, from the words and deeds recorded by his apostles. Unlike Christ, however, Confucius was not a religious reformer, but an ardent conformist in all matters both temporal and spiritual, and his counsels and maxims, recorded in the Analects, are concerned with the orderly conduct of life in this world, rather than the hopes and fears for the next. Confucius lived through the collapse of feudal civilization in ancient China, and wandered the land in search of a prince who would listen to his counsels. He loved life, was fond of horses and hunting, and was both a practical and a respectable man, distinguished from his contemporaries largely by his propensity both to utter uncomfortable truths, and to live by them.
-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture
The pioneers of the modern tech industry were once celebrated as exemplars of capitalist competition, illustrating what Joseph Schumpeter called the "creative destruction" that breaks up monopolies and allows others to rise from below. But today's tech leaders increasingly resemble an exclusive ruling class, controlling a few exceptionally powerful companies, and like aristocracies everywhere they are often resistant to any dispersion of their power. As the conquer ever more of the precious digital real estate, they are building a more stratified economic and social order, with widening class divisions, not only in the United States, but around the world.
-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of NEO Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
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