An Ever­Accumulating Collection of VARIOUS INSIGHTFUL, FUN, AND VEXING QUOTATIONS Assembled by Alexander Carpenter for the Edification and Consternation of Himself, his Friends, and Innocent Bystanders

THE STATE, particularly CHINA...... 3 EDUCATION and RELIGION...... 14 BUSINESS, ECONOMICS, and POLITICS...... 40 CORPORATIONS...... 123 POLITY...... 154 SELF...... 210 SCIENCE and GNOSIS...... 243 ENVIRONMENT...... 293 HEYOKA...... 315 TRAVEL...... 344 LANGUAGE and SPEECH...... 347 PROHIBITION...... 365 LIBERTY and RESTRAINT OF THE STATE...... 371 THE GOLDEN RULE...... 405 IT’S LIKE…...... 409 POLITY LISTS...... 415 UNPLACED...... 421 QUOTABLE...... 444

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Nota bene, “apocryphal” means I think somebody made it up, over­summarized it, took it out of context, or projected his own interpretations into it. This is distinguished from re­attribution, mis­ attribution, or outright appropriation (aka plagiarism).

Alexander Carpenter Compilation and Original­Creation Copyright © 1984­2013 All Rights Reserved In All Media All copyrighted material included under Fair Use [email protected] 1 January 2013

2 page THE STATE, particularly CHINA

People have friends; nations have interests.

Charles de Gaulle

Governments have interests, not principles. (paraphrased)

Cardinal Richelieu (also attributed to Henry Kissinger)

One learns soon enough that only a fool understands the Chinese quickly.

Arthur Miller, American Playwright, in The Atlantic Monthly

Generally speaking, Chinese hate Buddhist monks and nuns; they hate Moslems, and they hate Christians. But they do not hate Taoist priests. Whoever understands the reason for this has understood half of China.

Lu Xun, Chinese Writer

The principal function of modern government is to keep people apart. or

Keeping citizens apart has become the first maxim of modern politics.

Jean­Jacques Rousseau (1712­1778)

The more laws, the less justice.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis, 44 B.C.

Corruptissima republicae, plurimae leges. (The more corrupt the state, the more laws it has.)

Cornelius Tacitus (55­117 AD), ______

An old Chinese said he had heard that when empires were doomed they had many laws.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (Posthumous Notebooks), 1901

When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

3 page G.K. Chesterton

That government governs best which governs least.

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (resonant of Jefferson?)

The more restrictions and prohibitions there are, the poorer the people become. The sharper the people’s weapons are, the more national confusion increases. The more skill artisans require, the more bizarre their products are.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

‘The People’ is that part of the State that doesn’t know what it wants. … The people’s movement and action would be elemental, void of reason, violent and terrible, if not regulated.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of a Philosophy of Right, 1821, §§ 301 and 303

‘The People’ is a great beast.

Alexander Hamilton, American Statesman

How can you govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese?

Countries can cope with a surprising amount of bad government.

Charles de Gaulle

Many of us [Chinese] who have been to foreign countries to study and work agree that we can perform much more efficiently and productively abroad than in China... Foreigners are no more intelligent than we Chinese. Why, then, can’t we produce first­rate work? The reasons for our inability to develop our potential lie within our social system... Chinese intellectual life, material civilization, moral fiber, and government are in dire straits... The truth is that every aspect of the Chinese world needs to be modernized... Chinese culture is not just backward in a particular respect but primitive in an overall sense...

Fang Lizhi, Chinese Scientist, in The Atlantic Monthly, May 1988

Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the laws of the State always change with them.

The leaders of the State...may be allowed to lie for the good of the State.

4 page Plato (428­347 B.C.)

There are three kinds of intelligence — human, animal, and military.

Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point

A inveja e a arma dos incompetentes. (Jealousy is the weapon of the incompetent.)

Brazilian Saying

Quem tem dois, sempre tem um. Quem tem um, nao tem ningem. (He who has two [women], always has one. He who has one, has none.)

Another Brazilian Saying

The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

Jacques Anatole Francois, Le Lys Rouge

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well­housed, well­warmed and well­fed.

Herman Melville

Laws are generally found to be nets of such a texture, as the little creep through, the great break through, and the middle­sized are alone entangled in.

William Shenstone (1714­1763), Essays on Men, Manners, and Things; On Politics

Laws are spider webs; they hold the weak and delicate who are caught in their meshes, but are torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

Anacharsis, 1st­Century B.C. Scythian Philosopher

John Stuart Mill said that tyranny makes people cynical. He didn’t realize that there would be republics to make them silent.

Lu Xun, Chinese Writer

5 page Authoritarian government, required to speak, is silent. Representative government, required to speak, lies with impunity.

Napoleon Bonaparte

In a dictatorship, censorship is used; in a democracy, manipulation.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, journalist, Le Monde diplomatique (Paris), August 1999

No tyrant’s power can compare with that of a poor wretch ready to kill himself.

Emil Cioran, Romanian political philosopher (1911­1995)

A joke is an epitaph for a hope that has died.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844­1900)

History never repeats itself; man always does.

Voltaire

...it comes to pass that the same evils and inconveniences take place in all ages of history.

Niccolo Machiavelli (1569­1527), Discourses (II?)

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

Francis Bacon, Of Innovations

Of course, whether we are massacred by our own people or are massacred by foreigners does not amount exactly to the same thing. Thus, for instance, if a man slaps his own face he will not feel insulted; whereas if someone else slaps him he will feel angry. However, when a man is so cretinous that he will slap his own face, he fully deserves to be slapped by any passerby.

Lu Xun, Chinese Writer

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock­down argument for you!’” “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock­down argument’,” Alice objected. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.” 6 page Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

When clever fellows begin to praise someone — be he a wealthy old man, an actress, or their boss — it is naturally in the hope to derive some benefit from this activity. Yet for the ordinary people, the main purpose of all sycophancy is simply to ward off catastrophes. Consider, for instance, the various gods that are worshipped in China — nine times out of ten, they are malefic powers... Simply speaking, in China, whoever is the object of a cult must be a very dubious character.

Lu Xun, Chinese Writer

History in China is like an old man’s memory. The distant past is often more vivid than the present, and its stories are polished, exaggerated, and distorted by many tellings. The Chinese have always looked to their ancestors for their sense of direction and of duty in life. They have no epics and few creation stories, only history, full of moral examples to be drawn on and evaluated afresh in every generation. For history to the Chinese is not an objective account of the past. It is an endless morality tale in which the characters must be explicit villains and heroes, their virtues and vices made constantly relevant to the present day’s concerns.

Alasdair Clayre, The Heart of the Dragon

When the Chinese suspect someone of being a potential troublemaker, they always resort to one of two methods: they crush him, or they hoist him on a pedestal.

Lu Xun, Chinese Writer

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Once, I remember, we came upon a man­of­war anchored off the [African] coast... It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts... In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

We let ourselves be turned all too easily into slaves. And the worst is that once we have become slaves, we derive much satisfaction from it.

Lu Xun, Chinese Writer

Before the revolution we were slaves. And now we are the slaves of former slaves.

7 page Lu Xun, Chinese Writer

China is still a world apart, for all the superficial comings­together announced in recent years by politicians and the media. A world where children pay for the sins of their parents; truth means nothing compared with ritual; merit gives way to connections; revenge is a way of life; and the greatest transgression is to step out of line from the tribe.

Ross Terrill, Australian Journalist

The Chinese are not a very civilized people.

Jiang Qing, failed Shanghai actress, widow of Chairman Mao, vindictive stage­director of the Cultural Revolution, would­be Empress of China, and (perhaps) suicide.

The South gate of the courts is open. With right on your side but no money, do not go inside.

Chinese Saying

Heaven is high and the Emperor far away.

Another Chinese Saying

Sit Stump Wait Rabbit.

Yet Another Chinese Saying

The whole atmosphere in China now [1987] is very bad. There is no morality or religion, or, for that matter, anyone in charge of our moral education. Formerly, the Party did this to some extent, but now belief in the Party and Marxism has literally collapsed. When you ask young people what they believe in, they tell you that they don’t know. They have lost confidence in contemporary Chinese culture. They have nothing to be proud of. Except for those young people who are still idealistic because they have started to turn to democracy, there is a cultural and political vacuum.

Fang Lizhi, Chinese Scientist, in The Atlantic Monthly, May 1988

That Marxism no longer has any worth is a truth that cannot be denied... It is a thing of the past — useful to understand problems of the last century, but not those of today... In China the Communist Party has never had any success. Over the last thirty years it has produced no positive results... That is why the desire for a reformation is so strong, why faith in the Party, especially among young people, has disappeared... In China the Party wants not only to manage politics but to have everything under its control as well, including the way people think and live... To create a real economic democracy in China the Party must diminish this political control — precisely what 8 page it fears... The hard reality is that there is no way now to get the Chinese Communist Party out of power. To try to replace them, or even to persuade them to adopt some other political system, is impossible.

Fang Lizhi, Chinese Scientist, in The Atlantic Monthly, May 1988

“Is there no one I can trust?”

“No, you are a King.”

Alexandre Dumas, The Man in the Iron Mask

You may rape History, so long as you make her pregnant.

Alexandre Dumas

There are no cannibals in that country since the local authorities ate the last ones.

Alexandre Vialatte

Party members should not be measured by narrow standards of petit­bourgeois snobbery. Sometimes a scoundrel is useful to our Party precisely because he is a scoundrel.

Nickolai Lenin

There are people who know everything except what they are told.

Astolphe, Marquis de Custine (1790 ­ 1857)

Oppressed people always deserve their fate. Tyranny is achieved by a whole nation; it is not the accomplishment of a single individual.

Astolphe, Marquis de Custine (1790 ­ 1857), Lettres de Russie, 1839

Although bedbugs are unpleasant when they suck your blood, at least they bite you without a word, which is quite straightforward and frank. Mosquitoes are different. Of course, their method of piercing the skin may be considered fairly thoroughgoing; but before biting they insist on making a long speech, which is irritating. If they are expounding all the reasons that make it right for them to feed on human blood, that is even more irritating. I am glad I do not know their language.

Lu Xun, Chinese Writer

9 page The most horrible thing is not a government that stages public executions, but a government that secretly disposes of its victims.

Lu Xun, Chinese Writer

...if a city, which from its origin has enjoyed liberty but has of itself become corrupt, has difficulties in devising good laws for the maintenance of liberty, it is not to be wondered­at if a city that had its origins in servitude finds it not only difficult, but actually impossible, ever to organize a government that will secure its liberty and tranquility.

Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses, 1, XLIX

If a prince treats his subjects as his hands and feet, they will treat him as their belly and heart. If he treats them as his horses and hounds, they will treat him as a stranger. If he treats them like mud and weeds underfoot, they will treat him as an enemy.

Mencius, independent philosopher and disciple of Confucius

Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill­policed and wretchedly governed: a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization. Gentlemen of education, he observed, were pretty much the same in all countries; the condition of the lower orders, the poor especially, was the true mark of national discrimination.

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.

Polish­born Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

The best index to a person’s character is (a) how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can’t fight back.

Abigail van Buren, US advice columnist (1918­ )

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address

The arts of Power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim; 10 page denounces it; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.

Henry Clay, 1834

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of the years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who come after us may have a clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

J. R. R. Tolkien

The Soviets will not attack you in the German Plains: They will hypnotize your mind and soul with that menace. They will then be free to carry out a strategy of successive wide­range encirclements of Europe.

The first ring, through Angola and Mozambique, will threaten your supply lines with the Eastern Hemisphere.

A second ring will then be established, foreclosing the West from the Ethiopian high plateau, Aden, and Afghanistan, and possibly Iran and the Persian Gulf. Your influence on India will be reduced very close to zero; Pakistan will find itself in a difficult situation.

While cashing in on all that, the Soviet leaders will begin to construct a third encircling ring. This time they will aim at putting under their control the Balkan Peninsula and the Eastern Mediterranean. If that happens, the West as we know it will be finished.

Shortly before that happens you will witness an improvement in Soviet­Chinese relations: slow and cautious, but irresistible. You will remember that we never liked Stalin, but neither did we object to his pact with Hitler. The survival of his people is the first responsibility of a leader. Later on, the struggle may be resumed under better conditions.

Peoples Republic of China Premier Zhou En Lai to NATO visitors at the beginning of the Seventies; quoted by Roberto Ducci in The Atlantic Monthly, February 1985

I think the important thing to note is that in America, those on the right can do things those on the left can only talk about. ... No­one could question my anti­Communist credentials.

Richard Milhous Nixon, American President, in reference to his ‘Opening’ of China in 1972

If an ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country, a statesman is a man who lies from the comfort of home.

11 page Charles Krauthammer, Time Essay Why We Must Contain China, 31 July 1995

A Statesman is a dead politician. We need more Statesmen.

Unattributed

From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourself if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place your hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but merely that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.

Etienne de la Boetie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone expects to live at the expense of everyone else.

Frederic Bastiat, The State, in Selected Essays on Political Economy, page 144

To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence. Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 490 BCE

In either case there is no guarantee that this ruling class or ruling body represent the best mind of the nation or its noblest aims or its highest instincts. Nothing of the kind can be asserted of the modern politician in any part of the world; he does not represent the soul of a people or its aspirations. What he does represent is all the average pettiness, selfishness, egoism, self­deception that is about him and these he represents well enough as well as a great deal of mental incompetence and moral conventionality, timidity and pretence. Great issues often come to him for decision, but he does not deal with them greatly; high words and noble ideas are on his lips, but they become rapidly the claptrap of a party. The disease and falsehood of modern political life is patent in every country of the world and only the hypnotised acquiescence of all, even the intellectual classes, in the great organised sham, cloaks and prolongs the malady, the acquiescence that men yield to everything that is habitual and makes the present atmosphere of their lives. Yet it is by such minds that the good of all has to be decided, to such hands that it has to be entrusted, to such an agency calling itself the State that the individual is being more and more called upon to give up the government of his activities. As a matter of fact, it is in no way the largest good of all that is thus secured, but a great deal of organised blundering and evil with a certain amount of good which makes for real progress, because Nature moves forward always in the midst of all stumblings and secures her aims in the end more often in spite of man’s imperfect mentality than by its means.

12 page Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle; The Ideal of Human Unity ­ The Inadequacy of the State Idea, pg. 278

No state is ever destroyed except through those avertable conditions that mankind dreads to contemplate. Yet nations prefer to perish rather than master the single lesson taught by the washing away of those that have gone before them. In their indifference, and in the valor of ignorance, they depart, together with their monuments and their constitutions.

Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance, 1902

It is also in the interests of a tyrant to keep his people poor, so that they may not be able to afford the cost of protecting themselves by arms and be so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for rebellion.

Aristotle, Politics (J. Sinclair translation, 1962, page 226)

Popular revolt against a ruthless, experienced modern dictatorship, which enjoys a monopoly over weapons and communications, ...is simply not a possibility in the modern age.

George F. Kennan

We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world­ benefaction.... We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

George F. Kennan, head of U.S. State Department Policy Planning Staff, 1948

There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others…

I propose in the following discussion to call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the “economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means.”

Franz Oppenheimer (1864­1943), The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically, 1908, Chapter II

States which are about to decline appear most brilliant and powerful just before it happens, as a guttering candle flares brightly before being extinguished.

13 page Abd al­Rahman Ibn Mohammad (“Ibn Khaldun”) (1332­1406)

EDUCATION and RELIGION

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of obsolete fictions for contemporary experience.

George Bernard Shaw

Culture is the transfer of information by behavioral means, most particularly by the process of teaching and learning.

John Bonner, Biologist

Education is...hanging around until you’ve caught on.

Robert Frost

Don’t let school get in the way of your education.

Mark Twain, American Humorist

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.

George Bernard Shaw

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach education.

Anonymous Educator (a variation seen attributed to Calvin Calverley)

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709­1784)

The purpose of education is not to make men into carpenters, but to make carpenters men.

W.E.B. Du Bois

14 page I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.

Vincent van Gogh

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.

Wilson Mizner

As a rule, the philosopher is a kind of mongrel being, a cross between scientist and poet, envious of both.

Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, 1846

Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

T. S. Eliot, The Rock

Whatever the detail with which you cram your students, the chances of their meeting in after­life exactly that detail is almost infinitesimal; and if they do meet it, they will probably have forgotten what you taught them about it. The really useful training yields a comprehension of a few general principles with a thorough grounding in the way they apply to a variety of concrete details. In subsequent practice the students will have forgotten your particular details; but they will remember by an unconscious common sense how to apply principles to immediate circumstance.

Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays

The more abstract the truth you want to teach the more you must seduce the senses to it.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844­1900), Beyond Good and Evil

It is often easier for our children to obtain a gun than it is to find a good school.

Joycelyn Elders, U.S. Secretary of Education

Maybe that’s because guns are sold at a profit, while schools are provided by the government.

David Boaz

I would rather live in a society which treated children as adults than one which treated adults as children.

15 page Lizard

You teach kids how to succeed when they successfully foil the educational system.

Arlo Guthrie

A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.

John Stuart Mill (1806­1873), 1859

Outside the classrooms, the genuine, living institutions of culture — churches, associations, museums, artists, tribes, cults — are hip to using modern media to advance their mission. Only the die­hard academics — lashed like Captain Ahab to the white whale of political and cultural correctness — are sinking to irrelevancy under the wave of an implacable technology revolution.

Lewis J. Perelman

One of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed and nothing can be known — nothing of significance, that is.

E. Martin Schotz and Vincent Salandria, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy

Agnotology is the study of culturally­induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. The neologism was coined by Robert N. Proctor, a Stanford University professor specializing in the history of science and technology. More generally, the term also highlights the increasingly common condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before.

A prime example of the deliberate production of ignorance cited by Proctor is the tobacco industry's conspiracy to manufacture doubt about the cancer risks of tobacco use. Under the banner of science, the industry produced research about everything except tobacco hazards to exploit public uncertainty. Some of the root causes for culturally­induced ignorance are media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness.

Agnotology also focuses on how and why diverse forms of knowledge do not “come to be,” or are ignored or delayed. For example, knowledge about plate tectonics was delayed for at least a 16 page decade because key evidence was classified military information related to underseas warfare.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology

Most of learning in use is of no great use.

Benjamin Franklin

What the best and wisest parent wants for his child must be what the community wants for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; it destroys our democracy.

The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society that is coming, where everyone would be interdependent. (1899)

Independent self­reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future where people will be defined by their associations. (1896)

There is no such thing as the liberty or effective power of an individual, group, or class, except in relation to the liberties, the effective powers, of other individuals, groups or classes.

John Dewey, educational philosopher, proponent of modern public schools

Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent overeducation from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they’re not tempted to think about any other role.

U.S. Commissioner of Education, William T. Harris, 1889

[Schools should be factories] in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.

Elwood Cubberly (the future Dean of Education at Stanford), in his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College

In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their 17 page fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

Rockefeller Education Board

That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.

H.L. Mencken

Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.

Adolf Hitler (apocryphal)

Unless the educational process includes at each level of maturity some continuing contact with those fields in which value judgements are of prime importance, it must fall far short of the ideal. The student in high school, in college, and in graduate school must be concerned, in part at least, with the words “right” and “wrong” in both the ethical and mathematical sense.

James B. Conant, President of Harvard University, charging a committee to design the General Education curriculum, ca. 1943

We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.

Margaret Mead

Discoveries of any great moment in mathematics and other disciplines, once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before. ... Unfortunately, we find systems of education today which have departed so far from the plain truth, that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance ... [this puts] up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds imposed by one’s ignorance.

George Spencer Brown, Laws of Form, from Appendix 1

In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully 18 page equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Eric Hoffer

If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.

Hazel Henderson

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

Bertrand Russell

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

Charles Darwin (1809­1882), 1871

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

George Bernard Shaw

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end as superstitions.

Thomas Huxley, The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species, xii

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as self­evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788­1860)

If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.

René Descartes (1596­1650), Discours de la Méthode, 1637

Do not seek illumination unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond.

Sri Ramakrishna

The safest place in any crisis is always the hard truths.

19 page Don Beck

I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I am for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.

Malcolm X

Truth is sought for its own sake. And those who are engaged upon the quest for anything for its own sake are not interested in other things. Finding the truth is difficult, and the road to it is rough.

Ibn al­Haytham (965­1039)

All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.

Bruce Lee

The truth will set you free, but not until it is finished with you.

David Foster Wallace

A genuine first­hand religious experience ... is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine proves contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But then if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over; the spring is dry; the faithful live at a second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn.

The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail, business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

Stephen Roberts, Australian historian, died 1971

In a way, the world­view of the party imposed itself most successfully on the people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because 20 page they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding, they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just like a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird... As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking; it was his larynx. The stuff coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck... The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty­four, 1949

In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally, but naturally alive. There were only deeper and deeper streams of life, vibrations of life, more and more vast.

D.H. Lawrence

We must remember that anthropology is in its infancy, in spite of the heaven­descended precept of antiquity and the copy­book pentameter line of Pope. Instinct still moves in us as it did in Cain and those relatives of his who he was afraid would lynch him. Law comes to us from a set of marauders who cased themselves in iron, and the possessions they had won by conquest in edicts as little human in their features as the barred visors that covered their faces. Poor fantastic Dr. Robert Knox [a Scottish race theorist] was still groaning in 1850 over the battle of Hastings; not quite inaptly, it may be. Our most widely accepted theologies owe their dogmas to a few majority votes passed by men who would have hanged our grandmothers as witches and burned our ministers as heretics.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in The Atlantic Monthly, April 1875

An educational method that shall have liberty as its basis must intervene to help the child to a conquest of liberty. That is to say, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish as much as possible the social bonds which limit his activity.

Maria Montessori (1870–1952)

The progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion of education, than upon the labors of cabinets and foreign offices.

Richard Cobden (1804–1865)

My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.

21 page Margaret Mead

Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.

Albert Einstein

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

Japanese Proverb

Where there is no vision, the people perish. (King James)

Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained. (New American Standard)

Bible, Proverbs 29:18

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest­ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Alexander von Humboldt, 6 December 1813

[The natural right to be free of the debts of a previous generation is] a salutary curb on the spirit of war and indebtment, which, since the modern theory of the perpetuation of debt, has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Wayles Eppes, 1813

You find it difficult that he (the Rosh Yeshivah in Baghdad) has unleashed his tongue against you... There was no need for you to ask, ‘What about fear of heaven?’ For great people like him, fear of heaven means avoiding the more gross sins as the general public sees them, but they do not think that moral rectitude is one of our religious duties, nor are they as careful as regards what they say as the truly God­fearing are. Most clerics in a position of power lose all fear of heaven when something affects their hold on power.

Rambam, a Torah sage said to have lived after the biblical period, in a letter to his student, Yosef ben­Yehudah ibn­Sham’un

There is no institution more corruptible than a priest­king.

Alexander Carpenter, American 22 page The desire to rule is the mother of heresies.

St. John Chrysostom

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

Lenny Bruce, circa 1960

Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.

Saint Francis of Assisi, Apocrypha

Injury of the gods is the concern of the gods.

Tacitus, Roman

Heaven does not speak.

Mencius, Chinese Sage

Ignorance is the mother of true piety.

Henry Cole

That Heresies should arise, we have the prophesie of Christ; but that old ones should be abolished, we hold no prediction.

Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, I, 8, 1642

God must have loved the people in power, for he made them so very like their own image of him.

Kenneth Patchen

You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Anne Lamott

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

Thomas Paine 23 page Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism.

Albert Einstein

No credence whatever is to be given to the opinion…that the demons act as messengers and interpreters between the gods and men to carry all petitions from us to the gods and to bring back to us the help of the gods. On the contrary, we must believe them to be spirits most eager to inflict harm, utterly alien from righteousness, swollen with pride, pale with envy, subtle in deceit…

Augustine, The City of God, VIII, 22

The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, XV

Wonder is the basis of worship.

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 1833­34

I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.

Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 1954

Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world?

Euripides, Hecuba

Popular theology …is a massive inconsistency derived from ignorance. …The Gods exist because nature herself has imprinted a conception of them on the minds of men.

Cicero, De Natura Deorum, I, 16

All bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors: That man has two real existing principles: viz: a body & a soul. That energy, called evil, is alone from the body; & that reason, called good, is alone from the soul. 24 page That God will torment man in eternity for following his energies.

But the following contraries to these are true: Man has no body distinct from his soul; for that called body is a portion of soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age. Energy is the only life, and is from the body; and reason is the bound or outward circumfrence of energy. Energy is eternal delight.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790

Religion is a paramount contributor to human misery. It is not merely the opium of the masses, it is the cyanide.

Of course, religion’s omnipresent defenders are swift to point out the comfort it provides the sick, the weary, and the disappointed. Yes, true enough. But the Deity does not dawdle in the comfort zone. If one yearns to see the face of the Divine, one must break out of the aquarium, escape the fish farm, to go swim up wild cataracts, dive in deep fjords. One must explore the labyrinth of the reef, the shadows of lily pads. How limiting, how insulting to think of God as a benevolent warden, an absentee hatchery manager who imprisons us in the “comfort “ of artificial pools, where intermediaries sprinkle our restrictive waters with sanitized flakes of processed nutriment.

A longing for the Divine is intrinsic in Homo sapiens. (For all we know, it is intrinsic in squirrels, dandelions, and diamond rings, as well.) We approach the Divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains. To expedite those two things may be the mission of our existence.

Well and good. But such activity runs counter to the aspirations of commerce and politics. Politics is the science of domination, and persons in the process of enlargement and illumination are notoriously difficult to control. Therefore, to protect its vested interests, politics usurped religion a very long time ago. Kings bought off priests with land and adornments. Together, they drained the shady ponds and replaced them with fish tanks. The walls of the tanks were constructed of ignorance and superstition, held together with fear. They called the tanks “synagogues” or “churches” or “mosques.”

After the tanks were in place, nobody talked much about soul anymore. Instead, they talked about spirit. Soul is hot and heavy. Spirit is cool, abstract, detached. Soul is connected to the earth and its waters. Spirit is connected to the sky and its gasses. Out of the gasses springs fire. Firepower. It has been observed that the logical extension of all politics is war. Once religion became political, the exercise of it, too, could be said to lead sooner or later to war. “War is hell.” Thus, religious belief propels us straight to hell. History unwaveringly supports this view. (Each modern religion has boasted that it and it alone is on speaking terms with the Deity, and its adherents have been quite willing to die — or kill — to support its presumptuous claims.)

25 page Not every silty bayou could be drained, of course. The soulfish that bubbled and snapped in the few remaining ponds were tagged “mystics.” They were regarded as mavericks, exotic and inferior. If they splashed too high, they were thought to be threatening and in need of extermination. The fearful founders of the tanks, now psychologically dependent upon addictive spirit flakes, had forgotten that once upon a time they, too, had been mystical.

Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished. …Not only is religion divisive and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is divine in people; it is a suffocation of the soul. (pages 167 and 168)

Religion was an improper response to the Divine. Religion was an attempt to pin down the Divine. The Divine was eternally in flux, forever moving, shifting shape. That was its nature. It was absolute, true enough, absolutely mobile. Absolutely transcendent. Absolutely flexible. Absolutely impersonal. It had its god and goddess aspects, but it was ultimately no more male or female than it was star or screwdriver. It was the sum of all those things, but that sum could never be chalked on a slate. The Divine was beyond description, beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. To say that the Divine was Creation divided by Destruction was as close as one could come to definition. But the puny of soul, the dull of wit, weren’t content with that. They wanted to hang a face on the Divine. They went so far as to attribute petty human emotions (anger, jealousy, etc.) to it, not stopping to realize that if God were a being, even a supreme being, our prayers would have bored him to death long ago.

The Divine was expansive, but religion was reductive. Religion attempted to reduce the Divine to a knowable quantity with which mortals might efficiently deal, to pigeonhole it once and for all so we never had to reevaluate it. With hammers of cant and spikes of dogma, we crucified and crucified again, trying to nail to our stationary altars the migratory light of the world.

Thus, since religion bore false witness to the Divine, religion was blasphemy. And once it entered into its unholy alliance with politics, it became the most dangerous and repressive force that the world has ever known. (page 407 and 408)

Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All, 1990

Once he [Roderigo Borgia] became Pope Alexander VI, Vatican parties, already wild, grew wilder. They were costly, but he could afford the lifestyle of a Renaissance prince; as vice­chancellor of the Roman Church, he had amassed enormous wealth. As guests approached the papal palace, they were excited by the spectacle of living statues: naked, gilded young men and women in erotic poses. Flags bore the Borgia arms, which, appropriately, portrayed a red bull rampant on a field of gold. Every fete had a theme. One, known to Romans as the Ballet of the Chestnuts, was held on October 30, 1501. The indefatigable Burchard describes it in his Diarium. After the banquet dishes had been cleared away, the city’s fifty most beautiful whores danced with the guests, “first clothed, 26 page then naked.” The dancing over, the “ballet” began, with the Pope and two of his children in the best seats.

Candelabra were set up on the floor, scattered among them were chestnuts, “which,” Burchard writes, “the courtesans had to pick up, crawling between the candles.” Then the serious sex started. Guests stripped and ran out onto the floor, where they mounted, or were mounted by, the prostitutes. “The coupling took place,” according to Burchard, “in front of everyone present.” Servants kept score of each man's orgasms, for the Pope greatly admired virility, and measured a man’s machismo by his ejaculative capacity. After everyone was exhausted, His Holiness distributed prizes — cloaks, boots, caps, and fine silken tunics. “The winners,” the diarist wrote, “were those who made love with the courtesans the greatest number of times.”

His daughter [Lucrezia] had just turned seventeen and was at the height of her beauty. We now know that he was, in fact, her lover. ...Here, however, the tale darkens. Romans had scarcely absorbed the news that the father lusted for his daughter when they learned even more. Lucrezia was said to be unavailable to her father because she was already deeply involved in another incestuous relationship, or relationships — a triangular entanglement with both her handsome brothers. The difficulty, it was whispered, was that although she enjoyed coupling with both of them, each, jealous of the other, wanted his sister for himself. ...On the morning of June 15, 1497, Juan Borgia’s corpse was found floating in the Tiber mutilated by nine savage dagger wounds. ...

Borgia’s enjoyment of the flesh was enhanced when the woman beneath him was married, particularly if he had presided at her wedding. Breaking any commandment excited him, but he was partial to the seventh. As priest he married Rosa to two men. She may have actually slept with her husbands from time to time — since Borgia always kept a stable of women, she was allowed an occasional night off to indulge her own sexual preferences — but her duties lay in his eminence’s bed. Then, at the age of fifty­nine, he yearned for a more nubile partner. His parting with Rosa was affectionate. Later he gave her a little gift — he made her brother a cardinal. ...

Girolamo Savonarola was declared a heretic, arrested, tortured, hanged and then burned in the Plaza della Signoria in 1498 for publicly criticizing the wild orgies thrown inside the Vatican by Pope Alexander VI. According to Savonarola, “The Papal Palace had literally become a house of prostitution where harlots sit upon the throne of Solomon and signal to the passersby. Whoever can pay enters and does what he wishes.” …

The depravities of the Catholic church bred the Protestants, and the invention of mass printing during the same time brought a dawn of knowledge, a re­nascence of thinking that had been put down 1000 years before. The Protestants stripped the Christian philosophy of all of the colorful Catholic trappings, bringing us the sanitized, cinder­block Baptist church of today, more prudish, still scorning intellect and learning.

William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire; The Medieval Mind and The Renaissance, 1992 27 page The devil made you a slave, and then he gave you a bible.

Ice Cube

Religion is why the poor don’t kill the rich.

Bumper Sticker

Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet. (Kill them all; God will know his own.) or

Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. (Kill them [all]! Surely the Lord discerns which [ones] are his.)

Arnold­Aimery, Abbot of Citeaux and Papal Legate, referring to the Cathars of Bèziers during the Albigensian Crusade in 1209 (a reference to 2 Timothy 2:19?)

I only teach two things: the cause of human sorrow and the way to become free of it.

The Buddha

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

G.K. Chesterton

Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society.

George Washington, in a letter to Edward Newenham, 20 October 1792

The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.

Bertrand Russell

Human beings never think for themselves; they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told — and become upset if they are exposed 28 page to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their ‘beliefs.’ The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all.

We are stubborn, self­destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self­ congratulatory delusion.

Michael Crichton, The Lost World

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

George Orwell, 1946

My views of the Christian religion are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from the anti­Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity, I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wanted anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other.

Thomas Jefferson, in correspondence with John Adams

‘Achievement’ is the ‘diabolical’ element in human life; and the symbol of our vulgarization of human life is our near exclusive concern with achievement. Not scientific thinking, but the ‘gifts’ of science;’ the motor car, the telephone, radar, getting to the moon, anti­biotics, penicillin, telstar, the bomb. Whereas the only human value lies in the adventure and excitement of discovery. Not standing at the top of Everest, but getting there. Not the ‘conquests’ but the battles; not the ‘victory’ but the ‘play.’ It is our non­recognition of this, or our rejection of it, which makes our civilization a non­religious civilization. At least, non­Christian: Christianity is the religion of ‘non­ achievement’...

Michael Oakeshott, in an unpublished notebook, retrieved by Paul Franco

Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance, and to seek out graded ramps of slowly increasing complexity. Before Darwin, philosophers such as Hume understood that the improbability of life did not mean it had to be designed, but they couldn’t imagine the alternative. After Darwin, we all should feel, deep in our bones, suspicious of the very idea of design. The illusion of design is a trap that has caught us 29 page before, and Darwin should have immunised us by raising our consciousness. Would that he had succeeded with all of us.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

The universe is big, it’s small, it’s so many billion light years across and so many years old because you and I and some of our friends say it is. If we weren’t here in the audience, comparing and measuring, gasping and applauding, the whole show would have gone for nothing... Here would not be here. Now would not be now. And if here is not here, nor now now, there is not there, nor then then. There would be no is, no was, no will be. If no is, no was, no will be, then no passage of time. So we are perhaps not after all such nobodies. We are not for nothing.

Michael Frayn, The Human Touch

I do take life, mind and purpose seriously, and I concede that the universe at least appears to be designed with a high level of ingenuity. I cannot accept these features as a package of marvels which just happen to be, which exist reasonlessly. It seems to me that there is a genuine scheme of things — the universe is ‘about’ something. But I am equally uneasy about dumping the whole set of problems in the lap of an arbitrary god, or abandoning all further thought and declaring existence ultimately to be a mystery.

Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma

I feel that through strange forgotten connections I have been evolved arriving at my present state of expression. The great memory of those series of existences running through me lies in the subconscious. That is why I can feel an old bond of unity with creepers and trees, birds and beasts of this world. That is why this vastly mysterious and immense Universe does not appear terrifying or unfriendly.

Rabindranath Tagore

Well aware that Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time; ... that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that, therefore, the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence 30 page by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to the offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which in common with his fellow citizens he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honors and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it... that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Act For Establishing Religious Freedom, 1786

The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people. A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against enterprises of an aspiring prince.

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Religious fundamentalists see themselves as having remedies for the maladies of the modern world. In reality they are symptoms of the disease they pretend to cure. The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialization, ‘Western Civilization’ or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation. …

Those who struggle to change the world see themselves as noble, even tragic figures. Yet most of those who work for world betterment are not rebels against the scheme of things. They seek consolation for a truth they are too weak to bear. At bottom, their faith that the world can be transformed by human will is a denial of their own mortality. … 31 page

The mass of mankind is ruled not by its intermittent moral sensations, still less by self­interest, but by the needs of the moment. It seems fated to wreck the balance of life on earth — and thereby to be the agent of its own destruction. What could be more hopeless than placing the Earth in the charge of this exceptionally destructive species? …

Technical progress leaves only one problem unsolved: The frailty of human nature. Unfortunately that problem is insoluble. …

Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see? …

John Gray, Straw Dogs

Chang­Tsu admits no idea of salvation. There is no self and no awakening from the dream of self: “When we dream we do not know we are dreaming, and in the middle of a dream we interpret a dream within it; not until we wake do we know that we were dreaming. Only at the ultimate awakening shall we know that this is the ultimate dream.”

We cannot be rid of illusions. Illusion is our natural condition. Why not accept it?

John Gray, Straw Dogs, Chapter 2, Section 14, “The Ultimate Dream” (on Chiang Tsu & Taoism)

Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a God, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement; if that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it; if that Jesus was also a God, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love. In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision.

I forgot to observe, when speaking of the New Testament, that you should read all the histories of Christ, as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us, to be Pseudo­ evangelists, as those they named Evangelists. Because these Pseudo­evangelists pretended to inspiration, as much as the others, and you are to judge their pretensions by your own reason, and not by the reason of those ecclesiastics. Most of these are lost. There are some, however, still extant, collected by Fabricius, which I will endeavor to get and send you.

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to his nephew Peter Carr, 10 August 1787 32 page I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point may be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely more because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.

And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super­personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt. A political programme can never in reality be more than probably right. We never know all the facts about the present and we can only guess the future. To attach to a party programme — whose highest claim is to reasonable prudence — the sort of assent which we should reserve for demonstrable theorems, is a kind of intoxication.

C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, Chapter 3

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Pascal, Pensees

A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt about the significance of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation.

Albert Einstein, Nature 146 (1940), page 605

What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of ‘humility.’ This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

Albert Einstein

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have 33 page expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Albert Einstein, 1954, from Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press

The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun.

Thomas Paine (1737­1809)

Spirituality is a particular term that actually means a dealing with intuition. In the theistic tradition, there is a notion of clinging to a world, where a certain act is regarded as displeasing to a divine principles, where a certain act is regarded as pleasing for the divine...whatever. In the tradition of non­theism, however, it is very direct that the case history are not particularly important. What is actually important is here and now. Now is definitely now. We try to experience what is available there on the spot. There is no point in thinking that a past that exists that we could have now. This is now. This very moment. Nothing mystical, just now, very simple, straightforward. And from that nowness, however, there arises a sense of intelligence always that you are constantly interacting with the reality one by one, spot on spot, constantly. We actually experience fantastic precision, always. But we are threatened by the now so we jump to the past or the future. Paying attention to the materials that exist in our life – such rich life that we lead – all these choices takes place all the time, but none of then regarded as bad or good per se, everything we experience, our unconditional experience, there dirt come along with the label by saying this is regarded as bad, this is good. But we experience them but we don’t pay heed to them properly. We don’t actually regard that we are going somewhere, we regard that as a hassle, waiting to be dead. That’s a problem, that is not trusting the nowness properly. That what is actually experienced now possessed lots of powerful things. It is so powerful that we can’t face it, therefore we have to borrow from the past and invite the future all the time. And maybe that’s why we seek religion. Maybe that’s why we march in the streets. Maybe that’s why we complain to society. Maybe that’s why we vote for the presidents. It’s quite ironical; very funny indeed.

Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, personal communication

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

William James

What more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, and the future on another.

Virginia Wolfe, Orlando, page 6

34 page The past is fiction, the future is a dream, and we are living on the edge of a razor.

Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

They must find it difficult... those who have taken authority as the truth, rather than truth as the authority.

Gerald Massey

An atmosphere of moral panic surrounds religion. Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of many of the world’s worst evils. ...

The US is no more secular today than it was 150 years ago, when De Tocqueville was amazed and baffled by its all­pervading religiosity. The secular era was in any case partly illusory. The mass political movements of the 20th century were vehicles for myths inherited from religion, and it is no accident that religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed. The current hostility to religion is a reaction against this turnabout. ...

The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith, and like most varieties of atheism today, Pullman’s is a derivative of Christianity. ...

It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when they demonise religion. ...

Dawkins's “memetic theory of religion” is a classic example of the nonsense that is spawned when Darwinian thinking is applied outside its proper sphere. ... Unfortunately, the theory of memes is science only in the sense that Intelligent Design is science. Strictly speaking, it is not even a theory. Talk of memes is just the latest in a succession of ill­judged Darwinian metaphors. ...

[T]he belief that history is a directional process is as faith­based as anything in the Christian catechism. Secular thinkers such as Grayling reject the idea of providence, but they continue to think humankind is moving towards a universal goal — a civilisation based on science that will eventually encompass the entire species. In pre­Christian Europe, life was understood as a series of cycles; history was seen as tragic or comic rather than redemptive. With the arrival of Christianity, it came to be believed that history had a predetermined goal, which was human salvation. Though they suppress their religious content, secular humanists continue to cling to similar beliefs. One does not want to deny anyone the consolations of a faith, but it is obvious that the idea of progress in history is a myth created by the need for meaning. The problem with the secular narrative is not that it assumes progress is inevitable (in many versions, it does not). It is the belief that the sort of advance that has been achieved in science can be reproduced in ethics and politics. In fact, while scientific knowledge increases cumulatively, nothing of the kind happens in society.

35 page Science is the best tool we have for forming reliable beliefs about the world, but it does not differ from religion by revealing a bare truth that religions veil in dreams. Both science and religion are systems of symbols that serve human needs — in the case of science, for prediction and control.

Not everything in religion is precious or deserving of reverence. There is an inheritance of anthropocentrism, the ugly fantasy that the Earth exists to serve humans, which most secular humanists share. There is the claim of religious authorities, also made by atheist regimes, to decide how people can express their sexuality, control their fertility and end their lives, which should be rejected categorically.

John Gray, The Atheist Delusion, The Guardian, 15 March 2008

Thus, we propose, as a testable hypothesis, that religious behavior is distinguished by, and hence can be defined as, the communicated acceptance of a supernatural claim. That is, the communicated acceptance of another person's claim as true that cannot be shown to be true by the senses constitutes the necessary and sufficient elements for identifying behavior as religious.

Jay Feierman, The Biology of Religious Behavior, 2009, page 71

Fundamentalism can be understood as a particular way of believing one’s beliefs rather than referring to the actual content of one’s beliefs.

It can be described as holding a belief system is such a way that it mutually excludes all other systems, rejecting other views in direct proportion to how much they differ from one’s own. In contrast, the a/theistic approach can be seen as a form of disbelieving what one believes, or rather, believing IN God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes ABOUT God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain). This does not actually contradict the idea of orthodoxy but rather allow us to understand it in a new light...

This a/theism is not then some temporary place of uncertainty on the way to spiritual maturity, bur rather is something that operates within faith as a type of heat­inducing friction that prevents our liquid images of the divine from cooling and solidifying into idolatrous form.

Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, 2006

I must confess that it has been disappointing for me to have witnessed the recent surge of interest in atheism. It’s not that my own livelihood, that of a theologian, is at stake — although the authors in question would fervently wish that it were so. Nor is it that the treatment of religion in these tracts consists mostly of breezy over­generalizations that leave out almost everything that theologians would want to highlight in their own contemporary discussion of God. Rather, the new atheism is simply unchallenging theologically. Its engagement with theology lies at about the same level of reflection on faith that one can find in contemporary creationist and fundamentalist literature. 36 page Clearly the new atheists’ strategy is to suppress in effect any significant theological voices that might wish to join in conversation with them. As a result of this exclusion, the intellectual quality of their atheism is unnecessarily diminished. Their understanding of religious faith remains consistently at the same unscholarly level as the unreflective, superstitious, and literalist religiosity of those they criticize. Even though the new atheists reject the God of creationists, fundamentalists, terrorists, and “intelligent design” (ID) advocates, it is not without interest that they have decided to debate with these extremists rather than with any major theologians.

This choice of antagonists betrays their unconscious privileging of literalist and conservative versions of religious thought over the more traditionally mainstream types. The new atheists are saying in effect that if God exists at all, we should allow this God’s identity to be determined once and for all by the fundamentalists of the Abrahamic religious traditions. I believe they have chosen this strategy not only to make their job of demolition easier, but also because they have a barely disguised admiration for the simplicity of their opponents’ views of reality.

In preparing treatises on a­theism, one would expect that scholars and journalists would have done some research on theism, just to be sure they know exactly what it is they are rejecting. It is hard to be an informed and consistent atheist without knowing something about theology. And yet, aside from several barbed references, there is no sign of any real contact between the new atheists and theology at all, let alone studious investigation. This circumvention is comparable to creationists rejecting evolution without ever having taken a course in biology. They just know there’s something wrong with those crazy Darwinian fantasies. So the new atheists just know there is something sick and delusional about theology. There is no need to look at it up close.

Furthermore, conversation with theologians, most of whom are not biblical literalists, would add a dimension of intricacy to the new atheist literature that would detract from the breeziness that sells books. Ignorance of theology simplifies the new atheists’ attacks on their equally uninformed religious adversaries. It allows their critique to match, point for point, the fundamentalism it is trying to eliminate.

John Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, 2008

A third dilemma is that of authority versus uncertainty. In conditions of high modernity, in many areas of social life — including the domain of the self — there are no determinant authorities. There exist plenty of claimants to authority — far more than was true of pre­modern cultures... Some individuals find it psychologically difficult or impossible to accept the existence of diverse, mutually conflicting authorities. They find that the freedom to choose is a burden and they seek solace in more overarching systems of authority. A predilection for dogmatic authoritarianism is the pathological tendency at this pole. A person in this situation is not necessarily a traditionalist, but essentially gives up faculties of critical judgment in exchange for the convictions supplied by an authority whose rules and provisions cover most aspects of his life. We should distinguish this 37 page attitude from faith, even faith in fundamentalist religious codes. For faith almost by definition rests on trust. Taking refuge in a dominant authority, however, is essentially an act of submission. The individual, as it were, no longer needs to engage in the problematic gamble which all trust relations presume. Instead, he or she identifies with a dominant authority on the basis of projection. The psychology of leadership plays an important role here. Submission to authority normally takes the form of a slavish adherence to an authority figure, taken to be all­knowing.

Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self­Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, 1991

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

Bertrand Russell

Art and Atheism: Lying at the centre of this issue is the status we accord to human experience. Say I have an aesthetic, religious or emotional experience of great, life­changing importance. Science has three primary accounts of this. Freud — not now regarded as a scientist, but his account was intended to be and, for some time, accepted as scientific — would describe the feeling as “oceanic” and attribute it to the experience of the primitive ego. Neo­Darwinians would seek its roots in our evolved natures. Neuroscientists would locate the feeling in neuronal patterns of excitation. Freud we can discard. The evolutionary explanation remains speculative, though Neo­Darwinians will argue that it must be true. And neuroscience is in its early infancy. There is currently not even the shadow of an explanation of my feeling through the workings of my brain, we don’t even have a coherent explanation of how matter becomes mind. All such arguments are, therefore, circular. It must be true, therefore it will be true. But what does true mean here? Even if I was offered final and complete Neo­Darwinian and neuroscientific accounts of my experience, what would that tell me? In effect, nothing. These would be accounts of the experience, not the experience itself. They would be based on the dubious conviction that there was something — scientific knowledge — that lay above the human experience. To accept these accounts as final would be to bow down before a disguised metaphysic, a concealed god. Of course, I could choose to do so. But why? What would I gain? Again nothing.

Bryan Appleyard, http://www.bryanappleyard.com/

Art and Atheism: The evolutionary explanation remains speculative, though Neo­Darwinians will argue that it must be true. And neuroscience is in its early infancy. There is currently not even the shadow of an explanation of my feeling through the workings of my brain. The distinction between evolutionary “explanations” and neuroscientific ones is too sharp and the claim that there are no serious scientific hypotheses to explain the phenomenology of mind is just flatly wrong, although they are all controversial and may always be. But what is leading you wrong is the use of 38 page the word “explanation.” Science may not explain the workings of the mind but it advances hypotheses that can be tested and contested in various ways. It is religion that provides flat, categorical “explanations,” and that one of the things about it that so many of us find so ugly. You experience an “oceanic” feeling when looking at a painting and science provides you, as you have said, with several deeply complex and rich ways of describing and analysing that feeling. What does religion give you: “It's god, now shut up.” A failure to find any evidence for supernatural beings in an intense experience of art does not mean that you must hold that there are no aspects of human experience that cannot be meaningfully explored or analysed through means other than science, far from it. This is a complete red herring, or straw man, or, possibly a straw herring. And I have to say again, that if your contention holds, it must follow that Phillip Larkin, for example, never had an aesthetic experience, but it boggles the mind that anybody could have read his poetry or his criticism (including his passionate response to the works of Stanley Spencer) and really believe that.

John Meredith, http://www.bryanappleyard.com/

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

Article 11 of the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli unanimously approved by the U.S. Senate in an attempt to deal with Muslim piracy and “terrorism” in the Mediterranean Basin

Faith in immortality was born of the greed of unsatisfied people who make unwise use of the time that nature has allotted us. But the wise man finds his life span sufficient to complete the full circle of attainable pleasures, and when the time of death comes, he will leave the table, satisfied, freeing a place for other guests. For the wise man one human life is sufficient, and a stupid man will not know what to do with eternity.

Epicurus

It is impossible to reason a man out of something he has not been reasoned into. When people have acquired their beliefs on an emotional level they cannot be persuaded out of them on a rational level, no matter how strong the proof or the logic behind it. People will hold onto their emotional beliefs and twist the facts to meet their version of reality.

Sidney J. Harris, American Journalist

When facts are few, speculations are most likely to represent individual psychology.

Carl Jung 39 page Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

Nietzsche

Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing.

Man is a frightened animal who must lie in order to live.

Societies are standardized systems of death denial. They give structure to systems of heroic transcendence. Cosmic heroism is a self­defeating fantasy.

We embody death in order to control it. Ritual puts one in possession of eternity, yet is a departure from the truth of the human condition. … (T)he killing of others anesthetizes our fear of death.

Religious systematizers build symbolic interpretations around the crises of life. Historical religions are all critiques of false perceptions. … All religion is narcissistic megalomania.

Earnest Becker, The Denial of Death, 1974

If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.

Thomas Szasz, author, professor of psychiatry (b. 1920)

BUSINESS, ECONOMICS, and POLITICS

One, the economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy. Two, development is about people and not about objects. Three, growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth. Four, no economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services. Five, the economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible. And the fundamental value to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence for life.

Manfred Max­Neef

Economics, like war, is politics by other means.

Jay Hanson (after von Clauswitz and Hazel Henderson)

Taxes are not raised to carry on wars; wars are raised to carry on taxes.

40 page Thomas Paine (apocryphal)

Economic value does not predate law; it is created by law.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

We human beings are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others’ actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others’ activities. For this reason, it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.

Everywhere, by all means imaginable, people are striving to improve their lives. Yet strangely, my impression is that those living in the materially developed countries are less happy, and to some extent suffer more than those living in the least developed countries.

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

Whenever a state or individual cited “insufficient funds” as an excuse for neglecting this important thing or that, it was indicative of the extent to which reality had been distorted by the abstract lens of wealth. During periods of so­called economic depression, for example, societies suffered for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation almost invariably disclosed that there were plenty of goods available. Plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What was missing was not materials but an abstract unit of measurement called “money.” It was akin to a starving woman with a sweet tooth lamenting that she couldn’t bake a cake because she didn’t have any ounces. She had butter, flour, eggs, milk, and sugar, she just didn’t have any ounces, any pinches, any pints. The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.

Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All, 1990, page 408

Business is in itself an evil.

St. Augustine (354­430)

Avoid, as you would the plague, a clergyman who is also a businessman.

Homo mercator vix aut numquam potest Deo placere. (A man who is a merchant can seldom if ever please God.)

St. Jerome

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.

41 page Lily Tomlin

They who are of the opinion that Money will do everything, may very well be suspected to do everything for Money.

George Savile

This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work... I think there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, aye, to life itself, than this incessant business.

Henry Thoreau

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C.­65 A.D.)

The man enslaved to wealth can never be honest.

Democritus

Power should be confined to those who are not in love with it.

Plato

It is not power that corrupts, it is that corrupt individuals seek power.

Clinton Callahan, Beware the Psychopath, My Son

After Hubris Comes Nemesis.

Byron King, Whiskey and Gunpowder

All progress is based upon the universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

Samuel Butler

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

H.L. Mencken

One thing we all need to remember is that money speaks it own language and if you don’t speak 42 page its language it will not respond to your request.

Phillip Arreguin (from Warren Buffet?)

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This is a world in arms. This world in arms is not spending money alone; it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children….This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. (1953)

I like to believe that the people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than are governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it. (1959)

Dwight David Eisenhower

We must now face the harsh truth that the objectives of communism are being steadily advanced because many of us do not recognize the means used to advance them. ... The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst.

J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director, in August 1956 Elks Magazine

The Fundamental Theorem of Economics: If (1) each productive unit knows the prices and its own individual production technology and maximizes its own profits at the prevailing prices, (2) each consumer knows the prices and his or her own individual preferences and then maximizes utility given the prevailing prices and his or her income, and (3) the prices are such that supply equals demand for each good, then the allocation of goods that results is efficient.

Paul Milgrom and John Roberts, Stanford economists and authors of Economics, Organization, and Management

...the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices from the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

John Maynard Keynes, 1935

I sympathize therefore, with those who would minimize, rather than those who would maximize, economic entanglement between nations. Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel — these are the 43 page things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible; and, above all, let finance be primarily national.

John Maynard Keynes, National Self­Sufficiency, in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 21, edited by Donald Muggeridge. London, Macmillan and Cambridge University Press, 1933

Once one gets the scorecard straight, then it will become apparent that twentieth­century neoclassical [economic] theory resembles nothing so much as the child’s game of Mr. Potatohead — the fun comes in mixing and matching components with little or no concern for the coherence of the final profile.

Philip Mirowski, More Heat Than Light, Cambridge, 1989, page 294

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.

Edward Abbey

The vocabulary of physics is amoral — not antimoral, but amoral. Mass, force, and velocity have no moral implications because the laws describing them have no alternatives. The vocabulary of economics, in contrast, abounds in ethical terms. It is impossible to define ‘good,’ ‘service,’ or even ‘utility’ without making ethical judgments. Every object has mass, but not every object has utility. Moreover, some people may consider a certain object a good while others do not, but there can be no disagreement about the equivalence and direction of action and reaction. There is no other or 2 better way for a body to fall in a vacuum than s = ­gt ; this is not because physicists don’t happen to be interested in making this a better world. There is no unchanging price for a bushel of wheat; and this is not because economists don’t happen to be interested in a stable universe. The price of wheat depends upon what people do, but bodies fall as they do regardless of what people do or think.

Economics is not value­free, and no amount of abstraction can make it value­free. The econometricians’ search for equations that will explain the economy is forever doomed to frustration. It is often said that their models don’t work, because, on the one hand, the variables are too many and, on the other, the statistical data are too sparse. But the physical universe is as various as the economic universe (they are, to repeat, both infinite), and Newton had fewer data and less powerful means of calculation than are at the disposal of Jan Tinbergen and his econometrician followers. The difference is fundamental, and the failure to understand it reduces much of modern economics to a game that unfortunately has serious consequences. 44 page George Brockway, The End of Economic Man, Norton, 1995, pages 38­39

The central “truth” of [the social sciences] is that nature, especially that of humankind, is nice and that people are designed to do things that, all in all, favor the survival of their species. Hence people could never be equipped by nature with instincts to kill other people. This idea comes from the Bambi school of biology, a Disneyesque vision of nature as a collection of moralistic and altruistic creatures. It admires nature for its harmony and beauty of form and for its apparent “balance” or even cooperativeness. It admires the deer for its beauty and fleetness, and it grudgingly admires the lion for its power and nobility of form. If anything is really wrong with us, it explains, it is a sociocultural problem that we can fix by resocializing people. It is not a biological problem.

Michael P. Ghiglieri, 1999

There is the deeply embedded dominance of two strands of Cartesian thought in the social sciences: the fixed idea that there is a huge gulf between humans and other animals; and the belief that body and mind are separate rather than one and the same, which makes possible the implicit belief that biological evolution has to do with the body rather than the mind.

Jerome H. Barkow, 2006

In Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner write that Roe is “like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings on one continent and eventually creates a hurricane on another.” But this simile cuts both ways. It is presumably meant to evoke the “butterfly effect:” meteorologist Edward Lorenz’s famous description of a global climate system with such a dense web of interconnected pathways of causation that long­term weather forecasting is a fool's errand. The actual event that inspired this observation was that, one day in 1961, Lorenz entered .506 instead of .506127 for one parameter in a climate­forecasting model and discovered that it produced a wildly different long­ term weather forecast. This is, of course, directly analogous to what we see in the abortion­crime debate and Bartels’s model for income inequality: tiny changes in assumptions yield vastly different results. It is a telltale sign that human society is far too complicated to yield to the analytical tools that nonexperimental social science brings to bear. The questions addressed by typically have none of the characteristics that made causal attribution in the smoking­lung cancer case practical.

This shortcoming arises not because nonexperimental social science is somehow insufficiently tough­minded, but because the phenomenon of human social behavior is so complex. Businesses are notoriously practical and results­oriented, and have sunk vast resources into trying to develop useful, reliable predictions for behavior in the absence of experiments. In doing so, they have run into the same problems and hit the same dead ends.

Jim Manzi, Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial­and­Error for Business, Politics, and 45 page Society, 2012

Financial­risk models got us in trouble before the 2008 crash, and they're almost sure to get us in trouble again. When it comes to assigning blame for the current economic doldrums, the quants who build the complicated mathematic financial risk models, and the traders who rely on them, deserve their share of the blame. But what if there were a way to come up with simpler models that perfectly reflected reality? And what if we had perfect financial data to plug into them?

Incredibly, even under those utterly unrealizable conditions, we’d still get bad predictions from models. The reason is that current methods used to “calibrate” models often render them inaccurate.

That's what Jonathan Carter stumbled on in his study of geophysical models. Carter wanted to observe what happens to models when they're slightly flawed — that is, when they don’t get the physics just right. But doing so required having a perfect model to establish a baseline. So Carter set up a model that described the conditions of a hypothetical oil field, and simply declared the model to perfectly represent what would happen in that field — since the field was hypothetical, he could take the physics to be whatever the model said it was. Then he had his perfect model generate three years of data of what would happen. This data then represented perfect data. So far so good.

The next step was “calibrating” the model. Almost all models have parameters that have to be adjusted to make a model applicable to the specific conditions to which it's being applied — the spring constant in Hook’s law, for example, or the resistance in an electrical circuit. Calibrating a complex model for which parameters can’t be directly measured usually involves taking historical data, and, enlisting various computational techniques, adjusting the parameters so that the model would have “predicted” that historical data. [This is called “backcasting.”] At that point the model is considered calibrated, and should predict in theory what will happen going forward.

Carter had initially used arbitrary parameters in his perfect model to generate perfect data, but now, in order to assess his model in a realistic way, he threw those parameters out and used standard calibration techniques to match his perfect model to his perfect data. It was supposed to be a formality — he assumed, reasonably, that the process would simply produce the same parameters that had been used to produce the data in the first place. But it didn’t. It turned out that there were many different sets of parameters that seemed to fit the historical data. And that made sense, he realized — given a mathematical expression with many terms and parameters in it, and thus many different ways to add up to the same single result, you'd expect there to be different ways to tweak the parameters so that they can produce similar sets of data over some limited time period.

The problem, of course, is that while these different versions of the model might all match the historical data, they would in general generate different predictions going forward — and sure enough, his calibrated model produced terrible predictions compared to the “reality” originally 46 page generated by the perfect model. Calibration — a standard procedure used by all modelers in all fields, including finance — had rendered a perfect model seriously flawed. Though taken aback, he continued his study, and found that having even tiny flaws in the model or the historical data made the situation far worse. “As far as I can tell, you'd have exactly the same situation with any model that has to be calibrated,” says Carter.

That financial models are plagued by calibration problems is no surprise to Wilmott — he notes that it has become routine for modelers in finance to simply keep recalibrating their models over and over again as the models continue to turn out bad predictions. “When you have to keep recalibrating a model, something is wrong with it,” he says. “If you had to readjust the constant in Newton's law of gravity every time you got out of bed in the morning in order for it to agree with your scale, it wouldn't be much of a law. But in finance they just keep on recalibrating and pretending that the models work.”

David H. Freedman, Why Economic Models Are Always Wrong, Scientific American, October 2011

It’s a complex story, really; most of one’s thinking that’s worth anything comes not from reason but from intuition. Many of my scientist friends don’t like that — they’re still back in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where you did everything rationally and the word “irrationally” implied loose or bad thinking. I’m afraid it isn’t like that; all the things that really matter are intuitive. Understanding the Earth’s system is one of those things you cannot express in mathematical terms easily. The climate scientists tried to do it — there was a man called Lorenz, many years ago, who discovered that if you try to model a system containing more than two differential equations — and you need hundreds, thousands of them to look at the Earth’s system — it goes chaotic as soon as you put real­world data into it. So what they tend to do, because they have to model it that way, with hundreds of thousands of equations, they either fudge the equations with linearizing modifications, so that the model never goes chaotic, or they never run it beyond what they call equilibrium conditions, that is they never allow it to behave dynamically as a living thing. Now this is absolutely fatal as far as modeling goes and it applies both to biology and to climate science (geo­physiology) and this is why we are finding now that the great gathering of scientists that formed the IPCC — some of the best climate scientists in the world — with the very best of intentions and the most modern and expensive equipment, are failing to predict the climate that is with us today. … So to understand the Earth’s system, you can’t avoid approaching the whole problem to a certain extent intuitively and this is where I think Gaia came in because most of the first part of it was intuitive rather than rational. And I think it has some deeper significance in that one of my reasons for being somewhat pessimistic about the future of the present generation of humans is that I think the problem is right beyond us: we do not have the intellectual capacity to solve the problem of living successfully with our planet.

James Lovelock, speaking in London early 2009, at a function in his honor and coin­ ciding with the publication of John Gribbins’ He Knew He Was Right: The Irrepressible Life of James Lovelock and Gaia 47 page Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well­informed just to be undecided about them.

Laurence J. Peter

There is at the core of the celebration of markets a relentless tautology. If we begin, by assumption, with the premise that nearly everything can be understood as a market and that markets optimize outcomes, then everything else leads back to the same conclusion — marketize! If, in the event, a particular market doesn’t optimize, there is only one possible inference: it must be insufficiently marketlike. This epistemological sleight of hand is an astonishing blend that blurs the descriptive with the normative. It is a no­fail system for guaranteeing that theory trumps evidence. Should some human activity not, in fact, behave like an efficient market, it must be the result of some interference that should be removed or a stubborn human refusal to appreciate markets. It cannot possibly be that the theory fails to specify accurately how human behavior works. (page 6)

Economists enamored of pure markets begin with the theory, and hang models on assumptions that cannot themselves be challenged. The characteristic grammatical usage is an unusual subjunctive — the verb form ’must be.’ For example, if wages for manual workers are declining, it must be that their economic value is declining. If a corporate raider walks away from a deal with half a billion dollars, it must be that he added that much value to the economy. If Japan can produce better autos than Detroit, there must be some inherent locational logic, else the market would not dictate that result. If commercial advertising leads consumers to buy shoddy or harmful products, they must be ’maximizing their utility’ — because we know by assumption that consumers always maximize their utility. How do we know that? Because to do anything else would be irrational. And how do we know that individuals always behave rationally? Because that is the premise from which we begin. The truly interesting institutional questions — the disjunctures between what free­market assumptions would predict and the actual outcomes — are dismissed by the tautological and deductive form of reasoning. The fact that the real world is already far from a perfect market is ignored for the sake of theoretic convenience. The dissenter cannot challenge the theory; he can only describe the real world. (page 9)

Those who believe society can best be understood as a series of markets begin by positing a rational, calculating individual whose goal is to maximize ‘utility.’ This premise says everything and nothing, since it is true by definition in all cases. But it is a key aspect of the market model, since it is the behavioral part of the logical argument that whatever the market decides must be optimal. (page 41)

Robert Kuttner; Everything for Sale, Knopf, 1997

For Weber, causal efficacy was located exclusively within the individual. However, this does not mean that Weber was strictly a promoter of methodological individualism. Some definitions of methodological individualism (for example, Elster, 1982, p. 453) have suggested that all 48 page explanations of social or economic phenomena should be reduced entirely to individuals. Weber did not go this far. Notably, his statement that individuals alone ‘carry out subjectively understandable action’ is a version of ontological rather than methodological individualism, concerning action as an aspect of social being. Weber was clearly concerned to make intentional individuals — rather than the ‘social organism’ or ‘social forces’ — the causal agents behind socio­ economic phenomena. But Weber also examined the way in which social structures and institutions can shape human purposes and beliefs. Hence he did not reduce explanations entirely to individuals.

Nevertheless the individualistic thrust of Weber’s analysis was in remarkable contrast with the earlier historical school. Notably, both Weber and his historical school predecessors lacked the concept of an emergent property. With the concept of emergence, multiple levels of analysis are possible, based on emergent properties and causal powers at each level. Simultaneously, both individuals and institutions are sustainable as causally effective units of analysis. However, Weber and the historical school lacked the concept of emergence. Unable to sustain multiple levels of analysis, their social theory had to conflate upon one level — upon either the system as a whole or upon the individuals that comprised it. Unlike his historical school predecessors, Weber chose the latter option.

Another fateful consequence of Weber’s individualistic approach concerned his notion of the disciplinary boundaries between the social sciences. Weber developed a complex set of criteria to determine whether an act was ‘economic’ or ‘social’. Writing in Economy and Society, Weber (1968, p. 9) saw economics as concerned with action that is ‘strictly rational, unaffected by errors or emotional factors . . . completely and unequivocally directed to a single end, the maximization of economic advantage’. Whereas: ‘The economic activity of an individual is social only if it takes account of the behavior of someone else’ (p. 22). This was similar to the distinction between ‘economic’ and ‘non­economic’ action proposed in 1910 by Philip Wicksteed (1933). Wicksteed defined an ‘economic transaction’ as one in which one party did not consider the welfare or desires of the other, merely the object of the transaction itself.9

Note that Weber’s (and Wicksteed’s) definitions centered on the assumed nature of the inner thought processes of the individual, rather than on the social structures within and through which individuals act. The exclusive use of an individualist and subjectivist demarcation criterion between economics and other social sciences, means that inadequate attention is given to the nature of the social structures and institutions, as objects of analysis, alongside the individuals concerned. Both are important: just as structures are formed and changed by individuals, individuals are also changed by structures. In contrast, the seminal criteria of Weber and Wicksteed put exclusive weight on the subjective interpretations of the given individual.

At the same time, the ‘economic’ individual was treated as a fictional and ‘unreal’ being, acting ‘as if’ he or she was calculating or rational. The outcome is that both individual and structure were simultaneously denuded of much social and psychological content. Hence, despite its subjectivist twist, a further consequence of Weber’s argument was the explicit relegation of the relevance of 49 page psychology for economic analysis. In 1908, Weber (1975, pp. 31­2) saw economics as concerned with the construction of ‘general theorems’ on the ‘unreal’ assumption that people behave ‘as if’ they were ‘under the control of commercial calculation’, or ‘rationality’ in this sense. Accordingly, the investigation of the ‘real’ motives and behaviour of individuals, informed by psychological and other insights, was irrelevant to economics as Weber saw it. The result of this influential argument was to assist a widespread rejection of psychological insights by both sociologists and economists.

Weber’s demarcation between ‘rational’ and non­‘rational’ action in humans helped to establish barriers between economics, sociology and history. Economics, following Menger, would consider the rational behaviour of the individual, with given ends and in given circumstances. Sociology would consider the manner in which culture may mould those ends. History, in turn, would consider the spirit of the age and the manner in which the given circumstances had evolved. Weber’s attitude to psychology, and his individualist and subjectivist demarcation criterion between economics and sociology, affected Talcott Parsons. Principally through Wicksteed, similar ideas influenced Lionel Robbins.

Eventually, in the 1930s, a truce emerged, where economics concerned itself with the rational choice of means to serve given ends, sociology with the explanation of those ends, and history with their temporal context. This agreement gave significant scope for Austrian and neoclassical economics, at the theoretical core of the territory of the queen of the social sciences. It also removed the historical school from its prestigious pedestal, but gave them important complementary tasks: in economic sociology, sociology and history. Lionel Robbins (1932), Talcott Parsons (1937a) and Joseph Schumpeter (1954) endorsed this partial resolution of the conflict, by means of a partitioning of the contested territory. These writers were steeped in the German literature, and were also — in part by exporting German ideas — to have a crucial influence on Anglo­American social science in the coming years. These outcomes are discussed later in this book. The disciplinary demarcation criteria, and the narrowing view of the scope of economics, had major and global consequences for the erection of virtually impenetrable disciplinary boundaries after the Second World War.

Despite its dubious aspects, a positive and worthwhile feature of Weber’s analysis was to situate the concept of rationality principally in the real and modern world of pecuniary calculation. Accordingly, the concept of rationality became historically confined. Instead of a potentially universal concept, related to any possible activity, he pointed to a concept of rationality that became linked directly to a society in which markets, money, and exchange dominated much human behaviour. The merits and demerits of his rationality concept emerge again below, in the discussion of his methodology of ideal types.

Geoffrey M. Hodgson, How Economists Forgot History, 2001, pages 119, 121

Equilibrium and an invisible ideology

Economics as a discipline arose at a time when English society was in the final stages of removing 50 page the controls of the feudal system from its mercantile/capitalist economy. In this climate, economic theory had a definite (and beneficial) political role: it provided a counter to the religious ideology that once supported the feudal order, and which still influenced how people thought about society. In the feudal system the pre­ordained hierarchy of king, lord, servant and serf was justified on the basis of the ‘divine right of Kings’. The King was God’s representative on earth, and the social structure which flowed down from him was a reflection of God’s wishes.

This structure was nothing if not ordered, but this order imposed severe restrictions on the now dominant classes of merchants and industrialists. At virtually every step, merchants were met with government controls and tariffs. When they railed against these imposts, the reply came back that they were needed to ensure social order.

Economic theory — then rightly called political economy — provided the merchants with a crucial ideological rejoinder. A system of government was not needed to ensure order: instead, social order would arise naturally in a market system in which each individual followed his own self­ interest. Smith’s phrase ‘the invisible hand’ came along rather late in the process, but the notion played a key role in the political and social transformations of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

An essential aspect of this market social order was equilibrium.

From the outset, economists presumed that the market system would achieve equilibrium. Indeed, the achievement of equilibrium was often touted as an advantage of the free market over any system where prices were set by fiat. Equilibrium was therefore an essential notion of the economic defence of capitalism: the equilibrium of the capitalist market would replace the legislative order of the now defunct feudal hierarchy.

More importantly, whereas the feudal order endowed only the well­born with welfare, the equilibrium of the market would guarantee the best possible welfare for all members of society. The level of individual welfare would reflect the individual’s contribution to society: people would enjoy the lifestyle they deserved, rather than the lifestyle into which they had been born.

If, instead of equilibrium, economists had promised that capitalism would deliver chaos; if, instead of meritocracy, economists had said that the market could concentrate inequality, then economists could have hindered rather than helped the transition to capitalism (though they more likely would have been ignored).

By the middle of the 19th century, the transition to capitalism was complete: what was left of feudalism was a mere vestige. But rather than the promised equilibrium, 19th century capitalism was wracked by cycles and enormous disparities of wealth. A major depression occurred roughly every 20 years, workers’ conditions would improve and then rapidly deteriorate, prices rise and then fall, banks expand and then collapse. New ‘robber barons’ replaced the barons of old. It appeared that, while promising a meritocratic equilibrium, capitalism had instead delivered 51 page unbalanced chaos. A new political challenge arose: that of socialism.

Once again, economics rose to the challenge, and once again equilibrium was a central tenet. This time the defence was mounted by what we today call neoclassical economics, since classical economics had been turned into a weapon against capitalism by the last great classical economist, Karl Marx.

In contrast to the hand­waving of Smith, the neoclassical economists of the late 19th century provided a substantive mathematical analysis of how equilibrium could be achieved by an idealised market economy, and how this equilibrium could be fair to all. However, unlike the earlier classical championing of capitalism, this technical edifice provided very little in the way of libertarian slogans for the battle against the ideology of socialism. Instead of arming capitalism’s defenders with rhetoric to deploy against socialists, it gave birth to the academic discipline of economics.

Capitalism eventually transcended the challenge of socialism, with little real assistance from economic theory. But while the economics had little impact upon capitalism, the need to defend capitalism had a profound impact upon the nature of economic theory. The defensive imperative, and the role of equilibrium in that defence, cemented equilibrium’s role as a core belief of economic theory.

At the beginning of the 3rd millennium, there is no competing social system against which capitalism must prove its superiority. Feudalism is long dead, and those socialist societies which remain are either socialist in name only, or bit players on the world stage.

Today, most economists imperiously dismiss the notion that ideology plays any part in their thinking. The profession has in fact devised the term ‘positive economics’ to signify economic theory without any value judgments, while describing economics with value judgments as ‘normative economics’–and the positive is exalted far above the normative.

Yet ideology innately lurks within ‘positive economics’ in the form of the core belief in equilibrium.[3] As previous chapters have shown, economic theory has contorted itself to ensure that it reaches the conclusion that a market economy will achieve equilibrium.[4] The defence of this core belief is what has made economics so resistant to change, since virtually every challenge to economic theory has called upon it to abandon the concept of equilibrium. It has refused to do so, and thus each challenge — Sraffa’s critique, the calamity of the Great Depression, Keynes’s challenge, the modern science of complexity — has been repulsed, ignored, or belittled.

This core belief explains why economists tend to be extreme conservatives on major policy debates, while simultaneously believing that they are non­ideological, and are in fact motivated by knowledge rather than bias.

If you believe that a free market system will naturally tend towards equilibrium — and also that 52 page equilibrium embodies the highest possible welfare for the highest number — then ipso facto, any system other than a complete free market will produce disequilibrium and reduce welfare. You will therefore oppose minimum wage legislation and social security payments–because they will lead to disequilibrium in the labour market. You will oppose price controls–because they will cause disequilibrium in product markets. You will argue for private provision of services–such as education, health, welfare, perhaps even police–because governments, untrammelled by the discipline of supply and demand, will either under or oversupply the market (and charge too much or too little for the service).

In fact, the only policies you will support are ones that makes the real world conform more closely to your economic model. Thus you may support anti­monopoly laws — because your theory tells you that monopolies are bad. You may support anti­union laws, because your theory asserts that collective bargaining will distort labour market outcomes.

And you will do all this without being ideological.

Really?

Yes, really — in that most economists genuinely believe that their policy positions are informed by scientific knowledge, rather than by personal bias or religious­style dogma. Economists are truly sincere in their belief that their policy recommendations will make the world a better place for everyone in it — so sincere, in fact, that they often act against their own self­interest.

For example, there is little doubt that an effective academic union could increase the wages paid to academic economists. If economists were truly self­motivated — if they behaved like the entirely self­interested rational economic man of their models — they would do well to support academic unions, since the negative impacts they predict unions to have would fall on other individuals (fee­ paying students and unemployed academics). But instead, one often finds that economists are the least unionised of academics, and they frequently argue against actions that, according to their theories, could conceivably benefit the minority of academics at the expense of the greater community. However ideological economists may appear to their critics, in their hearts they are sincerely non­partisan — and, ironically, altruistic.

But non­partisan in self­belief does not mean non­partisan in reality. With equilibrium both encapsulating and obscuring so many ideological issues in economics, the slavish devotion to the concept forces economists into politically reactionary and intellectually contradictory positions.

Of course, if economists were right that equilibrium embodies the best possible outcome for the greatest number, then their apparently ideological policy positions would be justified — if the economy always headed back to equilibrium when disturbed from its Nirvana. In the next chapter, we’ll put aside the critiques which establish that the building blocks of equilibrium are invalid, and instead ask whether economic equilibrium, as defined by economic theory, is in fact stable.

53 page Steve Keen, Debunking Economics, 2001, Chapter 7

What an astounding thing it is to watch a civilization destroy itself because it is unable to re­ examine the validity, under totally new circumstances, of an economic ideology.

Sir James Goldsmith, richest man in Europe, about the free­trade doctrine, 1994

The problem is, of course, that not only is economics bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise ... economics is a form of brain damage.

Hazel Henderson

Economics is nothing more than politics in disguise. It is the art of privatizing gains and socializing losses. It is the state religion of the United States. Its god is growth and its idol is greed.

Z.B.F. Alexander

If you took all the economists in the world and laid them end­to­end, they’d still point in different directions!

Harry S. Truman (apocryphal)

…untrammeled intensification of laissez­faire capitalism and the spread of market values to all areas of life are endangering our open and democratic society.

George Soros, 1997

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

Lord Keynes

Broken homes, uprooted families, vanished dreams, delinquency, vandalism, crime, these are the hidden costs of free trade.

Pat Buchanan, 1998

Just as primitive people adopt the Western mode of denationalized clothing and parliamentarism out of a vague feeling that these magic rites and vestments will at once put them abreast of modern culture and technique, so the economists have developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise ideas in the language of infinitesimal calculus. ... Any pretense of applying precise formulae is a sham and a waste of time.

54 page Norbert Weiner

Free markets are creatures of state power, and persist only so long as the state is able to prevent human needs for security and the control of economic risk from finding political expression.

John Gray, leading British Thatcherite, 1998

Economic students are programmed (using modern “doublethink” techniques) to believe that there are no “limits to growth.”

Plenty of Gloom, The Economist, Editorial, 20 December 1997

Sometimes, the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

John Maynard Keynes, sometime in the 1930s

Ravaioli: But there are many other environmental problems...

Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman: Of course. Take oil, for example. Everyone says it’s a limited resource: physically it may be, but economically we don’t know. Economically there is more oil today than there was a hundred years ago. When it was still under the ground and no one knew it was there, it wasn’t economically available. When resources are really limited prices go up, but the price of oil has gone down and down. Suppose oil became scarce: the price would go up, and people would start using other energy sources. In a proper price system the market can take care of the problem.

Ravaioli: But we know that it takes millions of years to create an oil well, and we can’t reproduce it. Relying on oil means living on our capital and not on the interest, which would be the sensible course. Don’t you agree?

Nobel Laureate Friedman: If we were living on the capital, the market price would go up. The price of truly limited resources will rise over time. The price of oil has not been rising, so we’re not living on the capital. When that is no longer true, the price system will give a signal and the price of oil will go up. As always happens with a truly limited resource.

Ravaioli: Of course the discovery of new oil wells has given the illusion of unlimited oil.

Nobel Laureate Friedman: Why an illusion?

Ravaioli: Because we know it’s a limited resource.

Nobel Laureate Friedman: Excuse me; it's not limited from an economic point of view. You have to separate the economic from the physical point of view. Many of the mistakes people make come 55 page from this. Like the stupid projections of the Club of Rome: they used a purely physical approach, without taking prices into account. There are many different sources of energy, some of which are too expensive to be exploited now. But if oil becomes scarce they will be exploited. But the market, which is fortunately capable of registering and using widely scattered knowledge and information from people all over the world, will take account of those changes.

Carla Ravaioli, Economists and the Environment, Zed, 1995, page 33

The laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. There’s only one set of laws and they work everywhere. One of the things I’ve learned in my time at the World Bank is that whenever anybody says “But economics works differently here…” they're about to say something dumb. (page 106)

There are no ... limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind any time in the foreseeable future. There isn’t a risk of an apocalypse due to global warming or anything else. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit, is a profound error and one that, were it ever to prove influential, would have staggering social costs. (page 109)

Lawrence H. Summers, former World Bank Chief Economist and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under Robert Rubin and Bill Clinton, November 1991, quoted in Faith and Credit: The World Bank's Secular Empire, by Susan George and Fabrizio Sabelli, 1994

Oil is a renewable resource, with no intrinsic value over and above its marginal cost... There is no original stock or store of wealth to be doled out on any special criterion... Capital markets are equipped to handle [oil depletion].

Professor M.A. Adelman, The Genie Out of The Bottle: World Oil Since 1970, MIT, 1995, pages 34, 328

If [the petroleum] is not there to begin with, all the human ingenuity that can be mustered into the service of exploration cannot put it there... The literature of the past decade suggests that the best place to look for oil would be in the economics departments of American universities and research institutes, ... not in sedimentary rocks.

Richard Nehring, 1981

The main reason why it is profitable to establish a firm would seem to be that there is a cost of using the price mechanism. The most obvious cost of organizing production through the price mechanism is that of discovering what the relevant prices are.

R.H. Coase, Nobel­prize winning economist

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. …In the long run we are all dead. … 56 page Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in the tempestuous seasons they only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean will be flat.

John Maynard Keynes

But if the breakdown of our civilization was timed by the failure of world economy, it was certainly not caused by it. Its origins lay more than a hundred years back in that social and technological upheaval from which the idea of a self­regulating market sprang in Western Europe. The end of this venture has come in our time; it closes a distinct stage in the history of industrial civilization.

In the final part of the book we shall deal with the mechanism which governed social and national change in our time. Broadly, we believe that the present condition of man is to be defined in terms of the institutional origins of the crisis.

The nineteenth century produced a phenomenon unheard of in the annals of Western civilization, namely, a hundred years‚ peace — 1815­1914. Apart from the Crimean War — a more or less colonial event — England, France, Prussia, Austria, Italy, and Russia were engaged in war among each other for altogether only eighteen months. A computation of comparable figures for the two preceding centuries gives an average of sixty to seventy years of major wars in each. But even the fiercest of nineteenth century conflagrations, the Franco­Prussian War of 1870­71, ended after less than a year’s duration with the defeated nation being able to pay over an unprecedented sum as an indemnity without any disturbance of the currencies concerned.

This triumph of a pragmatic pacifism was certainly not the result of an absence of grave causes for conflict. Almost continuous shifts in the internal and external conditions of powerful nations and great empires accompanied this ironic pageant. During the first part of the century civil wars, revolutionary and anti­revolutionary interventions were the order of the day. In Spain a hundred thousand troops under the Duc d’Angoulème stormed Cadiz; in Hungary the Magyar revolution threatened to defeat the Emperor himself in pitched battle and was ultimately suppressed only by a Russian army fighting on Hungarian soil. Armed interventions in the Germanies, in Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, Denmark, and Venice marked the omnipresence of the Holy Alliance. During the second half of the century the dynamics of progress was released; the Ottoman, Egyptian, and the Sheriffian empires broke up or were dismembered; China was forced by invading armies to open her door to the foreigner and in one gigantic haul the continent of Africa was partitioned. Simultaneously, two powers rose to world importance: the United States and Russia. National unity was achieved by Germany and Italy; Belgium, Greece, Roumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Hungary assumed, or reassumed, their places as sovereign states on the map of Europe. An almost incessant series of open wars accompanied the march of industrial civilization into the domains of outworn cultures or primitive peoples. Russia’s military conquests in Central Asia, England’s numberless Indian and African wars, France’s exploits in Egypt, Algiers, Tunis, Syria, Madagascar, Indo­China, and Siam raised issues between the Powers which, as a rule, only force can arbitrate. Yet every single one of these conflicts was localized, and numberless other occasions for violent 57 page change were either met by joint action or smothered into compromise by the Great Powers. Regardless of how the methods changed, the result was the same. While in the first part of the century constitutionalism was banned and the Holy Alliance suppressed freedom in the name of peace, during the other half — and again in the name of peace — constitutions were foisted upon turbulent despots by business­minded bankers. Thus under varying forms and ever­shifting ideologies — sometimes in the name of progress and liberty, sometimes by the authority of the throne and the altar, sometimes by grace of the stock exchange and the checkbook, sometimes by corruption and bribery, sometimes by moral argument and enlightened appeal, sometimes by the broadside and the bayonet — one and the same result was attained: peace was preserved.

This almost miraculous performance was due to the working of the balance of power, which here produced a result which is normally foreign to it. By its nature that balance effects an entirely different result, namely, the survival of the power units involved; in fact, it merely postulates that three or more units capable of exerting power will always behave in such a way as to combine the power of the weaker units against any increase in power of the strongest. In the realm of universal history balance of power was concerned with states whose independence it served to maintain. But it attained this end only by continuous war between changing partners. The practice of the ancient Greek or the Northern Italian city­states was such an instance; wars between shifting groups of combatants maintained the independence of those states over long stretches of time. The action of the same principle safeguarded for over two hundred years the sovereignty of the states forming Europe at the time of the Treaty of Mònster and Westphalia (1648). When, seventy­five years later, in the Treaty of Utrecht, the signatories declared their formal adherence to this principle, they thereby embodied it in a system, and thus established mutual guarantees of survival for the strong and the weak alike through the medium of war. The fact that in the nineteenth century the same mechanism resulted in peace rather than war is a problem to challenge the historian.

The entirely new factor, we submit, was the emergence of an acute peace interest. Traditionally, such an interest was regarded as outside the scope of the state system. Peace with its corollaries of crafts and arts ranked among the mere adornments of life. The Church might pray for peace as for a bountiful harvest, but in the realm of state action it would nevertheless advocate armed intervention; governments subordinated peace to security and sovereignty; that is, to intents that could not be achieved otherwise than by recourse to the ultimate means. Few things were regarded as more detrimental to a community than the existence of an organized peace interest in its midst. As late as the second half of the eighteenth century, J. J. Rousseau arraigned trades people for their lack of patriotism because they were suspected of preferring peace to liberty.

After 1815 the change is sudden and complete. The backwash of the French Revolution reinforced the rising tide of the Industrial Revolution in establishing peaceful business as a universal interest. Metternich proclaimed that what the people of Europe wanted was not liberty but peace. Gentz called patriots the new barbarians. Church and throne started out on the denationalization of Europe. Their arguments found support both in the ferocity of the recent popular forms of warfare and in the tremendously enhanced value of peace under the nascent economies.

58 page The bearers of the new ‘peace interest’ were, as usual, those who chiefly benefited by it, namely, that cartel of dynasts and feudalists whose patrimonial positions were threatened by the revolutionary wave of patriotism that was sweeping the Continent. Thus, for approximately a third of a century the Holy Alliance provided the coercive force and the ideological impetus for an active peace policy; its armies were roaming up and down Europe putting down minorities and repressing majorities. From 1846 to about 1887 — ‘one of the most confused and crowded quarter centuries of European history’ — peace was less safely established, the ebbing strength of reaction meeting the growing strength of industrialism. In the quarter century following the Franco­ Prussian War we find the revived peace interest represented by that new powerful entity, the Concert of Europe. (pages 5­7)

The origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self­ regulating market system. (page 29)

By the end of the seventies the free trade episode (1846­79) was at an end; the actual use of the gold standard by Germany marked the beginnings of an era of protectionism and colonial expansion... the symptoms of the dissolution of the existing forms of world economy — colonial rivalry and competition for exotic markets — became acute. The ability of haute finance to avert the spread of wars was diminishing rapidly... For another seven years peace dragged on but it was only a question of time before the dissolution of nineteenth century economic organization would bring the Hundred Years’ Peace to a close. (page 19)

The true nature of the international system under which we were living was not realized until it failed. Hardly anyone understood the political function of the international monetary system; the awful suddenness of the transformation thus took the world completely by surprise... To liberal economists [economics] was purely an economic institution; they refused even to consider it as a part of a [political] mechanism. Thus it happened that the democratic countries were the last to realize the true nature of the catastrophe and the slowest to counter its effects. Not even when the cataclysm was already upon them did their leaders see that behind the collapse of the international system there stood a long development within the most advanced countries which made that system anachronistic; in other words, the failure of market economy itself still escaped them. (page 20)

The transformation came on even more abruptly than is usually realized. World War I and the postwar revolutions still formed part of the nineteenth century. The conflict of 1914­18 merely precipitated and immeasurably aggravated a crisis that it did not create. But the roots of the dilemma could not be discerned at the time. The dissolution of the system of world economy which had been in progress since 1900 was responsible for the political tension that exploded in 1914. (page 21)

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1957

How would you describe the difference between modern war and modern industry — between, 59 page say, bombing and strip mining, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in industry it is “accepted” as a “trade­off.”

Wendell Berry, farmer, author (born 1934)

Laissez faire was planned; planning was not.

Karl Polanyi

[With the development of modern physics] it became possible to see orthodox economic theory for what it really was: a bowdlerized imitation of nineteenth­century physics… It was not the methods of science that were appropriated by the early neoclassicals as it was the appearances of science, for the early neoclassicals possessed a singularly inept understanding of the physics they so admired… [Neoclassical economists attempt] to reduce all social institutions such as money, property rights, and the market itself to epiphenomena of individual constrained optimization calculation. All these attempts have failed, despite their supposed dependence upon mathematical rigor, because they always inadvertently assume what they aim to deduce… Conservation principles are the key to the understanding of a mathematical formulation of any phenomenon, and it has been there that the neoclassicals have been woefully negligent.

Philip Mirowski, Against Mechanism: Protecting Economics from Science, Rowman and Littlefield, 1988, pages 5­6

JEVONS’ SUNSPOTS: Macroeconomic Instability and the “Natural” Process in Early Neoclassical Economics

It may seem odd to disinter an economic theory — in this instance, William Stanley Jevons’s claim that sunspots caused macroeconomic fluctuations — which no one now believes or much cares about. In fact, my purpose is not to scoff at a dead theory, but to use it as a pretext to discuss the following issues: economic historians often have suggested a dichotomy between a premodern and industrial macroeconomy, with the premodern economy largely at the mercy of weather and other natural phenomena; this dichotomy is rooted in early neoclassical economic theory (here restricting ourselves to Jevons); there is little historical evidence that premodern macro fluctuations were caused by natural disturbances, such as the weather (here restricting ourselves to the case of England); and the above three theses have some interesting implications for the way economic policy is conceived, both then and now.

William Stanley Jevons, in his 1870 Presidential Address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section F, lamented that, “There is no one who occupies a less enviable position than the political economist. Cultivating the frontier regions between certain knowledge and conjecture, his efforts and advice are scorned and rejected on all hands.” Although this may prompt nods of assent in the 1980s, it is important to understand the historical context of such 60 page complaints. As he said later in the same address,

“The growth of the arts and manufactures and the establishment of free trade have opened the widest means of employment and brought an accession of wealth previously unknown.... Nevertheless within the past few years we have seen pauperism almost as prevalent as ever, and the slightest relapse of trade throws whole towns and classes of people into a state of destitution little short of famine.”

The problem of English political economy in the 1870s was its firm association with the doctrine of free trade, which in turn was a direct corollary of the fundamental theoretical principle that unfettered market structures were a superior means of organizing production and distribution. In periods of buoyancy such a stance was easy to defend; but by the 1870s doubts became more insistent in England: doubts about the stability of market organization, which resulted in sharp aggregate fluctuations, and doubts about the long­term efficacy of free trade due to the successes of Britain’s foreign economic rivals. Jevons personally had felt these chill winds when his father’s iron firm was bankrupted in 1848, and his family bore the stigma of being the “poor relations.” This experience did not sour Jevons on free trade and the efficacy of market organization, however, because he felt that by hard work from an early age he had managed, in the face of adversity, to improve his station in life, and further that such an avenue was open to all who would but avail themselves of it. In practice, the early Jevons responded to the mistrust of political economy by blaming the victims. But, as he soon came to understand, that was not a winning strategy.

All of Jevons’s innovations in economics — his pioneering efforts in marginalist price theory, his work on the Coal Question, and his sunspot theory — may be understood as a unified rational response to the increasing skepticism about political economy in Britain. Economists in the late twentieth century tend to view the innovations in price theory as Jevons’s crowning achievement and the sunspot theory as some unfortunate lapse, or even an embarrassment. Indeed, for some the sunspot theory has attained the status of joke, whereas for others it is a cautionary parable concerning the pitfalls of inductive argument. All of these interpretations are much too facile, because they ignore the unified thrust of Jevons’s theoretical project. In short, his project was to portray the market as a “natural” process, so that doubts about its efficacy would be assuaged, or at the very least, countered by scientific discourse. The ultimate object was to reconstruct the foundations of the case for free trade.

In the case of neoclassical price theory the evidence for this thesis is extensive, but would be superfluous in the present context; in any event it is summarized above. Briefly, Jevons’s price theory laid claim to scientific status because it was identical in mathematical form and analytical content to the physics of the mid­nineteenth century, which is sometimes referred to as “energetics” by historians of science. For our present purposes, it is only necessary to survey the broadest implications of this stratagem. First, it drew a direct analogy between economic transactions and transfers of energy, which subtly endowed the transactions with the “natural” ontological status of the transfers. Second, it encouraged specialization within economics and the 61 page cultivation of an internal language (mathematics), which served to buffer the discipline from the intrusions of lay critics. Third, it demonstrated that market processes maximized utility in a regime of free competition, thus implying that no improvement was possible through conscious intervention in production and exchange. These were a much more formidable set of defenses of the doctrine of free trade than those provided by the demoralized and disheveled remnants of classical political economy.

However, effective these new foundations, they did not address the most significant objection to British political economy: If free trade was such an able method of economic coordination, why did it result in such devastating contractions punctuating economic expansion? In this respect, Jevons’s sunspot theory was the necessary adjunct to his newly formulated price theory. If the market always functioned in an effective manner tended toward a configuration insuring maximum happiness, then there was only one obvious way to explain the incongruity of the misery and suffering of depressions. The natural operation of the market could only be deflected or stymied (although never fully neutralized) by another opposing “natural” force — here Jevons proposed that macroeconomic fluctuations and credit crises were caused by meteorological disturbances, ultimately caused in turn by variations in sunspot activity. The advantage of this sort of explanation was that no one was to blame, or as Jevons put it,

“We must not lay to the charge of trades­unions, or free trade, or any other pretext, a fluctuation of commerce which affects countries alike which have trades­unions and no trades­ unions, free trade and protection; as to intemperance and various other moral causes, no doubt they may have powerful influence on our prosperity but they afford no special explanation of a temporary wave of calamity.”

The issue of macroeconomic instability, then, could not be used as an argument for protection, for instance, since the cause fell on all countries indifferently as a natural state of affairs. To my knowledge, no one has adequately explored the hypothesis that the English retained their allegiance to free trade long after the Continent did because they, unlike the French or Germans, persisted in seeing economic relations grounded in a physical (and not physiological) analogy.

Throughout his life, Jevons subscribed to the principle that macroeconomic fluctuations were of natural origins, but he encountered great difficulty in fleshing out the theory. His first article on the subject in 1875 tried to establish that English grain prices from 1254 to 1400 cycled with a period of 11 years. Because astronomers at that time believed that sunspot activity also rose and fell in cycles of 11.1 years, he asserted that the coincidence of periodicities implied that observed price fluctuations were caused by exogenous shocks. Of course, this was a very flimsy argument, as Jevons was well aware: he could not cite sunspot data contemporaneous with his fourteenth­ century price data. Objections that would daunt the less resolute were not sufficient to restrain him: “I am aware that speculations of this kind may seem somewhat far­fetched and finely wrought; but financial collapses have occurred with such approach to regularity in the last fifty years, that either this or some other explanation is needed.”

62 page What was needed was some connection between the existing sunspot data — the Wolf Zurich relative sunspot numbers, beginning in 1749 — and some contemporaneous indicator of economic activity. Jevons openly admitted that he had attempted to find a regular periodicity in the prices of European grains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the search had failed. His next tactic was to assert the existence of a very stable 11­year period between English credit crises, and to suggest that the equality of periodicity with that of the sunspots was sufficient evidence to infer causality. This argument hinged crucially upon the claim that there was a clockwork regularity in the appearance of crises in England; and it was to this thesis that Jevons committed much intellectual effort. He produced one list of the dates of credit crises in 1877­1878, but then received the unpleasant surprise that astronomers had repudiated their earlier estimate of the periodicity of the sunspot cycle, revising the estimate to read 10.45 years. Again Jevons was not to be frustrated in his quest. He simply redefined a few of the dates of his "crises" so that the average interval became equal to 10.5 years. His final list of crisis dates (with those Jevons indicated as doubtful in italics) were: 1701, 1711, 1731­1732, 1742, 1752, 1763, 1772­1773, 1783, 1793, 1804­1805, 1815, 1825, 1836­1839, 1847, 1857, 1866, and 1878. [italics emphasis lost]

At this point, Jevons became the butt of some ridicule: one example was a satirical statistical study showing that the periodicity of winning Oxbridge teams in collegiate boat races was the same as that of sunspots. Other more serious challengers pointed out that Jevons’s conception of crises, as revealed in his choice of dates, was so vague as to admit of any and all interpretations. He responded by maintaining that he was simply proposing the following working hypothesis:

“A wave of increased solar radiations favorably affects the meteorology of the tropical regions, so as to produce a succession of good crops in India, China, and other tropical and semi­ tropical countries. After several years of prosperity the 6 or 800 millions of inhabitants buy our manufactures in unusual quantities; good trade in Lancashire and Yorkshire leads the manufacturers to push their existing means of production to the utmost and then to begin building new mills and factories. While a mania of active industry is thus set going in Western Europe, the solar radiation is slowly waning, so that just about the time when our manufacturers are prepared to turn out a greatly increased supply of goods, famines in India and China suddenly cut off the demand.”

In his published work, Jevons also stressed that it was the long credits given in the Eastern trade that provided a transmission mechanism for the financial credit crises. The explanation was actually much more popular than we today might think, because it resonated with an ethos of the “white man's burden” prevalent in the popular English culture of the 1880s and 1890s. Jevons capped this narrative in 1879 by publishing a series of wheat prices from Delhi, 1763­1834, which he claimed displayed the sought­after periodicity and corresponded to his chronology of crisis dates. From 1879 to his death in 1882 he published nothing further on the subject, but his correspondence reveals that he persisted in his defense and employment of his sunspot theory in discussions of macroeconomic fluctuations.

Philip Mirowski, Against Mechanism: Protecting Economics from Science, 63 page Rowman and Littlefield, 1988, pages 45­48

The bulk of this text was taken up with examining the claims of neoclassical economic theory to scientific status. Given contemporary views on the nature of scientific theory, I examined neoclassical economic theory in terms of both its historical and contemporary phases. I demonstrated that the cardinal theory of utility that formed the foundation for early neoclassical theory foundered on account of its inability to measure utility in any acceptable scientific way. Its substitute, the ordinal theory of utility, was shown to be equally unacceptable. The scientific pretensions of ordinal utility theory and its correlate, revealed preference theory, were shown compromised by the normative structure of the foundational postulate of rationality. The unscientific nature of ordinal utility theory was further shown to be reinforced by the insulating role played by the ceteris paribus proviso.

This general critique was extended not only to the neoclassical theory of individual agent choice but also to general equilibrium theory and positive neoclassical welfare economic theory. Given the general dissatisfaction with neoclassical theory, a number of alternative theories have been proposed, but the problem with the latter is that, with few exceptions, they are founded on the premise that an objective science of economics is still possible despite its present failings. I pointed out the shortcomings of those theories and argued that on account of the nature of human decision­making, no analysis of it could be scientific in the way in which the natural sciences are scientific. Mental states that must be invoked to explain behavior are just not subject to empirical analysis. The attempts by theorists to establish explanatory theories by appeal to heuristic concepts such as rationality were shown to be unsuccessful. The point is that ‘rationality’ plays a normative role similar to that of ‘goodness’ in ethical theory.

The sociologist can indeed record the behavior of individuals in terms of cultural norms of ‘goodness,’ ‘badness,’ ‘deviancy,’ and so on, but he or she must recognize that theories of behavior founded on such concepts are necessarily normative. Similarly, the neoclassical theorist who embraces a particular notion of rationality and grounds his or her theories on such a notion is certainly formulating a normative theory. My analysis showed that the neoclassical theorist of economic behavior is confronted with the dilemma of restricting his or her analysis to a case­by­ case taxonomy of individual agent choice, given the inaccessibility to mental states, or grounding his or her explanatory theories on the normative heuristic of rational choice. Neither alternative yields scientific results.

L.D. Keita, Science, Rationality, And Neoclassical Economics, Delaware, 1992, pages 150­151

Politics is the dismal science because we have learned from it that there are no equilibria to predict. In the absence of equilibria we cannot know much about the future at all, whether it is likely to be palatable or unpalatable, and in that sense our future is subject to the tricks and accidents of the way questions are posed and the way alternatives are offered and eliminated.

64 page William H. Riker, Implications from the Disequilibrium of Majority Rule for the Study of Institutions, American Political Science Review, 74, 1980: page 443

As long as we remain trapped by the ideology of competitive­growth equilibrium, there is no solution. We are reminded of the South Indian monkey trap, in which a hollowed­out coconut is fastened to a stake by a chain and filled with rice. There is a hole in the coconut just large enough for the monkey to put his extended hand through but not large enough to withdraw his fist full of rice. The monkey is trapped only by his inability to reorder his values, to recognize that freedom is worth more than a handful of rice.

Herman Daly, Steady State Economics, Second Edition, 1991

The theoretical constructs introduced to economics over a century ago continue to pervade discussions of policy. They provide both a strong bias towards and an apparently strong rationale for policies which move towards the creation of a free, competitive market. For example, the political and social agendas of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were powerfully motivated by the logic of free­market economics. Or, to be more precise, free­market economics was used to underpin the ideological preconceptions of these politicians. The deregulation of financial markets in the 1980 in the Anglo­Saxon economies; the deregulation of and increased flexibility in labour markets, a topic which is presently the subject of a fierce debate among the political classes of Europe; the privatisation of state­owned industries; reductions in welfare programmes — all these themes flow from the logic of the theory of competitive equilibrium.

Paul Ormerod, The Death of Economics, 1994, 1997

Few academic theories have achieved as much influence as the economics of competitive markets. Few eighteenth­century metaphors are as well remembered and widely quoted as Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Mathematical restatements of that metaphor are endorsed by the great majority of economists, and provide the framework for a large and growing number of decisions about public policy. Prominent economists have described the invisible hand as the most important contribution of economics to social theory (Arrow and Hahn 1971: 4). In the case of economics, the ivory tower casts a long shadow over social and political life.

The image of the invisible hand arises in a parable about the socially desirable outcomes of private competition. The magic of the marketplace coordinates isolated individual decisions, “as if by an invisible hand,” to achieve the best possible outcome for society. The individuals are assumed to be selfish (if they were selfless altruists, there would be nothing to prove); and the optimal outcome is not foreseen or planned by anyone. In the opening chapters of his Wealth of Nations, Smith made an early, but incomplete, attempt to explain how competitive markets achieved this happy result through the price mechanism. Smith’s image of invisible coordination was supported by verbal argument, with stories about bakers and butchers learning by trial and error that they will profit by selling the goods that consumers want to buy. These stories are suggestive, but do not strictly prove that the invisible hand is always in touch with our collective best interests. 65 page Recognizing the incompleteness of the theory, economists continued to struggle with the question of the optimality of market outcomes. Almost two hundred years after Smith, his point about the invisible hand and its desirable results was apparently proved by Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu, in the imposingly abstract mathematics of general equilibrium theory. Imagine an economy of many consumers and producers, selfishly engaged in optimizing satisfaction and profits and satisfying a long list of assumptions (many of which are discussed in this book). Under those assumptions, the model built by Arrow and Debreu shows that there is always a market equilibrium at which supply equals demand for every commodity. It is a “general” or economy­ wide equilibrium since it involves the interaction of all prices with the supply and demand for all commodities, as opposed to partial equilibrium theories, which are concerned with price determination in particular markets.

A general equilibrium is always an optimum outcome for society, using the somewhat odd technical definition of “optimum” that has become standard in economics. (On the political biases of Pareto optimality, see Ackerman and Heinzerling (2004, chap. 2).) The mathematics of general equilibrium seems to show that the private greed of bakers, butchers, and all the rest of us, expressed through the market, leads to a collective result that cannot be improved upon for anyone without worsening the outcome for someone else.

The “proof of existence” of a general equilibrium by Arrow and Debreu in 1954 was hailed as a scientific demonstration of the optimal results attained by competitive markets. Amid the celebration, no critical analysis was undertaken of the economic meaning of the abstract mathematical tools used in their opus. Soon the weight of research shifted to the dynamics of price formation, in order to examine just how market forces could lead to that equilibrium point whose existence had been “proven.” Here the results were, to say the least, disappointing. The initial work of Arrow et al. (1959) concluded with the conjecture that, in general, the Arrow­Debreu model would converge to an equilibrium position. The conjecture was shown to be false by Scarf (1960), using a simple counterexample. Further research soon led to even more negative conclusions, as Frank Ackerman explains in “Still dead after all these years,” Chapter 1 of this book. The discipline soon realized that it was unable to provide a theoretical account of the dynamics of the invisible hand and retreated to the apparent robustness and intimidating abstraction of the static “proof of existence.” Ironically, the triumph of free­market economic policies during the past two decades has coincided with the recognition by economic theorists that the most general theoretical models of the market economy were leading to discouraging results.

Such doubts are not usually presented in textbooks and classroom lectures, let alone public debate. Most economists do not follow the very theoretical branches of the research literature, and typically continue to assert — and believe — that general equilibrium has been definitively proved to lead to the best of all possible outcomes. This conclusion, the optimality of general equilibrium, does not depend on any information about any real economy. It is an axiomatic deduction from a set of abstract hypotheses, based solely on a mathematical model. Yet it often appears to have very specific and controversial implications for the real world, supporting conservative political 66 page arguments against any form of government intervention in markets. If unregulated market competition leads to an ideal result, then public programs, regulations, and initiatives of all types can only make things worse.

How can the use of pure mathematics lead to such partisan political conclusions? This paradox suggests that something is wrong with either the theory or its applications. The premise of this book is that there are profound problems both in the theory of general equilibrium and in its common, careless application to reality. A theory built on flawed foundations is unsatisfying for theorists, and has little to say about the economic policy questions that ultimately matter: what changes, what improvements in the status quo, are possible in reality? (pages 1­3)

The instability of the neoclassical model can be attributed to the inescapable difficulties of the aggregation process, and the highly individual, asocial nature of consumer preferences. These are not recent innovations, but design flaws that have been present since the origins of the theory in the late nineteenth century. The third section argued that two intentional features of the theory, present in the original neoclassical analogy to physics, led economics astray: the huge number of dimensions and information requirements of the "commodity space" framework, and the individualistic behavioral model.

Repairing these flaws … will require a model of human needs and behavior that is not defined in terms of individual commodities. It will involve mathematically complex analyses of social interaction. And it will have to recognize the central role of social and institutional constraints. These new departures will make economics more realistic, but will not demonstrate the inherent stability or optimality of market outcomes, as general equilibrium theory once seemed to do. (pages 30­31)

Frank Ackerman and Alejandro Nadal with Carlo Benetti, Kevin P. Gallagher, and Carlos Salas, The Flawed Foundations of General Equilibrium: Critical Essays on Economic Theory, 2004, pages 1­3

The social sciences have a long, rich history of writings on rationality. In the tradition of neoclassical economic science, as in the writings of [Vilfredo] Pareto (1935), an action is rational when it corresponds with the ends or goals sought. Rationality means the adaptation of means to ends. The more congruent the means to the ends, the more efficient the decision and, therefore, the more rational the organization (Weber, 1947). Economists abstain from applying the test of rationality to ends.

Mary Zey, Decision Making: Alternatives to Rational Choice Models, Sage, 1992, page 16

Ends are ape­chosen; only means are man’s.

Aldous Huxley 67 page Man is free to do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.

Schopenhauer

Because the order of nature is providential, the free market that reflects natural order also reflects the workings of providence. In this way the spheres of morality, theology, jurisprudence, and economics become hostages to nature, so to speak.

Deborah Redman, The Rise of Political Economy as a Science, MIT, 1997, page 237

All over the globe, we have recently witnessed a return to religious fundamentalism. In my view, the return to the equilibrium price­auction model in economics represents a parallel development — a desire for psychological certainty in a world that is, in the last instance, uncertain. (page xix)

In late 1973 the first OPEC oil shock struck, as oil prices quadrupled and the general inflation indexes shot up to 11 percent. More important, gasoline lines appeared. Waiting in line to buy a basic commodity like gasoline is something that no American had ever experienced. Shock and irritation were high, but those lines were like the first small heart attack — an indication of mortality. Maybe the American economy was growing old and becoming vulnerable. Maybe the American economic dream of an ever­rising standard of living was over. Small may be beautiful, but if that phrase meant a lower standard of living, then the average American considered it a nightmare.

The Nixon­Ford Administration responded with oil and gas price controls. As a vehicle for holding down prices, controls were bound to fail. For one thing, world prices would have to be paid on that part of consumption imported from abroad; for another, controls make it too easy for oil companies to hold oil in the ground or not to look for new supplies of oil until prices rose. When controls did fail, the public’s feeling that the federal government and its economists were incapable of managing anything efficiently was further reinforced.

What was worse, economists could pose no solution to the energy problem. Influential professionals, such as Milton Friedman, predicted that the oil cartel would quickly fall apart. It didn’t. Other economists recommended that prices be allowed to climb to world levels, but that wasn’t a solution to the problem faced by the average American. Higher prices would force him to change his life style. He might respond to higher prices with smaller cars and colder houses as economists predicted, but he liked doing neither and he could vote. No one considered a forced change in life style a solution.

Once again, falling back on the principle that higher unemployment would produce lower inflation, monetary authorities tightened the rate of growth of the money supply in an effort to slow the economy, raise unemployment, and push inflation out of the economy. This time the policies produced a credit crunch. For six months in late 1974 and early 1975 the GNP fell at the 68 page fastest rate ever recorded. Even the rates of decline in the Great Depression had been less precipitous — although of course longer and deeper. Anxieties quickly shifted from an unacceptable inflation rate to an unacceptable unemployment rate, and the term ‘stagflation’ was born.

Stagflation was both a term and an indictment, since economists had taught that the phenomena — slow growth, rising unemployment, and rising inflation — could not all exist at the same time. Yet they did. (pages 34­36)

Lester Thurow, Dangerous Currents, Random, 1983

If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.

Hazel Henderson

James Tobin, the American Nobel Prize winner in economics, has questioned very seriously whether it makes sense from the point of view of American society as a whole to divert so much of its young talent from the top universities into financial markets. This debate is not new. John Maynard Keynes considered the same question in the 1930s, and expressed the view that on the whole the rewards of those in the financial sector were justified. Many individuals attracted to these markets, Keynes argued, are of a domineering and even psychopathic nature. If their energies could not find an outlet in money making, they might turn instead to careers involving open and wanton cruelty. Far better to have them absorbed on Wall Street or in the City of London than in organised crime. (pages 3­7)

The theoretical constructs introduced to economics over a century ago continue to pervade discussions of policy. They provide both a strong bias towards and an apparently strong rationale for policies which move towards the creation of a free, competitive market. For example, the political and social agendas of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were powerfully motivated by the logic of free­market economics. Or, to be more precise, free­market economics was used to underpin the ideological preconceptions of these politicians. The deregulation of financial markets in the 1980 in the Anglo­Saxon economies; the deregulation of and increased flexibility in labour markets, a topic which is presently the subject of a fierce debate among the political classes of Europe; the privatisation of state­owned industries; reductions in welfare programmes — all these themes flow from the logic of the theory of competitive equilibrium.

Paul Ormerod, The Death of Economics, 1997

[T]ruly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have ‘assumptions’ that are wildly inaccurate representations of reality... The relevant question to ask about the ‘assumptions’ of a theory is not whether they are descriptively ‘realistic,’ for they never are, but whether they are 69 page sufficiently good approximations for the purpose in hand. And this question can be answered only by seeing whether the theory works, which means whether it yields sufficiently accurate predictions.

A hypothesis is important if it ‘explains’ much by little, that is, if it abstracts from the common and crucial elements from the mass of complex and detailed circumstances surrounding the phenomena to be explained and permits valid predictions on the basis of them alone. To be important, therefore, a hypothesis must be descriptively false in its assumptions; it takes account of, and accounts for, none of the many other attendant circumstances, since its very success shows them to be irrelevant for the phenomena to be explained.

Milton Friedman, The Methodology of Positive Economics, 1953

Milton Friedman’s essay on The Methodology of Positive Economics (1953) is clearly the best­known work in twentieth­century economic methodology. It was a “Marketing Masterpiece” (Caldwell 1982, page 173) that is cited in almost every economics textbook and it remains, almost half a century after its publication, “the only essay on methodology that a large number, perhaps majority, of economists have ever read.” (Hausman 1992, page 162).

D. Wade Hands, Reflection Without Rules: Economic Methodology and Contemporary Science Theory, 2001, page 53

Friedman argued that in accepting or dismissing a theory, we should only look at its fit with the data, not at the realism (or lack thereof) of its assumptions. Bluntly speaking, he urged us to apply to theories the principle we often apply to sausages: as far as the final product is good, better not to ask about the ingredients. This is the famous “as if” defense of RCT [Rational Choice Theory]: however implausible an assumption may seem, it is acceptable as long as humans behave “as if” it were true. RCT practitioners that take Friedman’s defense at heart cannot be bothered by lengthy philosophical discussions as the ensuing one. In their view, questions about human agency, ethical behavior and things of the like are irrelevant for the enterprise of RCT because they do not falsify its predictions.

Medina, 2004

One suspects that if somehow an alien time traveler could remove all traces of “falsification” from the historical record — exorcise it completely from our minds and documents — economics would look exactly the same. The prescriptive methodological “bite” seems to be more of an impercep­ tible nibble. But this impactive failure is just one side of the coin; the other is to suppose economists did respond; suppose they did reject all theories that were empirically falsified or did not consistently predict Lakatosian novel facts. Nothing would be left standing; there would be no economics.

D. Wade Hands, Reflection Without Rules, 2001 70 page My first exposure to the psychological assumptions of economics was in a report that Bruno Frey wrote on that subject in the early 1970’s. Its first or second sentence stated that the agent of economic theory is rational and selfish, and that his tastes do not change. I found this list quite startling, because I had been professionally trained as a psychologist not to believe a word of it. The gap between the assumptions of our disciplines appeared very large indeed.

Has the gap been narrowed in the intervening 30 years? A search through some introductory textbooks in economics indicates that if there has been any change, it has not yet filtered down to that level: the same assumptions are still in place as the cornerstones of economic analysis.

Daniel Kahneman (2003 Nobel Prize in Economics), A Psychological Perspective on Economics, 2003

Behavioural economics...is best understood as a set of exceptions that modifies but leaves intact the canonical model of rational choice, not least since it is irrational to suppose that people in general behave irrationally.

The Economist, 29 April 2006

Confusion between positive and normative economics is to some extent inevitable.

Milton Friedman (1953)

[Pinochet] has supported a fully free­market economy as a matter of principle. Chile is an economic miracle.

Milton Friedman, Newsweek, January 1982

“I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable...because foregone earnings from increased morbidity” are low. He adds that “the underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles...”

Lawrence Summers, World Bank chief economist, quoted in The Economist, 8 February 1992

Oil has literally made foreign and security policy for decades. Just since the turn of this century, it has provoked the division of the Middle East after World War I; aroused Germany and Japan to extend their tentacles beyond their borders; the Arab Oil Embargo; Iran versus Iraq; the Gulf War. This is all clear.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, 9 December 1999 71 page The life contest is primarily a competition for available energy.

Ludwig Boltzman, 1886

Material conditions in the First World War ruled out brilliant generalship or any quick route to victory for two main reasons: commanders were deprived of the direct voice control of their predecessors and of the wireless communications of their successors; and poor tactical means of mobility entailed that the defensive would hold an advantage over the offensive.

Brian Bond, The Unquiet Western Front

War analyst Stanislav Andreski concluded that the trigger for most wars is hunger, or even ‘a mere drop from the customary standard of living.’ Anthropologists Carol and Melvin Ember spent six years studying war in the late 1980s among 186 preindustrial societies. They focused on precontact times in hopes of collecting the ‘cleanest, least distorted’ data. Andreski, it seems, was right. War’s most common cause, the Embers found, was fear of deprivation. The victors in the wars they studied almost always took territory, food, and/or other critical resources from their enemies. Moreover, unpredictable disasters — droughts, blights, floods, and freezes — which led to severe hardships, spurred more wars than did chronic shortages.

This also holds true among modern nations. In 1993, political scientists Thomas E. Homer­Dixon, Jeffrey H. Boutwell, and George W. Rathjens examined the roots of recent global conflicts and concluded, “There are significant causal links between scarcities of renewable resources and violence.” In short, many wars seem to be a mass, communal robbery of another social group’s life­ support resources.

Michael P. Ghiglieri, The Dark Side Of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence, Perseus, 1999, page 90

...underlying all the other reasons for warfare is almost always this fundamental imbalance of resource stress and population growth.

Steven LeBlanc, Constant Battles, page 169

Humans have evolved to survive die­off by taking resources from others, rather than evolving to avoid die­off. The sociopaths make ideal leaders because they are can make logical decisions without emotion. That is why they are still in the gene pool. Selfish­gene logic is that logic which out­reproduced the competition.

Jay Hanson

The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a 72 page fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to people but to poor ideology and land­use management is sophistic.

E.O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, 1992, pages 328­329

Whenever a community consists of too many people for the resources available to it, heavy mortality can then actually improve the conditions of life for the lucky survivors.

There is nothing more dangerous than a shallow­thinking compassionate person.

Garret Hardin

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The explosive growth of the human population is the most significant terrestrial event of the past million millennia. ... Whatever your cause, it’s a lost cause without population control.

Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich, Population Resources Environment

Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long­term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?

Professor Albert Bartlett, University of Colorado at Boulder

Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies. The more people there are, the less one individual matters.

What is the greater danger — nuclear warfare or the population explosion? The latter absolutely! To bring about nuclear war, someone has to do something; someone has to press a button. To bring about destruction by overcrowding, mass starvation, anarchy, the destruction of our most cherished values — there is no need to do anything. We need only do nothing except what comes naturally — and breed. And how easy it is to do nothing.

Isaac Asimov

The global economy is, in fact, nothing more than a transient set of trade and financial relations. ... The result, as far as America is concerned, has been an extended fiesta based on suburban comfort, easy motoring, fried food in abundance, universal air conditioning, and bargain­priced imported 73 page merchandise.

James Howard Kunstler, End of the Binge

Economic history is a never­ending series of episodes based on falsehoods and lies, not truths. It represents the path to big money. The object is to recognize the trend whose premise is false, ride that trend, and step off before it is discredited.

George Soros

Even when grappling with the idea of economic disintegration, Americans attempt to cast it in terms of technological or economic progress: eco­villages, sustainable development, energy efficiency and so on. Under the circumstances, such compulsive techno­optimism seems maladaptive. ... Why do people seem incapable of doing the simplest things without making them into projects, preferably ones that involve some element of new technology?

Dimitry Orlov, Our Village

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people…. [There is also an] inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and … degeneracy of manners and of morals…. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

James Madison

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved through understanding.

Albert Einstein

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying, losses.

Thomas Jefferson

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. (To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, this they falsely call empire; and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.)

74 page Tacitus, Agricola, Oxford Revised Translation, Chapter 30

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, Part 2

War is cruelty. There’s no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

William Tecumseh Sherman

When will men be convinced that even successful wars do at length become misfortunes to those who unjustly commenc’d them, and who triumph’d blindly in their success, not seeing all its consequences. There is so little good gain’d, and so much mischief done generally by wars that I wish the imprudence of undertaking them was more evident to princes. For in my opinion there never was a good war, or a bad peace. What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public utility!

Benjamin Franklin

War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war a physical force is created, and it is the executive will to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honor and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and the most dangerous weakness of the human breast — ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame — are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

James Madison

Great military peoples have conquered their known world time and time again through the centuries, only to die out in the inevitable ashes of their fire. Well over two thousand years ago, the Chinese philosopher, Laotzu, concluded that: “Weapons often turn upon the wielder; an army’s harvest is a waste of thorns.” We may have to resort to arms in the future, as we have in the past. We may have to use them to prevent atomic war from being launched against us. But let us have the wisdom to realize that the use of force is a sign of weakness on a higher plane, and that a policy based primarily on recourse to arms will sooner or later fail.

Charles Lindbergh, Of Flight and Life, 1948

Peasant rebellions were not exceptional events. They erupted so frequently in the course of these 75 page four centuries that they may be said to have been as common in this agrarian society as factory strikes would be in the industrial world. In southwestern France alone, some 450 rebellions occurred between 1590 and 1715. No region of Western Europe was exempted from this pattern of chronic violence. The fear of sedition was always present in the minds of those who ruled. It was a corrective, a salutary fear — since only the threat of insurrection could act as a check against unlimited exactions.

George Huppert, After the Black Death, 1998, page 80

The social intelligence hypothesis posits that the large brains [and] distinctive cognitive abilities of primates (in particular, anthropoid primates) evolved via a spiraling arms race in which social competitors developed increasing ‘Machiavellian’ strategies.

Andrew Whiten & Richard W. Byrne, Eds., Machiavellian Intelligence II, 1997, page 240

Males typically obtain meat in human and nonhuman primate societies and then attempt to use it to manipulate or control females.

Craig B. Stanford, 1999

War is a male reproductive strategy. All that is needed for the strategy to evolve, is that aggressors fight and win more often than they lose. (page 165)

Chimp social structure would be unique were it not for humans acting similarly. This is no coincidence. By most taxonomic criteria, chimps and humans are sibling species. Overall, chimp society is not only extremely sexist — with all adult males dominant over females — but also xenophobic to the extent of killing all alien males, many infants, and some old females who enter their territory. To some readers, my use of the word war may seem too strong to describe what male kin groups do. But systematic, protracted, deliberate, and cooperative brutal killings of every male in a neighboring community, plus genocidal and frequent cannibalistic murder of many of their offspring, followed by usurpation of the males’ mates and annexation of part or all of the losers’ territory, matches or exceeds the worst that humans do when they wage war.

Wild chimps reveal the natural contexts of territoriality, war, male cooperation, solidarity and sharing, nepotism, sexism, xenophobia, infanticide, murder, cannibalism, polygyny, and mating competition between kin groups of males — behaviors that have evolved through sexual selection. Also significant is the fact that none of these apes learned these violent behaviors by watching TV or by being victims of socioeconomic handicaps — poor schools, broken homes, bad fathers, illegal drugs, easy weapons, or any other sociological condition. Nor were these apes spurred to war by any political, religious, or economic ideology or by the rhetoric of an insane demagogue. They also were not seeking an ‘identity’ or buckling under peer pressure. Instead, they were obeying instincts, coded in the male psyche, dictating that they must win against other males. (page 176)

76 page The central ‘truth’ of sociologists is that nature, especially that of humankind, is nice and that people are designed to do things that, all in all, favor the survival of their species. Hence people could never be equipped by nature with instincts to kill other people. This idea comes from the Bambi school of biology, a Disneyesque vision of nature as a collection of moralistic and altruistic creatures. It admires nature for its harmony and beauty of form and for its apparent ‘balance’ or even cooperativeness. It admires the deer for its beauty and fleetness, and it grudgingly admires the lion for its power and nobility of form. If anything is really wrong with us, it explains, it is a sociocultural problem that we can fix by resocializing people. It is not a biological problem.

Nature, however, is actually a dynamic state of recurring strife of relentless competition, dedicated predators and parasites, and selfish defense. The deer owes its beauty and fleetness to predators such as mountain lions, which kill the clumsiest and slowest deer first; to competitors for food; and to competition between males to mate. Without predators, deer would not only lack fleetness; they would lack legs altogether. They would be slugs oozing from one plant to another. Yet even if these deer­slugs were the only animals out there, natural selection would favor the evolution of faster and more aggressive deer­slugs and would favor any other trait that made them superior competitors against each other. This would include the killing of one deer­slug by another in situations where it boiled down to kill or die.

Moreover, the power and noble visage of the lion (or of the family cat or dog, for that matter) rest entirely on natural selection having shaped not only a fleet predator and efficient killing machine but also a very violent competitor against its own kind in situations where the options were narrowed to exclude or kill, or else kill to survive or reproduce. (page 179)

Michael P. Ghiglieri, The Dark Side Of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence, Perseus, 1999

Counting societies instead of bodies leads to equally grim figures. In 1978 the anthropologist Carol Ember calculated that 90 percent of hunter­gatherer societies are known to engage in warfare, and 64 percent wage war at least once every two years. Even the 90 percent may be an underestimate, because anthropologists often cannot study a tribe long enough to measure outbreaks that occur every decade or so (imagine an anthropologist studying the peaceful Europeans between 1918 and 1938). In 1972 another anthropologist, W.T. Dival, investigated 99 groups of hunter­gatherers from 37 cultures, and found that 68 were at war at the time, 20 had been at war five to twenty­five years before, and all the others reported warfare in the more distant past. Based on these and other ethnographic surveys, Donald Brown includes that conflict, rape, revenge, jealously, dominance, and male coalitional violence are human universals.

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, page 57

The physical evidence provided by fossils and archaeological excavations stands witness to a bloody slaughter of our own species stretching back to our hominid ancestors — and as we argue, beyond that to a common ancestor we share with chimpanzees. There are no broken links in the 77 page transition from small raiding parties in preliterate societies to the classical battles of antiquity, and on to the laser­guided missiles and roadside bomb attacks of our own time. In the Middle Ages, one king defined a group of less than seven armed men as brigands, seven to thirty­five as an armed band, and more than thirty­five as an army. He was right in the sense that the transition from a raiding party to full­scale warfare occurs not when groups grow from thousands to tens of thousands, but in the transition from tens to several tens. The evolved predispositions that drive a band of Stone Age warriors setting out to ambush a rival and one million Russian soldiers attacking Berlin at the end of World War II are the same, in the sense that a large army is made up of tiny units, sometimes less than a dozen men, who are intensely loyal to one another and who do indeed share the basic characteristics of raiding parties.

Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden, SEX AND WAR: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World, page 170

Evolutionary psychology is not just one more school of psychology. It is a perspective on the whole of psychology that claims that we are human animals, and that our minds, no less than our bodies, are products of the forces of nature operating on a time frame of millions of years; human nature was forged from our ancestors’ struggle to survive and reproduce.

David Livingston Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind

Of course, you can argue with the proposition that all we are is knobs and turnings, genes and environment. You can insist that there’s something...something MORE. But if you try to visualize the form this something would take, or articulate it clearly, you’ll find the task impossible, for any force that is not in the genes or the environment is outside of physical reality as we perceive it. It’s beyond scientific discourse.

Robert Wright, The Moral Animal

During most of the twentieth century “determinism” was a term of abuse, and genetic determinism was the worst kind of term. Genes were portrayed as implacable dragons of fate, whose plots against the damsel of free will were foiled only by the noble knight on nurture.

Matthew Ridley, Nature via Nurture, page 98

Natural selection dictates that organisms act in their own self­interest... They “struggle” continuously to increase the representation of their genes at the expense of their fellows. And that, for all its baldness, is all there is to it; we have discovered no higher principle in nature.

Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin

Not only are human societies never alone, but regardless of how well they control their own 78 page population or act ecologically, they cannot control their neighbors’ behavior. Each society must confront the real possibility that its neighbors will not live in ecological balance but will grow its numbers and attempt to take the resources from nearby groups. Not only have societies always lived in a changing environment, but they always have neighbors. The best way to survive in such a milieu is not to live in ecological balance with slow growth, but to grow rapidly and be able to fend off competitors as well as take resources from others.

To see how this most human dynamic works, imagine an extremely simple world with only two societies and no unoccupied land. Under normal conditions, neither group would have much motivation to take resources from the other. People may be somewhat hungry, but not hungry enough to risk getting killed in order to eat a little better. A few members of either group may die indirectly from food shortages — via disease or infant mortality, for example — but from an individual's perspective, he or she is much more likely to be killed trying to take food from the neighbors than from the usual provisioning shortfalls. Such a constant world would never last for long. Populations would grow and human activity would degrade the land or resources, reducing their abundance. Even if, by sheer luck, all things remained equal, it must be remembered that the climate would never be constant: Times of food stress occur because of changes in the weather, especially over the course of several generations. When a very bad year or series of years occurs, the willingness to risk a fight increases because the likelihood of starving goes up.

If one group is much bigger, better organized, or has better fighters among its members and the group faces starvation, the motivation to take over the territory of its neighbor is high, because it is very likely to succeed. Since human groups are never identical, there will always be some groups for whom warfare as a solution is a rational choice in any food crisis, because they are likely to succeed in getting more resources by warring on their neighbors.

Now comes the most important part of this overly simplified story: The group with the larger population always has an advantage in any competition over resources, whatever those resources may be. Over the course of human history, one side rarely has better weapons or tactics for any length of time, and most such warfare between smaller societies is attritional. With equal skills and weapons, each side would be expected to kill an equal number of its opponents. Over time, the larger group will finally overwhelm the smaller one. This advantage of size is well recognized by humans all over the world, and they go to great lengths to keep their numbers comparable to their potential enemies. This is observed anthropologically by the universal desire to have many allies, and the common tactic of smaller groups inviting other societies to join them, even in times of food stress.

Assume for a moment that by some miracle one of our two groups is full of farsighted, ecological geniuses. They are able to keep their population in check and, moreover, keep it far enough below the carrying capacity that minor changes in the weather, or even longer­term changes in the climate, do not result in food stress. If they need to consume only half of what is available each year, even if there is a terrible year, this group will probably come through the hardship just fine. More important, when a few good years come along, these masterfully ecological people will not 79 page grow rapidly, because to do so would mean that they would have trouble when the good times end. Think of them as the ecological equivalent of the industrious ants.

The second group, on the other hand, is just the opposite — it consists of ecological dimwits. They have no wonderful processes available to control their population. They are forever on the edge of the carrying capacity, they reproduce with abandon, and they frequently suffer food shortages and the inevitable consequences. Think of this bunch as the ecological equivalent of the carefree grasshoppers. When the good years come, they have more children and grow their population rapidly. Twenty years later, they have doubled their numbers and quickly run out of food at the first minor change in the weather. Of course, had this been a group of “noble savages” who eschewed warfare, they would have starved to death and only a much smaller and more sustainable group survived. This is not a bunch of noble savages; these are ecological dimwits and they attack their good neighbors in order to save their own skins. Since they now outnumber their good neighbors two to one, the dimwits prevail after heavy attrition on both sides. The “good” ants turn out to be dead ants, and the “bad” grasshoppers inherit the earth. The moral of this table is that if any group can get itself into ecological balance and stabilize its population even in the face of environmental change, it will be tremendously disadvantaged against societies that do not behave that way. The long­term successful society, in a world with many different societies, will be the one that grows when it can and fights when it runs out of resources. It is useless to live an ecologically sustainable existence in the “Garden of Eden” unless the neighbors do so as well. Only one nonconservationist society in an entire region can begin a process of conflict and expansion by the “grasshoppers” at the expense of the Eden­dwelling “ants.” This smacks of a Darwinian competition — survival of the fittest — between societies. Note that the “fittest” of our two groups was not the more ecological, it was the one that grew faster. The idea of such Darwinian competition is unpalatable to many, especially when the “bad” folks appear to be the winners.

Steven A. LeBlanc, CONSTANT BATTLES: Why we Fight, 2004, pages 73­75

How true! Evolution theory explains our present dead end, why sociopaths weren’t bred out of the gene pool, and why untrained people can not understand complex systems or where this all leads. Our “selfish genes” didn’t evolve to avoid dieoff, they evolved to profit from it. We didn’t evolve to avert resource constraints; we evolved to kill those competing with us for those resources. The sociopaths make ideal leaders because they can make logical decisions without emotion. That is why they are still in the gene pool. Selfish­gene logic is that logic which out­reproduced the competition. We should learn to appreciate our sociopaths because we are going to need them. America is will be doing a hell of a lot of killing (millions) over the next few decades. It’s our genetic legacy.

Jay Hanson, personal communication, 22 March 2012

In general, an economist’s prior beliefs about what is true play a very important role in the way he sees economic evidence. Once their beliefs are formed, it is difficult to prove any economist’s priors wrong so convincingly that he will change his beliefs about the way the world works. And 80 page because of its seemingly comprehensive answers to all economic questions, the price­auction model creates a very strong set of prior beliefs. (page 18)

No discipline except economics attempts to make the world act as it thinks the world should act. But of course what Homo sapiens does and what Homo economicus should do are often quite different. That, however, does not make the basic model wrong, as it would in every other discipline. It just means that actions must be taken to bend Homo sapiens into conformity with Homo economicus. So, instead of adjusting theory to reality, reality is adjusted to theory. (page 21)

Lester C. Thurow, Dangerous Currents: The State of Economics, Random, 1983

The human mind evolved to believe in gods... Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to [science & engineering] which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms.

E.O. Wilson, The Biological Basis of Morality

Popular theology …is a massive inconsistency derived from ignorance. …The Gods exist because nature herself has imprinted a conception of them on the minds of men.

Cicero, De Natura Deorum, I, 16

There is the deeply embedded dominance of two strands of Cartesian thought in the social sciences: the fixed idea that there is a huge gulf between humans and other animals; and the belief that body and mind are separate rather than one and the same, which makes possible the implicit belief that biological evolution has to do with the body rather than the mind.

Jerome H. Barkow, 2006

As for pointing to our mental failures with scorn or dismay, we might as well profess disappoint­ ment with the mechanics of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. In other words, the degree of disillusionment we feel in response to any particular human behavior is the precise measure of our ignorance of its evolutionary and genetic origins.

Reg Morrison, The Spirit in the Gene

The human mind is a product of the Pleistocene age, shaped by wildness that has all but disappeared. If we complete the destruction of nature, we will have succeeded in cutting ourselves off from the source of sanity itself.

David Orr, environmental philosopher, in Adbusters, Sept./Oct. 2002

81 page Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

Buckminster Fuller

Scientists search for truth by forming statements that can be tested. If a statement cannot be tested, then it is not “scientific.” Testable statements are known as “hypotheses” and take the general form “If [I do this], then [this will occur].” For example, the hypothesis “If I drop a rock, then it will fall to the ground” can be tested to see if it is “false.”

In 1934, Sir Karl Popper proposed a criterion of testability, or falsifiability, for scientific validity. Scientific theories are hypotheses from which can be deduced statements testable by observation; if the appropriate experimental observations falsify these statements, the hypothesis is refuted. If a hypothesis survives efforts to falsify it, it may be tentatively accepted. No scientific theory, however, can be conclusively established.

Popper’s mode of thought — the habit of attempting to prove oneself wrong — is the only path to knowledge about the real world.

Evolutionary psychologists have found that humans evolved to naturally use a “falsification strategy” with respect to the social world, but use a “confirmation strategy” with respect to the physical world. Our innate social­world “falsification strategy” causes us to instinctively reject social anomalies and attempt to “falsify” claims about the real world that might jeopardize social beliefs (e.g., the claim that global oil production will “peak” soon).

On the other hand, our innate physical­world “confirmation strategy” allows us to defend social constructions of reality (e.g., the “free market”) to the death, even if the ideals they represent are far from physical reality.

Consider first a phenomenon I call the deontic effect in human reasoning (Cummins, 1996b, 1996c). Deontic reasoning is reasoning about rights and obligations; that is, reasoning about what one is permitted, obligated, or forbidden to do (Hilpinen, 1981; Manktelow & Over, 1991). Deontic reasoning contrasts with indicative reasoning, which is reasoning about what is true or false. When reasoning about deontic rules (social norms), humans spontaneously adopt a violation­detection strategy: They look for cheaters or rule­breakers. In contrast, when reasoning about the truth status of statements about the world, they spontaneously adopt a confirmation­seeking strategy. This effect is apparent in the reasoning of children as young as three years of age (Cummins, 1996a; Harris & Nuñez, 1996) and has been observed in literally hundreds of experiments on adult reasoning over the course of nearly thirty years, making it one of the most reliable effects in the psychological literature (see Cummins, 1996b, 1996c, and Oaksford & Chapter, 1996 for reviews of this literature).

Denise D. Cummins & Colin Allen (Editors), The Evolution of Mind, 82 page Oxford, 1998, pages 39, 40

Jay Hanson, The Best­Kept Secret in Washington, http://dieoff.com/page173.htm

One suspects that if somehow an alien time traveler could remove all traces of “falsification” from the historical record — exorcise it completely from our minds and documents — economics would look exactly the same. The prescriptive methodological “bite” seems to be more of an imperceptible nibble. But this impactive failure is just one side of the coin; the other is to suppose economists did respond; suppose they did reject all theories that were empirically falsified or did not consistently predict Lakatosian novel facts. Nothing would be left standing; there would be no economics.

D. Wade Hands

The origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self­ regulating market system. (page 29)

By the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, world commodity prices were the central reality in the lives of millions of Continental peasants; the repercussions of the London money market were daily noted by businessmen all over the world; and governments discussed plans for the future in light of the situation on the world capital markets. Only a madman would have doubted that the international economic system was the axis of the material existence of the race. Because this system needed peace in order to function, the balance of power was made to serve it. Take this economic system away and the peace interest would disappear from politics. (page 18)

By the end of the seventies the free trade episode (1846­79) was at an end; the actual use of the gold standard by Germany marked the beginnings of an era of protectionism and colonial expansion… the symptoms of the dissolution of the existing forms of world economy — colonial rivalry and competition for exotic markets — became acute. The ability of haute finance to avert the spread of wars was diminishing rapidly. For another seven years peace dragged on but it was only a question of time before the dissolution of nineteenth century economic organization would bring the Hundred Years’ Peace to a close. (page 19)

The breakdown of the international gold standard was the invisible link between the disintegration of world economy since the turn of the century and the transformation of a whole civilization in the thirties. Unless the vital importance of this factor is realized, it is not possible to see rightly either the mechanism which railroaded Europe to its doom, or the circumstances which accounted for the astounding fact that the forms and contents of a civilization should rest on so precarious foundations.

The true nature of the international system under which we were living was not realized until it failed. Hardly anyone understood the political function of the international monetary system; the awful suddenness of the transformation thus took the world completely by surprise... To liberal 83 page economists the gold standard was purely an economic institution; they refused even to consider it as a part of a social mechanism. Thus it happened that the democratic countries were the last to realize the true nature of the catastrophe and the slowest to counter its effects. Not even when the cataclysm was already upon them did their leaders see that behind the collapse of the international system there stood a long development within the most advanced countries which made that system anachronistic; in other words, the failure of market economy itself still escaped them. (page 20)

The transformation came on even more abruptly than is usually realized. World War I and the postwar revolutions still formed part of the nineteenth century. The conflict of 1914­18 merely precipitated and immeasurably aggravated a crisis that it did not create. But the roots of the dilemma could not be discerned at the time… The dissolution of the system of world economy which had been in progress since 1900 was responsible for the political tension that exploded in 1914. (page 21)

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon, 1957

The last two years of the decade while Europe enjoyed a rich fat afternoon, were the quietest. Nineteen­ten was peaceful and prosperous; with the second round of Moroccan crises and Balkan wars still to come. A new book, The Great Illusion by Norman Angell, had just been published, which proved that war was impossible. By impressive examples and incontrovertible argument Angell showed that in the present financial and economic interdependence of nations, the victor would suffer equally with the vanquished; therefore war had become unprofitable; therefore no nation would be so foolish as to start one. Already translated into eleven languages, The Great Illusion had become a cult. At the universities, in Manchester, Glasgow, and other industrial cities, more than forty study groups of true believers had formed, devoted to propagating its dogma. Angell’s most earnest disciple was a man of great influence on military policy, the King’s friend and adviser, Viscount Esher, chairman of the War Committee assigned to remaking the British Army after the shock of its performance in the Boor War. Lord Esher delivered lectures on the lesson of The Great Illusion at Cambridge and the Sorbonne wherein he showed how “new economic factors clearly prove the insanity of aggressive wars.” A twentieth­century war would be on such a scale, he said, that its inevitable consequences of “commercial disaster, financial ruin, and individual suffering” would be “so pregnant with restraining influences” as to make war unthinkable. He told an audience of officers at the United Service Club, with the Chief of General Staff, Sir John French, in the chair, that because of the interlacing of nations War “becomes every day more difficult and improbable.”

Germany, Lord Esher felt sure, “is as receptive as Great Britain to the doctrine of Norman Angell.” How receptive were the Kaiser and the Crown Prince to whom he gave, or caused to be given, copies of The Great Illusion is not reported. There is no evidence that he gave one to General Von Bernhardi, who was engaged in 1910 in writing a book called Germany and the Next War, published in the following year, which was to be as influential as Angell’s but from the opposite point of view. Three of its chapter titles, “The Right to Make War,” “The Duty to Make War,” and “World 84 page Power or Downfall” sum up its thesis.

Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August, pages 24­25

All these champions of interventionism fail to realize that their program thus implies the establishment of full government supremacy in all economic matters and ultimately brings about a state of affairs that does not differ from what is called the German or the Hindenburg pattern of socialism. If it is in the jurisdiction of the government to decide whether or not definite conditions of the economy justify its intervention, no sphere of operation is left to the market. … [T]he market is free as long as it does precisely what the government wants it to do. It is “free” to do what the authorities consider to be the “right” things, but not to do what they consider the “wrong” things; the decision concerning what is right and what is wrong rests with the government. Thus the doctrine and the practice of interventionism ultimately tend to abandon what originally distinguished them from outright socialism and adopt entirely the principles of totalitarian all­ around planning.

Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, pages 723­4

Should we be taking steps to limit the use of these most precious stocks of society’s capital so that they will still be available for our grandchildren?

Economists answer this question in two ways. First, they point out that fossil fuels like oil and gas are finite but not ‘essential.’ An essential resource is one, like oxygen, for which there are no substitutes. Substitutes exist for all the energy resources. We can substitute coal for oil and gas in most uses; we can liquefy or gasify coal where liquid or gas fuels are needed; when coal runs out, we can use higher­cost solar energy, nuclear fission, and perhaps someday even nuclear fusion. These last three are superabundant in the sense that when we run out of solar energy, the earth will already be uninhabitable.

A second point concerns the relative productivity of different assets. Many environmentalists argue that energy and other natural resources like wilderness areas and old­growth forests are very special kinds of capital that need to be preserved so that we can maintain ‘sustainable’ economic growth. Economists tend to disagree. They look at natural resources as yet another capital asset that society possesses — along with fast computers, human capital in an educated work force, and technological knowledge in its patents, scientists, and engineers. Both economists and environmentalists agree that this generation should leave an adequate stock of capital assets for future generations; but economists worry less about the exact form of capital than about its productivity. Economists ask, Would future generations benefit more from larger stocks of natural capital such as oil, gas, and coal or from more produced capital such as additional scientists, better laboratories, and libraries linked together by information superhighways?

The substitutability of natural capital and other kinds of capital is shown by the production indifference curve or ‘isoquant’ in Figure 18­2. We show there the amounts of the two kinds of 85 page capital that would be required to attain a certain level of output in the future (Q*), holding other inputs constant. That output can be produced at point C with a conservationist policy that emphasizes reducing energy use today, leaving much oil and gas and relatively little human capital for the future. Or it might be produced with a low­energy­price and high­education strategy at B. Either of these is feasible, and the more desirable one would be the one that has a higher consumption both now and in the future.

Note as well that the isoquant hits the vertical axis at point A, indicating that we can produce future output level Q* with no oil and gas. How is this possible? With the greater scientific and technical knowledge represented by point A, society can develop and introduce substitute technologies like clean coal or solar energy to replace the exhausted oil and gas. The curve hits the axis to indicate that in the long run, oil and gas are not essential.

Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, Economics, McGraw­Hill, 1998, page 328

Remember to hold other things constant when you are analyzing the impact of a variable on the economic system.

Samuelson & Nordhaus (with a straight face…)

There is a different and more fundamental cost that is independent of the monetary price. That is the energy cost of exploration and production. So long as oil is used as a source of energy, when the energy cost of recovering a barrel of oil becomes greater than the energy content of the oil, production will cease no matter what the monetary price may be.

M. King Hubbert, Stanford Geophysics Professor

Increases or decreases in the level of money supply are thought to influence the level of production in the economy. However, this is true only if the ‘externals’ to the economy — i.e., sources of energy from outside of the money circle — are constant. When the availability of energy changes, the economy changes in ways not correctable by manipulations of the money supply.

H.T. Odum in A Survey of Ecological Economics, Krishnan, Harris, and Goodwin, editors, Island Press, 1995, pages 204­206

The world’s present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin. Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely, exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter­energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost 86 page over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and, according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest. This disparity between a monetary system which continues to grow exponentially and a physical system which is unable to do so leads to an increase with time in the ratio of money to the output of the physical system. This manifests itself as price inflation. A monetary alternative corresponding to a zero physical growth rate would be a zero interest rate. The result in either case would be large­scale financial instability.

M. King Hubbert

Because the order of nature is providential, the free market that reflects natural order also reflects the workings of providence. In this way the spheres of morality, theology, jurisprudence, and economics become hostages to nature, so to speak.

Deborah Redman, The Rise of Political Economy as a Science, MIT, 1997, page 237

It is, in fact, the fate of all kinds of energy of position to be ultimately converted into energy of motion. The former may be compared to money in a bank, or capital, the latter to money which we are in the act of spending ... If we pursue the analogy a step further, we shall see that the great capitalist is respected because he has the disposal of a great quantity of energy; and that whether he be nobleman or sovereign, or a general in command, he is powerful only from having something which enables him to make use of the services of others. When a man of wealth pays a labouring man to work for him, he is in truth converting so much of his energy of position into actual energy...

The world of mechanism is not a manufactory, in which energy is created, but rather a mart, into which we may bring energy of one kind and change or barter it for an equivalent of another kind, that suits us better — but if we come with nothing in hand, with nothing we will most assuredly return.

Balfour Stewart, Professor of Natural Philosophy (1828­1887), The Conservation of Energy, 6th Edition, 1883, pages 26­27, 34. Quoted by Philip Mirowski, More Heat Than Light, Cambridge, 1989, page 132

High inflation rates can be explained by the linkages between fuel use and money supply. If the money supply is increased, stimulating demand beyond levels that can be satisfied by existing fuel supplies, then prices will rise. This implies that when the costs of obtaining fuel are high, fiscal and monetary policies may not be successful in stimulating economic growth.

Cutler J. Cleveland, Robert Costanza, Charles A.S. Hall, and Robert Kaufmann, Summary of Energy and the US Economy: A Biophysical Perspective, Science 225 (31 August 1984), 890­897

Give me control over a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws. 87 page Mayer Amchel Rothschild, 1790

The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908­2006) Canadian­born economist, Harvard professor, Money: Whence it came, where it went, 1975

The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.

Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (1834­1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham

People who will never turn a shovel full of dirt on the project (Muscle Shoals Dam) nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest... but here is the point: If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution, pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People. If the currency issued by the People were no good, then the bonds would be no good, either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charge at the hands of men who control the fictitious value of gold. Interest is the invention of Satan.

Thomas Alva Edison, interview in New York Times, 1921

When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769­1821) French emperor

The genius of our so­called democracy lies in its stability and predictability. James Madison (1751­ 1836) is known as “the father of the U.S. Constitution,” “the ideal Machiavellian Prince,” and “the father of preferred freedoms.” Madison’s primary political concern centered on the maintenance of social stability by the political and social control of competing factions; control by government itself was a secondary consideration. With those objectives in mind, the framers crafted an 88 page elaborate political system:

Where “first object of government” (highest priority) was “the faculties” of acquiring property. Where the struggle of classes and passions (e.g., religious conflict) was replaced with the struggle of interests in the economic sphere. Where the political system was extremely resistant to change. Where political power was reserved for a white male minority while projecting the illusion of self­government to the majority.

Madison scholar Richard K. Matthews explains:

By consciously denying virtually all but a handful of citizens any role in a governmental structure that, by design, was to be run by an elite of superior ability (who nonetheless would have to check and balance each other), Madison left [economic struggle] as the prime avenue for humanity to search for meaning. If Men Were Angels: James Madison & the Heartless Empire of Reason, Kansas, 1995, page 84

Jay Hanson, The Best­Kept Secret in Washington, http://dieoff.com/page173.htm

Remember, the United States is not a democracy — and has never been intended to be a democracy. It is what is called in the political science literature a polyarchy. A polyarchy is one in which a small sector of the population is in control of essential decision­making for the economy, the political system, the cultural system and so on. And the rest of the population is supposed to be passive and acquiescent. They are supposed to cede democracy to the elite elements who call themselves (rather) modestly the “responsible men.” “We are the responsible men and we take care of the affairs of the world.” The rest are sometimes called a “bewildered herd” or a rabble or something like that. Actually, I am quoting Walter Lippman, the leading figure in U.S. journalism, and a leading public intellectual of the 20th century.

This goes right back to the constitutional system. The system was designed that way.... It is not exactly what you learn in school. But if you read the debates of the Constitutional Convention, which are much more revealing than the published documents, you find that the main framer, James Madison (1751­1836), who was very lucid and intelligent, understood all this very well. He was a democrat. He wanted to have a kind of democracy in which the primary role of government — I am quoting now — “is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”

That is the fundamental role of government, what he (Madison) called “the permanent interests of the country” are those of property owners and that they must be protected. He was thinking very concretely. Remember, this was in the 18th century and the model they had in mind was England and the question of the English framework of the constitution kept coming up. And Madison pointed out that if in England the general population had the right to participate freely in the political system, then they would have to institute the kinds of programmes which we nowadays 89 page call agrarian reforms. They would want to take over property and have it used for the general population, not concentrated in the hands of a small number of wealthy. And, of course, that is intolerable.

The U.S. system was designed so that power was to be placed in the hands of what Madison called “the wealth of the nation” — people who are sympathetic to property and its rights and will not allow infringement on them. The rest of society is supposed to be fragmented and broken up so that they do not do too much.

Noam Chomsky

Democracy is the pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of the ignorant.

H.L Mencken

Economists have become a plague as dangerous as rabbits, prickly pear, or cane toads. Economists have become the cultural cane toads of Canberra, oozing over the landscape and endangering myriad indigenous species. Not only the economy but also mental health would be greatly improved if we could lift the fog of obfuscation on things economic. The first step is to take economists from their pedestal and to see them as the curiosities they are. The first step to reducing their power is to reduce their legitimacy. How is this to be achieved? First, economists’ outpourings should, as a matter of principle, be met with laughter, derision, benign paternalism. They should cease to be employed as media commentators. In the long term they should cease to be hired. Let them be pensioned off and die out. Extinction is a worthy end for a profession whose brief is rotten to the core.

Dr. Evan Jones, Economics Department, University of Sydney, 1991

THE CHICAGO SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS. A great center of contemporary scholasticism [q.v.] The economists working there and produced by it are as important to the stagnation of useful thought as the Schoolmen of the University of Paris were at the height of the Middle Ages.

Like that of the Paris scholastics, their mastery of highly complex rhetorical details obscures a great void at the centre of their argument. They also share a tactical genius for exporting their conceptual definitions to less important centres around the world. The result is a pleasing symphony of international echoes imitating their calculations and cadences so confirming their correctness, even when their policies bring economic disaster. The percussion section of Chicago's orchestra is the Nobel committee for economics. Each golden medal is like another congratulatory parchment presented at the end of an elaborate theological debate.

But what of content? There isn't much. What of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman? These minor Thomists preach little more than inevitability and so counsel passivity.

90 page What they call libertarian economics is a remarkable revenge of the scholastics on the men of the Enlightenment, who had theoretically destroyed them. Peel away the tangle of intellectual leaves from the Chicago School and what remains is a great clockmaker god who has set the world ticking. But the conclusion of the Enlightenment was that god's indifference left humans free to organize the world as they wished. Chicago has so deformed this idea as to invert it. The great clock has been turned into an absolute, all­encompassing system. Better than an ideology, the world is its own absolute economic truth. We must remain passive before its majesty.

This is a denial of Western experience. It is nonsense which simply comforts the power slipping increasingly into the corporatist structures.

Strategic thinking can save a great deal of time wasted over tactics. A large number of America’s economic problems, and those of the West [and of the world?], could be solved by shutting down the Chicago School of Economics.

This would not prevent the academics employed there from preaching their essentially anti­social and amoral doctrines. They would be gathered up with delight by the hundreds of imitation Chicago Schools. The purpose of closure would be simply to disentangle a tendentious ideology from its unassailable position within contemporary power structures. The same sort of liberating shock treatment was applied to European civilization in 1723 when the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was disbanded. The effect was to set free the ideas of the Enlightenment.

John Ralston Saul, The Doubter’s Companion, Simon & Schuster, 1994

I see you take care in your prospectus not to offend your economists by a declaration of your views; and in this I commend your prudence. But I hope in your work you will batter them, crush them, pound them, reduce them to dust and ashes. The fact is they are the most fanciful and arrogant set of men to be found nowadays, since the destruction of the Sorbonne... I ask myself with amazement what can have induced our [physiocrat] friend M. Turgot to join them.

David Hume (1711­1776), in a letter of 10 July 1769 to Morellet

A page of history is worth a volume of logic.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, NY Trust Co. v. Eisner, 256 U.S. 345, 1921

The best guide to the future is an understanding and a study of the past. When history is distorted, then any kind of rational, wise policies for the future become impossible.

Mark Weber

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. That men do not 91 page learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Aldous Huxley

The members of the American economics profession, as [Thurman W.] Arnold contended, performed a vital practical role in maintaining this unique system of corporate socialism American style. It was their role to prevent the American public from achieving a correct understanding of the actual workings of the American economic system. Economists instead were assigned the task to dispense priestly blessings that would allow business to operate independent of damaging political manipulation. They accomplished this task by means of their message of ‘laissez faire religion, based on a conception of a society composed of competing individuals.’ However false as a description of the actual U.S. economy, this vision in the mind of the American public was in practice ‘transferred automatically to industrial organizations with nation­wide power and dictatorial forms of government.’ Even though the arguments of economists were misleading and largely fictional, the practical — and beneficial — result of their deception was to throw a ‘mantle of protection ... over corporate government’ from various forms of outside interference. Admittedly, as the economic ‘symbolism got farther and farther from reality, it required more and more ceremony to keep it up.’ But as long as this arrangement worked and there could be maintained ‘the little pictures in the back of the head of the ordinary man,’ the effect was salutary ‘the great [corporate] organization was secure in its freedom and independence.’ It was this very freedom and independence of business professionals to pursue the correct scientific answer — the efficient answer — on which the economic progress of the United States depended.

Robert H. Nelson, Reaching for Heaven on Earth, Rowman & Littlefield, 1993

It is natural that the country whose theories of government are the most unrealistic in the world should develop the greatest and most powerful sub rosa political machinery.

Thurman Wesley Arnold (1891­1969), Yale Professor of Law, 1931­1938

The term up has no meaning apart from the word down. The term fast has no meaning apart from the term slow. In addition such terms have no meaning even when used together, except when confined to a very particular situation... most of our language about the organization and objective's of government is made up of such polar terms. Justice and injustice are typical. A reformer who wants to abolish injustice and create a world in which nothing but justice prevails is like a man who wants to make everything up. Such a man might feel that if he took the lowest in the world and carried it up to the highest point and kept on doing this, everything would eventually become up. This would certainly move a great many objects and create an enormous amount of activity. It might or might not be useful, according to the standards which we apply. However it would never result in the abolishment of down.

Thurman W. Arnold

92 page UNIVERSITY­TRAINED LIARS: Five Deliberate Lies

“There is an assumption in economics that the market system handles resource allocation in an efficient manner unless proven otherwise.” Thomas H. Tietenberg

“The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.” Joseph Schumpeter

We have seen in an earlier paper [1] how America was specifically designed to be a “special interest” government – a government by, for, and of the rich. This is done by giving social power (political power) to those with money. The role of the social scientist in America is simply to prevent the public from discovering how the American political system actually works – to provide an “umbrella of protection” [2] over the rich.

Ever since the Physiocrats, economists have begun with the political claim that “the market” is the best means to manage society and have spent over 200 years working backwards trying to prove it. They have failed. The bizarre result of 200 years spent reverse­engineering is a theory that must only reference itself to be even moderately coherent. In other words, economic theory is about economic theory – it’s a monstrous circular argument. This is typical:

“Economists assume people that people make ‘rational’ decisions but abstain from testing that assumption. Instead of testing, economists invoke ‘revealed preferences theory’ which states that choices are rational because they are based on preferences that are known through the choices that are made. In other words, economists resort to meaningless, circular arguments and mathematical conjuring tricks to justify their political program.” [3]

Those free marketers who bother to rationalize their arguments, base them on five deliberate lies:

DELIBERATE LIE #1. The market is “efficient”. This is the founding lie (actually an “idiosyncratic redefinition” of terms) which is designed to prevent engineers and scientists from investigating our money­based political system objectively. Economists know that people who do not have economic training are going to assume that “efficient” is used in the same way that engineers use the word: acting or producing effectively with a minimum of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort.

But for economists, “efficient” means either “efficient distribution” of profits or “efficient production” of products – not the “efficient use of materials.” Since the market economizes “money” (that which is in limitless supply [4] ), the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The reason economists use idiosyncratic redefinitions instead of coining new terms (like every other discipline) is to make them better liars!

Idiosyncratic redefinition allows economists to stand in front of your local Rotary Club and appear to HONESTLY use words that mean one thing to them, while Club members think they mean something completely different. This is how economists evade our innate ability to spot liars. 93 page Far from being “efficient”, the so­called “market system” is probably the MOST INEFFICIENT social organization possible! The overhead (commuting to work, banks, insurance companies, advertising agencies, etc.) associated with our present way of organizing consumes the largest fraction BY FAR of our natural resources – something like 2 trillion tonnes of oil equivalent per year! [5]

DELIBERATE LIE #2. “Wants” are the identical to “needs”. This is the second­most­important lie in economic theory. This lie sets one up to swallow the rest of the lies. Right wingers (it is boilerplate economic theory) deliberately lie about this because they want you to believe that Donald Trump “needs” another million dollar painting on the wall of one of his mansions just as badly as a welfare mother “needs” health care for her children. This amounts to a license for the rich to hog limited resources (on a spherical planet, all resources are “limited”) and serves as the Vaseline for the rest of the lies.

DELIBERATE LIE #3. People are “rational utility maximizers”.[6] Although even economists admit this is a lie, [7] it is still boilerplate economic theory. Economists MUST lie about this because if people are being manipulated by marketing, then the so­called “free market” obviously requires government intervention.

In a Liberal Democracy, tax payers are ultimately responsible for an individual if that individual becomes destitute or a criminal. Economists use the “rational utility maximizer” lie to prevent government intervention in markets when intervention would serve the common good. For example, a rational government would intervene in markets to prevent con artists from peddling their worthless shit to an unsuspecting public. (We have all seen those suckers dumping their last dollar in a slot machine.)

Economists argue that government can not possibly know what an individual “needs”. If people are manipulated by advertisers, flashing lights, and sex symbols, then government has a good reason to intervene in the market for an individual’s welfare because these causalities are dumped on government to care for after the con artists have cleaned them out. For example, a federal law could be passed that would limit legalized gambling to high net worth individuals (it’s now done with options and futures trading).

By having university­trained liars (economists) convince the victims that they alone are responsible for their own actions (instead of a team of best­professionals­money­can­buy who were hired to exploit the public), the rich evade responsibility for their actions. Thus “the market” repeats the basic motif of American politics and illustrates what makes it so clever: the rich manipulate unsuspecting citizens for fun and profit, deplete common resources, externalize social costs onto the tax payer, and blame the victims themselves or the elected screw­ups and their cronies for social problems. It’s brilliant!

DELIBERATE LIE #4. Money is just a “medium of exchange”.[8] War is continuation of politics by other means – Clausewitz Economics is a continuation of politics by other means – Hanson 94 page Money is literally “created” (and backed by consumer debt) every time a bank makes a loan. At the time the loan is made, not enough money is in circulation to pay the interest on the loan, so more money must be eventually “created”, by more consumer debt, to pay back the interest on the loan. [9] “Politics” is defined one attempting (and sometimes succeeding) to get another to do what one wants them to do. All higher social animals engage in politics: rams butt each other for females, a dog growls, a boss threatens to fire employees or reward them with pay raises.

Since money can also buy the behavior of other people, it qualifies is a form of political power. Thus, contemporary economic theory is actually a “political” theory which asserts that everyone will be better off if the rich are allowed to do whatever they want (so­called “market outcomes”).

DELIBERATE LIE #5. Economists have “proved” that the market is efficient![10] Economists use the word “proved” in the sense that one part of their bogus economic model agrees with another. It has absolutely nothing to do with the real world.

[1] http://warsocialism.com/founded.htm [2] http://dieoff.com/page235.htm [3] LUNATIC POLITICS, Jay Hanson, 1998 http://www.dieoff.com/page141.htm [4] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=­9050474362583451279&hl=en [5] Here is a very rough idea: In 2004, Americans consumed about 342,700,000 Btu, per capita, per year. [ http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tablee1c.xls ] This converts to about 86,358,951 calories per year [ http://www.onlineconversion.com/energy.htm ] or 86,358,951 / 365 = 236,599 calories per day. But humans only require something like 3,000 calories per day to survive, so it seems we (very roughly) waste something like 236,599 ­ 3,000 = 233,599 calories per day, per capita. Studies show that food grains produced with modern, high­yield methods (including packaging and delivery) now contain between four and ten calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of solar energy. So we will allow ten calories of energy to grow and process each calorie of food delivered, so 3,000 * 10=30,000 calories per day is required to keep someone alive. Thus, 233,599 – 30,000 = 203,599 calories are still being wasted each and every day, by every American. Let's allow 20,000 calories per day, per capita to collect and deliver food and water to each and every household in the country, so 203,599 ­ 20,000 = 183,599 calories wasted per day, per capita in the US. Population in America is 302,664,192 (August 2007 est.), [ http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html ] so 183,599 * 302,664,192 * 365 = 20,282,627,690,257,900 calories or 2,028,262,769 tonnes of oil equivalent is wasted each year in the US feeding people! (In 2006, oil production in the Middle East was only 1,221,900,000 tonnes! [ http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/reports_and_public ations/statistical_energy_review_2007/STAGING/local_assets/downloads/pdf/table_of_world_ oil_production_tonnes_2007.pdf ]) The market system is obviously the most inefficient organization in human history!! 95 page On a spherical planet, governed by the laws of thermodynamics, “the market system” WILL end – sooner­or­later, one­way­or­another. [6] The lie that people are so­called “Rational Utility Maximizers” provides the foundation and rationale for contemporary economics. See, for example, DECISION MAKING AND PROBLEM SOLVING, Herbert A. Simon, 1986: “Central to the body of prescriptive knowledge about decision making has been the theory of subjective expected utility (SEU), a sophisticated mathematical model of choice that lies at the foundation of most contemporary economics, theoretical statistics, and operations research. SEU theory defines the conditions of perfect utility­maximizing rationality in a world of certainty or in a world in which the probability distributions of all relevant variables can be provided by the decision makers. (In spirit, it might be compared with a theory of ideal gases or of frictionless bodies sliding down inclined planes in a vacuum.) SEU theory deals only with decision making; it has nothing to say about how to frame problems, set goals, or develop new alternatives.” http://warsocialism.com/simon.htm [7] Milton Friedman (1955) defended Rational Choice Theory (RCT) by insisting that economists should simply lie. Friedman argued that in accepting or dismissing a theory, we should only look at its fit with the data, not at the realism (or lack thereof) of its assumptions. Bluntly speaking, he urged us to apply to theories the principle we often apply to sausages: as far as the final product is good, better not to ask about the ingredients. This is the famous “as if” defense of RCT. [8] “MONEY: Anything which is widely acceptable in exchange for goods, or in settling debts, not for itself but because it can be similarly passed on, has the character of money since it serves the primary function of money, i.e. a means of payment. As a means of payment money is an entity which is transferred when a payment is made; as such it acts as a MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE, a function essential to any economy other than the most primitive.” [ p. 285, THE MIT DICTIONARY OF ECONOMICS, Fourth Edition; http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262660784 ]. [9] Watch this free video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=­9050474362583451279 or buy the DVD at: http://www.moneyasdebt.net/ [10] http://warsocialism.com/HowEconomistsSeeTheEnvironment.pdf

Jay Hanson, 28 June 2008 http://www.warsocialism.com/economic.htm

I am one of those who do not believe the national debt is a national blessing... it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country.

Andrew Jackson, Letter to L. H. Coleman of Warrenton, N.C., 29 April 1824

Evolutionary psychology is not just one more school of psychology. It is a perspective on the whole of psychology that claims that we are human animals, and that our minds, no less than our bodies, are products of the forces of nature operating on a time frame of millions of years; human nature was forged from our ancestors’ struggle to survive and reproduce.

David Livingston Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind 96 page One of the most widespread approaches to emerge is what might be called fitness teleology. Teleological explanations are found in Aristotle, and arguably constitute an evolved mode of interpretation built into the human mind. Humans find explaining things in terms of the ends they lead to intuitive and often sufficient. Social science theories have regularly depended on explicitly or implicitly teleological thinking. Economics, for example, explains choice behavior not in terms of its antecedent physical or computational causes but in terms of how the behavior serves utility maximization. Of course, the scientific revolution originated in Renaissance mechanics, and seeks ultimately to explain everything using forward physical causality — a very different explanatory system in which teleology is not admissible. Darwin outlined a physical process — natural selection — that produces biological outcomes that had once been attributed to natural teleological processes. Williams mounted a systematic critique of the myriad ways teleology had nonetheless implicitly infected evolutionary biology (where it persists in Darwinian disguises). ... Organisms are adaptation executers, not fitness pursuers.

Tooby & Cosmides

As a school of thought, teleology can be contrasted with metaphysical naturalism, which views nature as having no design or purpose. Teleology would say that a person has eyes because he has the need of sight, while naturalism would say that a person has sight because he has eyes.

Unattributed. Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology

Behavioural economics ... is best understood as a set of exceptions that modifies but leaves intact the canonical model of rational choice, not least since it is irrational to suppose that people in general behave irrationally.

The Economist, 29 April 2006

In 585 BC, the Greek philosopher Thales of Mellitus concluded that every observable effect must have a physical cause. The discovery of causality is now taken to mark the birth of science, and Thales is immortalized as its father. But causality also means the death of superstition.

Bob Parks

Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.

Richard Feynman

The idea of rational expectations has two components: first, that each person's behavior can be described as the outcome of maximizing an objective function subject to perceived constraints; and second, that the constraints perceived by everybody in the system are mutually consistent. The first part restricts individual behavior to be optimal according to some perceived constraints, while 97 page the second imposes consistency of those perceptions across people. In an economic system, the decisions of one person form parts of the constraints upon others, so that consistency, at least implicitly, requires people to be forming beliefs about others' decisions, about their decision processes, and even about their beliefs.

Why have economists embraced the hypothesis of rational expectations? One reason is that, if perceptions of the environment, including perceptions about the behavior of other people, are left unrestricted, then models in which people’s behavior depends on their perceptions can produce so many possible outcomes that they are useless as instruments for generating predictions. The combination of its two key aspects — individual rationality and consistency of beliefs — has in many contexts made rational expectations a powerful hypothesis for restricting the range of possible outcomes. Another reason for embracing rational expectations is that the consistency condition can be interpreted as describing the outcome of a process in which people have optimally chosen their perceptions. That is, if perceptions were not consistent, then there would exist unexploited utility­or­profit­generating possibilities within the system. Insisting on the disappearance of all such unexploited possibilities is a feature of all definitions of equilibrium in economics.

Thomas J. Sargent, Bounded Rationality In Macroeconomics, Clarendon Paperbacks, 2001, pages 6 & 7

Either we see business as a restorative undertaking, or we, business people, will march the entire race to the undertaker. Business is the only mechanism on the planet today powerful enough to produce the changes necessary to reverse global environmental and social degradation.

Paul Hawken, Inc. Magazine, April 1992

The required criteria for success in the 21st century are ecological integrity, effective decision­ making, and social cohesion. These are progressively replacing current commitments to maximum economic growth, compulsive consumption, and international competition.

Robert Theobald, Reworking Success

Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. …the past clarifies potential paths to the future. One often­discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the “crash” that many fear — a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the “soft landing’ that many people hope for — a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy­conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology.

98 page Joseph A. Tainter, Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies, from Getting Down to Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics, 1996; at http://www.dieoff.org/page134.htm

The [thermodynamic] laws that express the relation between matter and energy govern the rise and fall of political systems, the freedom or bondage of societies, the movements of commerce and industries, the origin of wealth and poverty, and the general physical welfare of a people.

Frederick Soddy, 1911

Anytime we can’t figure out how to find a win/win solution to a problem, it just means we haven’t really learned the rules of the game we are playing.

Dr. Eliayhu Goldratt, Avraham Goldratt Institute

It was futile to work for to work for political solutions to humanity’s problems because humanity’s problems were not political. Political problems did exist, all right, but they were entirely secondary. The primary problems were philosophical, and until the philosophical problems were solved, the political problems would have to be solved over and over again. The phrase “vicious circle” was coined to describe the ephemeral effectiveness of almost all political activity.

For the ethical, political activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that one could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one’s perceptions and transforming one’s self. For the unconscionable, political reactivism was seductive because it seemed to protect one’s holdings and legitimize one’s greed. Both sides were gazing through a kerchief of illusion.

The monkey wrench in the progressive machinery of primate evolution was the propensity of the primate band to take its political leaders — its dominant males — too seriously. Of benefit to the band when it was actively threatened by predators, the dominant male (or political boss) was almost wholly self­serving and was naturally dedicated not to liberation but to control. Behind his chest­banging and fang display, he was largely a joke and could be kept in his place (his place being that of a necessary evil) by disrespect and laughter. …

Of course, as long as there were willing followers, there would be exploitive leaders. And there would be willing followers until humanity reached that philosophical plateau where it recognized that its great mission in life had nothing to do with any struggle between classes, races, nations, or ideologies, but was, rather, a personal quest to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain. On that quest, politics was simply a roadblock of stentorian baboons.

Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All, 1990

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the 99 page people who don’t do anything about it.

Albert Einstein

Work is the basis of all wealth, all well­being, while monopoly and cartels are obstacles for the beneficial processes…

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith was correct in noting that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.

The Political Economist (apocryphal)

I have long written that the last official act of any government is to loot the nation, but I would add that the very first official act of any government is to render unusable by others the very means by which they came to power.

Michael Rivero, What Really Happened

One can relish the varied idiocy of human action during a panic to the full, for, while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.

‘The economic situation is fundamentally sound’ or simply ‘The fundamentals are good.’ All who hear these words should know that something is wrong.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929, Introduction

In economics, the majority is always wrong.

John Kenneth Galbraith

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.

Eugene V. Debs, American socialist leader (1855­1926)

When you have to classify the very capacity of the Earth to support life as an “externality,” then it is time to rethink your theory.

Herman Daly

[The natural right to be free of the debts of a previous generation is] a salutary curb on the spirit of 100 page war and indebtment, which, since the modern theory of the perpetuation of debt, has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Wayles Eppes, 1813

That we are overdone with banking institutions which have banished the precious metals and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium, that these have withdrawn capital from useful improvements and employments to nourish idleness, that the wars of the world have swollen our commerce beyond the wholesome limits of exchanging our own productions for our own wants, and that, for the emolument of a small proportion of our society who prefer these demoralizing pursuits to labors useful to the whole, the peace of the whole is endangered and all our present difficulties produced, are evils more easily to be deplored than remedied.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Abbe Salimankis, 1810. ME 12:379

The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.

Abraham Lincoln (apocryphal)

We need outside information, and we will have to learn. But it is complicated because most businesses have two information systems. One is organized around the data stream; the other, far older one, around the accounting system. The accounting system, though, is a five­hundred­year­ old information system that is in terrible shape. The changes we will see in information technologies over the next twenty years are nothing compared to the changes we will see in accounting.

We have already begun to observe changes in manufacturing cost accounting, whose roots go back to the 1920s and which is totally obsolete. But that is only for manufacturing, not service. Manufacturing today accounts for 23 percent of the GNP and perhaps 16 percent of employment. Thus, for the vast majority of businesses, we have no accounting that’s worth anything.

The problem with service­business accounting is simple. Whether it’s a department store or a university or a hospital, we know how much money comes in and we know how much money goes out. We even know where it goes. But we cannot relate expenditures to results. Nobody knows how.

At present, these two systems are separate. They will not be separate for our grandchildren’s generation. Today’s CEOs still depend on the accounting model. I don’t know of a single business that bases its decisions on the data processing system. Everyone bases their decisions on the accounting model, even though most of us have learned how easy this model is to manipulate. 101 page We know where we can trust it and where we can’t. We have all fallen through thin ice often enough not to walk on every part of it. We have learned to depend on cash flow because any second­year accounting student can manipulate a P&L. By the next generation, when the data processing stream is more familiar, we will be able to merge the two, or at least make them compatible, which they aren’t today. We teach them separately in the schools.

We have an accounting major and a computer science major, and the two don’t talk to each other. Both departments are, as a rule, headed by people who know little about information. The person who heads up your accounting system knows government requirements. The head of data processing came up in hardware. Neither knows information.

We will have to bring the two together, but we don’t yet know how. My own guess is that ten years from now a medium­size company, let alone a large one, will have two different people filling two positions that one person handles today. It will have a chief financial officer, who will not manage anybody. This person will manage the corporation’s money, the biggest part of which will be managing foreign exchange — tough now and soon to become much worse. And the company will have a chief information officer, who will manage its information systems. The company will need both. They both look at the world and the business quite differently.

Neither of these people, though, is focused on the wealth­producing capacity of the business or on tomorrow’s decisions. They are both focused on what happened. Not on what might happen or could be made to happen.

We have an enormous job ahead of us. We need to make ourselves and our businesses information­literate. The job will begin with the individual. We must become tool users. We need to look for information as a tool for a specific job, which few people do. (Most who approach information in this way are not in business; those who have gone the furthest are in the military.)

Out second big job is to use our data processing capacity to understand what is happening on the outside. The available data are usually in poor form and of dubious reliability. The only companies that have any information of this kind are the big Japanese trading houses. They have information about the outside (what they have about Brazil is amazing), but it took them forty years and a great deal of money to acquire it.

For most CEOs, the most important information is not about customers but about non­customers. This is the group in which change will occur.

Let’s take a look at that endangered species, the American department store. Nobody knew more about their customers than these stores. Until the 1980s they held onto their customers. But they had no information about non­customers. They had 28 percent of the retail market, the largest single share. However, this meant that 72 percent didn’t shop at the department stores. And the department stores had no information on these people. And they couldn’t have cared less. Thus, 102 page they were unaware that new customers — especially the affluent — do not shop in department stores. Nobody knows why. They just don’t. By the end of the 1980s, though, these noncustomers had become the dominant influence group. They began to determine how all of us shop. But nobody in the department store world knew this because they had been looking at their own customers. After a time, they knew more and more about less and less.

We must begin to organize information from the outside, where the true profit centers exist. We will have to build a system that gives this information to those who make the decisions. And we will have to bring together the accounting and data­processing systems, which is something few people are interested in doing. We’re at the beginning.

Peter F. Drucker, Managing in the Next Society. The Information Society; From Computer Literacy to Information Literacy, 2002, pages 52­56

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

H.L. Mencken

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude better than the animated contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

Samuel Adams

The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.

Arie De Geus, Royal Dutch Shell

Whenever a state or individual cited “insufficient funds” as an excuse for neglecting this important thing or that, it was indicative of the extent to which reality had been distorted by the abstract lens of wealth. During periods of so­called economic depression, for example, societies suffered for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation almost invariably disclosed that there were plenty of goods available. Plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What was missing was not materials but an abstract unit of measurement called “money.” It was akin to a starving woman with a sweet tooth lamenting that she couldn’t bake a cake because she didn’t have any ounces. She had butter, flour, eggs, milk, and sugar, she just didn’t have any ounces, any pinches, any pints. The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves. 103 page Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All, 1990, page 408

The health of a State depends on a due quantity and regular circulation of cash as much as the health of an animal body depends upon the due quantity and regular circulation of the blood.

Alexander Hamilton, First Secretary of the United States Treasury

Actually, I have no regard for money. Aside from its purchasing power, it’s completely useless.

Alfred Hitchcock

Hitler held that, as long as the international monetary system was based on gold, a nation which cornered gold could impose its will on those who lacked it. This could be done by drying up their sources of exchange, and thereby compelling them to accept loans on interest in order to distribute their wealth — their production. He said: ‘The community of the nation does not live by the fictitious value of money, but by real production which in its turn gives value to money. This production is the real cover of the currency, and not a bank or a safe full of gold.” He decided: (1) To refuse foreign interest­bearing loans, and base German currency on production instead of on gold. (2) To obtain imports by direct exchange of goods — barter — and subsidize exports when necessary. (3) To put a stop to what was called ‘freedom of the exchanges’ — that is, license to gamble in currencies and shift private fortunes from one country to another according to the political situation. And (4) to create money when men and material were available for work instead of running into debt by borrowing it.

Because the life of international finance depended upon the issue of interest­bearing loans to nations in economic distress, Hitler’s economics spelt its ruination. If he were allowed to succeed, other nations would certainly follow his example, and should a time come when all non­gold­ holding governments exchanged goods for goods, not only would borrowing cease and gold lose its power, but the money­lenders would have to close shop.

This financial pistol was pointed more particularly at the United States, because they held the bulk of the world’s supply of gold, and because their mass­production system necessitated the export of about 10 percent of their products in order to avoid unemployment. Further, because of the brutalities meted out to German Jews by Hitler understandably had antagonized American Jewish financiers, six months after Hitler became Chancellor, Samuel Untermeyer, a wealthy New York attorney, threw down the challenge. He proclaimed a ‘holy war’ against National Socialism and called for an economic boycott of German goods, shipping, and services.

Major General J.F.C. Fuller C.B., C.B.E., D.S.O., A Military History of the Western World, vol. III, Minerva Press, 1956, pages 368 ff

There may be some truth in that if the Arabs have some complaints about my policy towards 104 page Israel, they have to realize that the Jews in the U.S. control the entire information and propaganda machine, the large newspapers, the motion pictures, radio and television, and the big companies, and there is a force that we have to take into consideration.

Richard Milhous Nixon, Thirty­Seventh President of the United States of America, as quoted by Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, Oxford University Press, New York, (1994), pp. 232­233. Dinnerstein cites: “Clipping of Fikri Abbaza, interview with Richard Nixon, Al­Mussawar, July 12, 1974, folder ‘Jewish Matters, 1969­1974,’ box 5, Leonard Garment mss., LC.”

I only know three people who understand money, and two of them have very little of it.

A. Rothschild (apocryphal)

If all bank loans were paid [off], no one would have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of currency or coin in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or [checkbook] credit[s]. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied soon.

Robert H. Hemphill, former Credit Manager, The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Senate Document #23, page 102, January 24,1939

Seignorage on the currency is a wonderful central­banking thing which explains why many central banks, perhaps most central banks, are both grossly overstaffed and grossly inefficient. We were no exception to that. We took the seignorage income, which in a moderately high inflation environment was always more than adequate for our needs, spent what we felt like spending and handed over the rest to the Treasury by way of dividend. There was no political oversight of what we spent. We just got first crack at the seignorage.

Donald Brash, governor of the New Zealand Central Bank, 1999

You cannot in a democratic society have an institution which is either fully or partly dissociated from the electoral process and which has powers that central banks inherently have.

Alan Greenspan, 1994

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, 105 page then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake­up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.

Thomas Jefferson, Third President of the United States (1743 ­ 1826), Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802)

Money is the most important subject intellectual persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it is widely understood and its defects remedied very soon.

Robert H. Hemphill, Federal Reserve

You must remember that, to an economist, reality is a special case.

Harry Pollard

An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.

Alfred A. Knopf, 20th Century American publisher

Gresham’s Law: Bad money drives out good. Gresham’s Law applied to immigration: Immigrant labor pauperizes domestic labor. Cheap foreign labor drives out life­supporting local labor. Free trade drives out responsible trade.

Garrett Hardin, The Ostrich Factor

...[R]emember that this out­of­control global financial system is a man­made artifact, a political regime devised over many years by interested parties to serve their ends. Nothing in nature or, for that matter, in economics requires the rest of us to accept a system that is so unjust and mindlessly destructive.

William Greider, in The Nation

Whenever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the rich supposes the indigence of the many, who are often driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. ... Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. 106 page Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776, Book V, Chapter I, Part II, page 775

A state divided into a small number of rich and a large number of poor will always develop a government manipulated by the rich to protect their property.

Harold Laski, 1930

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

Plutarch (apocryphal)

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.

Gaylord Nelson (1916­2005)

Economists in particular, for the most part, have failed to come to grips with the ultimate consequences of the transition from the open to the closed earth.

Kenneth Boulding, 1966

Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.

A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well­being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well­being with the minimum of consumption.... The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity.

It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilisation not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man's work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products.

The most striking about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed.

Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non­violent, the elegant and beautiful.

The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on 107 page the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty, and chaotic.

If greed were not the master of modern man, how could it be that the frenzy of economic activity does not abate as higher standards of living are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness?

E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, 1973

Nothing in politics happens by accident. If it does, you better believe it was carefully planned.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (apocryphal)

The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in a letter written Nov. 21, 1933 to Colonel E. Mandell House

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

Ernest Benn

You can bet the rent money that whatever politicians do will end up harming consumers. ... Economic ignorance is to politicians what idle hands are to the devil. Both provide the workshop for the creation of evil.

Walter E. Williams

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Carl Jung, On the Psychology of the Unconscious, 1917

It is truly a triumph of rhetoric over reality when people can believe that going into politics is ‘public service,’ but that producing food, shelter, transportation, or medical care is not.

Thomas Sowell

What we call progress is a mysterious marriage of creativity and plunder. Civilization has flowered when human beings have devised ingenious new ways to organize production and social life, but such organization has usually been accomplished with stolen goods... Under girding [its] 108 page extraordinary achievements in art philosophy, literature, and statecraft [are] military power and conquest.

Richard J. Barnet

We can begin with a simple premise: Democracy and market economics are not the same thing. Worse, the attempts to confuse and conflate them in pretended equivalence stood out at the millennium as a destructive aspect of U.S. politics. As noted, the rollbacks of democracy sketched in these chapters have accompanied the elevation of markets — the fulfillment of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Union (launched as a common market) and the World Trade Organization, and the ascent of the Federal Reserve Board as the protector and liquidity provider of financial and securities markets.

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts would probably have been appalled. Politics and government down through the ages, while often brutal or grossly deficient, have been the subject matter of Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Machiavelli, Locke, and a few of America's own great names. Markets, by contrast, descend from fairs of late medieval Europe, church­ permitted safety valves for gambling, money­lending, and other forms of license. The idea that they have turned into a vehicle for human governance lacks any base beyond the occasional financial publication.

Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy, 2002, pages 417­418

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. … Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. ... Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Robert F. Kennedy, at the University of Kansas, 18 March 1968

An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.

Arthur Miller

According to an emerging idea, political positions are substantially determined by biology and can be stubbornly resistant to reason. ... Evidence to support this idea is growing. For example, twin 109 page studies suggest that opinions on a long list of issues, from religion in schools to nuclear power and gay rights, have a substantial genetic component. The decision to vote rather than stay at home on election day may also be linked to genes. Neuroscientists have also got in on the act, showing that liberals and conservatives have different patterns of brain activity. ...

These results are startling. Evolution is a slow process that takes centuries to effect changes, so why would it endow us with genes that affect issues which seem fleeting on an evolutionary scale? Frank Sulloway, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, backs the idea that inheritance can influence political attitudes, but admits the results may sound odd. “There's no such thing as a gene for disliking hippies,” he says. The point is that certain genes shape personality traits, and these are linked to political opinion. ... So while there isn’t a gene for liking hippies, there is probably a set of genes that influences openness, which in turn may influence political orientation. ...

The act of voting inevitably has an emotional dimension. Voters generally have a certain degree of trust in their chosen candidate, for example. That suggests that two well­studied genes may be involved: 5HTT and MAOA, which both help control the levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that also influences brain areas linked with trust and social interaction. People with versions of the genes that are better at regulating serotonin tend to be more sociable. According to Fowler’s hypothesis, they should also be more likely to vote. ...

Many other genes are likely to be involved. In a paper presented in April 2007 to the annual conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, held in Chicago, Ira Carmen, of the University of Illinois at Urbana­Champaign, discussed D4DR, a gene involved in regulating levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine. It is known that high levels of dopamine can cause obsessive­ compulsive disorder. Carmen speculates that dopamine might therefore be linked to the need to impose order on the world. If so, variants of the D4DR gene that lead to higher levels of dopamine should be found more frequently in conservatives. ...

Even without a detailed understanding of the genes involved, these studies could influence real­ world politics. At worst, the research could be interpreted in a depressing way. Jost and others speculate that all societies contain groups analogous to western liberals and conservatives: one wants to bring in new ideas, the other resists change.

Jim Giles, Are Political Leanings All in the Genes?, New Scientist Print Edition Issue 2641, 2 February 2008

Our most significant adaptation is a brain that is run by an operating system called “culture.” It is in our genes, so to speak, to learn and think within a cultural system. The food we eat (cheeseburgers, fermented puffins, grilled grubs, raw whale blubber) will vary with our culture, but what we crave (fats, high energy sugars and proteins) will not.

The ideas we think with (magical, philosophical, religious, scientific, individualistic, conformist) 110 page will also vary with our culture, but the fact that we think with ideas will not.

We have the most complex brain of any known animal, and at least some scientists think it got this complicated so that it could learn cultural systems: But can we distinguish the hardware from the operating system?

The selfish gene still is valid for a limited range of behavioral systems — but in humans and some other animals that live in groups of closely related individuals, it really ought to be understood as the “selfish genome.”

Helga Vierich­Drever

Humans as Stubborn Operators of Broken Machines

Behavioral economics grew out of a critique of standard economic assumptions. This tradition sometimes leads to a view of behavioral economics as a collection of “biases,” that is, violations of standard assumptions in economics.

Behavioral models often take as a starting point a standard economic model and reinterpret the model as a description how the person thinks and feels. Next, an (often compelling) case is made that many of the assumptions are unrealistic because humans cannot perform the difficult mental tasks embodied in the formalism. The mistake or bias is typically modeled by assuming that some aspect of the optimization procedure in the decision model is done incorrectly. Typically, behavioral economists take great care in motivating the particular mistake and provide detailed evidence that humans indeed have trouble performing the task required by the model. Finally, the psychological and sometimes also the economic consequences of the model with the bias are explored. However, rarely do these theories ask whether — once the mistake is taken for granted — the original model makes sense. In other words, why would humans go to the trouble of maximizing objective functions, formulating complicated beliefs only to get things systematically wrong?

For example, consider the O’Donoghue­Rabin model of naive, dynamically inconsistent decision makers. These decision­makers maximize a standard utility function but have incorrect beliefs about their own future behavior. The assumption that humans have wrong, even systematically biased, beliefs seems plausible and strikes a cord with most readers. At the same time, it seems highly implausible that individuals would go to the trouble of solving a dynamic optimization problem when solving this problem has no clear benefit. In a standard model, maximizing a utility function is simply a concise representation of how the agent behaves. But once the model is interpreted as a mental process, we must imagine that the decision maker actually performs the optimization.

Since the decision maker is systematically wrong about future behavior there is no obvious benefit from maximizing the objective function as opposed to taking some other (perhaps arbitrary) 111 page action. The metaphor of an operator of a broken machine comes to mind. Think of a car owner who operates a car with a defective steering and yet behaves as if the steering were in perfect working condition. He spends great effort learning how to drive on a perfectly working car only to crash his defective vehicle at every opportunity.

Bayes’ rule is an implication of the standard model of decision­making together with the existence of subjective probabilities and the separation of payoffs and beliefs. There are numerous experiments to describe how individuals process information incorrectly, that is, in ways inconsistent with Bayes’ rule. One way in which behavioral models deal with violations of Bayesian updating is to assume that individuals apply Bayes’ rule incorrectly or apply it to the wrong underlying stochastic process. The problem with this type of model is that by introducing the bias the model has lost the reason why individuals should hold probabilistic beliefs to begin with. Why go to the trouble of forming numerical representations of likelihoods when those representations are used incorrectly? While it is very plausible that agents make mistakes in information processing, it seems even more plausible that the remainder of the standard model is also wrong given that information is processed incorrectly.

Wolfgang Pesendorfer, Behavioral Economics Comes of Age, Princeton, 2006, pages 9­10

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.

Carroll Quigley, Author, Historian, Government consultant

Further economic growth is neither possible nor desirable. Modern industrial economy is not required for cultural or spiritual growth, and poses a threat to human survival.

Dimitri Orlov

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as the final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 1949

All the perplexities, confusion, and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.

There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by sword. The other is by debt. 112 page John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, 25 August 1787

This institution [privately­owned central banks] is one of the most deadly hostility against the principles of our Constitution…suppose a series of emergencies should occur…an institution like this…in a critical moment might overthrow the government.

Thomas Jefferson, December 1803 letter to Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin

We say in our platform that we believe that the right to coin and issue money is a function of government. We believe it. We believe that it is a part of sovereignty, and can no more with safety be delegated to private individuals than we could afford to delegate to private individuals the power to make penal statutes or levy taxes…Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank, and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson rather than with them, and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of government, and that the banks ought to go out of the governing business… When we have restored the money of the Constitution, all other reform will be possible, but until this is done there is no other reform that can be accomplished.

William Jennings Bryan, in his Cross of Gold speech, 1896

The real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over city, state and nation. Like the octopus of real life, it operates under cover of a self created screen....At the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both political parties.

New York City Mayor John F. Hylan, 1922

The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson — and I am not wholly excepting the Administration of W.W. [Woodrow Wilson]. The country is going through a repetition of Jackson's fight with the Bank of the United States — only on a far bigger and broader basis.

Franklin Roosevelt, letter to Col. Edward Mandell House, 21 November 1933

The depression was the calculated ‘shearing’ of the public by the World Money powers, triggered by the planned sudden shortage of supply of call money in the New York money market....The One World Government leaders and their ever close bankers have now acquired full control of the money and credit machinery of the U.S. via the creation of the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank.

113 page Curtis Dall (FDR's son­in­law), My Exploited Father­in­Law, 1967

As the name implies, process politics emphasizes the adequacy and fairness of the rules governing the process of politics. If the process is fair, then, as in a trial conducted according to due process, the outcome is assumed to be just — or at least the best the system can achieve. By contrast, systems politics is concerned primarily with desired outcomes; means are subordinated to predetermined ends.

William Ophuls & Boyan, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited: The Unraveling of the American Dream, 1992, page 242

But what counter­insurgency really comes down to is the protection of the capitalists back in America, their property, and their privileges. US national security, as preached by US leaders, is the security of the capitalist class in the US, not the security of the rest of the people. (page 562)

American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force — without a secret police force. Now, more than ever, each of us is forced to make a conscious choice whether to support the system of minority comfort and privilege with all its security apparatus and repression, or whether to struggle for real equality of opportunity and fair distribution of benefits for all of society, in the domestic as well as the international order. It's harder now not to realize that there are two sides, harder not to understand each, and harder not to recognize that like it or not we contribute day in and day out either to the one side or to the other. (page 597)

Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, 1975

Is realpolitik part of human nature? A subset? Yes and no. “Realpolitik” is a collective aspect of human nature (although, it could be applied to chimps, wolves, lions, etc.) It’s the practical political situation as it exists at a specific point in time.

As we have discussed before, the way our government actually works isn’t taught in schools except (apparently) to lobbyists. Instead Americans (even academics) are taught “idealism,” and this ignorant view of how governments actually work is hammered down the throats of ordinary Americans on talk radio — and talking­head TV — 24/7.

Americans are brainwashed into thinking that the only choices are “laissez faire” or government intervention, which is portrayed as Soviet Union style of government), but this is a lie promoted by the Right. These are the same arguments made before the minimum wage, social security, etc. were enacted. In fact, business could not even exist without government interference (to enforce contracts, etc.). Moreover, those 35,000 lobbyists are after more government interference, not less.

These points were made by [Thurmond] Arnold in his work, by Robert H. Nelson, and now by Cass Sunstein. Here is some history as to how we got here: 114 page http://www.warsocialism.com/gospelOfEfficiency.htm

Unless activists consider the actual political system, they are going to fail again and again and again until a new version of Julian Simon is trotted out of some closet somewhere, given a script that is so stupid that a chimp would gag on it, and Americans will simply send the troops for more supplies.

Jay Hanson, 16 June 2009, personal communication

I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.

William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism, 1959

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908­2006)

The little­known ninth law of thermodynamics states that the more money a group receives from the taxpayer, the more it demands and the more it complains.

Matt Ridley, 1994

The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn’t deliver the goods.

John Maynard Keynes (apocryphal)

Economics is a magical technique for making a political problem (disempowerment) and a spiritual problem (no higher purpose) look like a technical problem (not enough goods).

KAPO Consensus

Although it has been said repeatedly that we need a new conception of the world to replace the ideology of self­help, free enterprise, competition, and beneficent cupidity upon which Americans have been nourished since the foundation of the Republic, no new conceptions of comparable strength have taken root and no statesman with a great mass following has arisen to propound them... 115 page Almost the entire span of American history under the present Constitution has coincided with the rise and spread of modern industrial capitalism. In material power and productivity the United States has been a flourishing success. Societies that are in such good working order have a kind of mute organic consistency. They do not foster ideas that are hostile to their fundamental working arrangements. Such ideas may appear, but they are slowly and persistently insulated, as an oyster deposits nacre around an irritant. They are confined to small groups of dissenters and alienated intellectuals, and except in revolutionary times they do not circulate among practical politicians.

Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, pages vii– ix, 1948

What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles.

George Wilhelm Hegel

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another — slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire would ruin us.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985, Foreword 116 page We have a large public that is very ignorant about public affairs and very susceptible to simplistic slogans by candidates who appear out of nowhere, have no track record, but mouth appealing slogans. …

The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up­to­date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. …

In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era, ca. 1970

The era of procrastination, of half­measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…

Winston Churchill, November 1936

The division of the United States into two federations of equal force was decided long before the civil war by the high financial power of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained in one block and as one nation, would attain economical and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over the world. The voice of the Rothschilds predominated. They foresaw the tremendous booty if they could substitute two feeble democracies, indebted to the financiers, to the vigorous Republic, confident and self­providing. Therefore they started their emissaries in order to exploit the question of slavery and thus dig an abyss between the two parts of the Republic.

Otto von Bismarck, 1876 (apocryphal)

The few who understand the system, will either be so interested from its profits or so dependent on its favors, that there will be no opposition from that class.

Rothschild Brothers of London, 1863

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

H.L. Mencken 117 page And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

[It was] the poverty caused by the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament which has caused in the colonies hatred of the English and . . . the Revolutionary War.

Benjamin Franklin (apocryphal)

…[C]ommerce is but a means to an end, the diffusion of civilization and wealth. To allow commerce to proceed until the source of civilization is weakened and overturned is like killing the goose to get the golden egg. Is the immediate creation of material wealth to be our only object? Have we not hereditary possessions in our just laws, our free and nobly developed constitution, our rich literature and philosophy, incomparably above material wealth, and which we are beyond all things bound to maintain, improve, and hand down in safety? And do we accomplish this duty in encouraging a growth of industry which must prove unstable, and perhaps involve all things in its fall?

William Stanley Jevons, 1865

What is baffling is why our regulators have failed and continue to fail to act on the precautionary principle. They tend to rely instead on what we might call the anti­precautionary principle. When a new technology is being proposed, it must be permitted unless it can be shown beyond reasonable doubt that it is dangerous. The burden of proof is not on the innovator; it is on the rest of us.

Dr. Peter Saunders, Professor of Applied Mathematics at King's College London, co­ Founder of ISIS (Institute for Science in Society), Use and Abuse of the Precautionary Principle, 2000

The neoclassical school is the dominant (and probably the numerically largest) school in contemporary economics. For neoclassical economists, micro economic theory (i.e., welfare economics) underlies every theoretical subfield of specialization and every theoretical, practical, and policy­oriented conclusion at which they arrive. All of their cost­benefit analyses, their demonstrations of the universal gains from foreign trade, their notions of market efficiency that are encountered in every branch of applied economics, as well as their notion of rational prices, have absolutely no meaning whatsoever other than that manifested in their faith that a free­enterprise, competitive market system will tend toward a Pareto optimal situation. Without a Pareto optimal situation in effect, these phrases and notions cannot be defended. In fact, in the absence of an 118 page optimal situation, these phrases have no meaning whatsoever. They are given meaning only when the neoclassical economists first posit the existence of a Pareto optimum; then, by definition, all exchangers are said to gain, resources are said to be ‘efficiently allocated,’ prices are said to be ‘rational’ and therefore conducive to making accurate assessments — on utilitarian grounds — of the social costs and social benefits of various government projects. Utilitarian neoclassical welfare economics pervades and dominates nearly all neoclassical analyses on all theoretical and practical matters.

E.K. Hunt & Mark Lautzenheiser, Destruction of The Invisible Hand, History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective, Third Edition, 2011

It is not needed, nor fitting here [in discussing the Civil War] that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions; but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effect to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor, in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them, and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded thus far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class — neither work for others nor have others working for them. … It is not forgotten that a considerable number of persons mingle their own labor with capital; that is, they labor with their own hands and also buy or hire others to labor for them; but this is only a mixed and not a distinct class. No principle stated is disturbed by the existence of this mixed class.

Abraham Lincoln, Address to Joint Session of Congress, 3 December 1861

What to many appears to be a “conspiracy of elites” is just our way of life. Evidence of this is the increasingly eerie way that the financial crimes of recent years somehow vanish into the ethers of history without any official notice from either the media or the police powers of society. 119 page Some would blame our current problems on an organized conspiracy. I wish it were so simple. Members of a conspiracy can be rooted out and brought to justice. This system, however, is fueled by something far more dangerous than conspiracy. It is driven not by a small band of men but by a concept that has become accepted as gospel: the idea that all economic growth benefits humankind and that the greater the growth, the more widespread the benefits. This belief also has a corollary: that those people who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should be exalted and rewarded, while those born at the fringes are available for exploitation.

The concept is of course, erroneous. We know that in many countries economic growth benefits only a small potion of the population and may in fact result in increasingly desperate circumstances for the majority. This effect is reinforced by the corollary belief that the captains of industry who drive this system should enjoy a special status, a belief that is the root of many of our current problems and is perhaps also the reason why conspiracy theories abound. When men and women are rewarded for greed, greed becomes a corrupting motivator. When we equate the gluttonous consumption of the earth’s resources with a status approaching sainthood, when we teach our children to emulate people who live unbalanced lives, and when we define huge sections of the population as subservient to an elite minority, we ask for trouble. And we get it. (page xii)

That is what we EHMs [Economic Hit Men] do best: we build a global empire. We are an elite group of men and women who utilize international financial organizations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks. Like our counterparts in the Mafia, EHMs provide favors. These take the form of loans to develop infrastructure — electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports, or industrial parks. A condition of such loans is that engineering and construction companies from our own country must build all these projects. In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston, or San Francisco.

Despite the fact that the money is returned almost immediately to corporations that are members of the corporatocracy (the creditor), the recipient country is required to pay it all back, principal plus interest. If an EHM is completely successful, the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh. This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil or the Panama Canal. Of course, the debtor still owes us the money — and another country is added to our global empire. (page xx)

John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 2004, Preface

Even the very earliest Vedic poems, composed sometime between 1500 and 1200 BC, evince a constant concern with debt — which is treated as synonymous with guilt and sin. ... In all Indo­ European languages (such as English and French), words for “debt” are synonymous with those 120 page for “sin” or “guilt,” illustrating the links between religion, payment, and the mediation of the sacred and profane realms by “money.” For example, there is a connection between money (German Geld), indemnity or sacrifice (Old English Geild), tax (Gothic Gild) and, of course, guilt. ...

Why ... do we refer to Christ as the “redeemer?” The primary meaning of “redemption” is to buy something back, or to recover something that had been given up in security for a loan; to acquire something by paying off a debt. It is rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God’s own son to rescue humanity from eternal damnation, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction. ...

The authors of the Brahmanas were not alone in borrowing the language of the marketplace as a way of thinking about the human condition. Indeed, to one degree or another, all the major world religions do this.

The reason is that all of them — from Zoroastrianism to Islam — arose amidst intense arguments about the role of money and the market in human life, and particularly about what these institutions meant for fundamental questions of what human beings owed to one another. The question of debt, and arguments about debt, ran through every aspect of the political life of the time. ... We have spent thousands of years contemplating sacred texts full of political allusions that would have been instantly recognizable to any reader at the time when they were written, but whose meaning we now can only guess at.

One of the unusual things about the Bible is that it preserves some bits of this larger context. ... It would seem that the economy of the Hebrew kingdoms, by the time of the prophets, was already beginning to develop the same kind of debt crises that had long been common in Mesopotamia: especially in years of bad harvests, the poor became indebted to rich neighbors or to wealthy moneylenders in the towns, they would begin to lose title to their fields and to become tenants on what had been their own land, and their sons and daughters would be removed to serve as servants in their creditors’ households, or even sold abroad as slaves.

[This is what the biblical book of Nehemiah is referring to in the passage,] “Some of our daughters are brought unto bondage already: neither is it in our power to redeem them.” One can only imagine what those words meant, emotionally, to a father in a patriarchal society in which a man’s ability to protect the honor of his family was everything. Yet this is what money meant to the majority of people for most of human history: the terrifying prospect of one’s sons and daughters being carried off to the homes of repulsive strangers to clean their pots and provide the occasional sexual services, to be subject to every conceivable form of violence and abuse, possibly for years, conceivably forever, as their parents waited, helpless, avoiding eye contact with their neighbors, who knew exactly what was happening to those they were supposed to have been able to protect...

Through most of history, when overt political conflict between classes did appear, it took the form of pleas for debt cancellation — the freeing of those in bondage, and usually, a more just reallocation of the land. … What we see, in the Bible and other religious traditions, are traces of the 121 page moral arguments by which such claims were justified, usually subject to all sorts of imaginative twists and turns, but inevitably, to some degree, incorporating the language of the marketplace itself.

David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011, pages 56, 59, 80­81, 85, 87

What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family­ruled dictators actually owned their countries. …And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business — a perfectly justified cause — and against “governments.” What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties — which then hand their democratic mandate and people’s power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of “experts” from America’s top universities and “think tanks,” who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalization rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed — and still believe — they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have — through the gutlessness and collusion of governments — become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people’s wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator­brothers could imagine.

Robert Fisk, Bankers are the Dictators of the West, The Independent, 10 September 2011

In numerous treatises on the passions that appeared in the seventeenth century, no change whatever can be found in the assessment of avarice as the “foulest of them all” or in its position as the deadliest Deadly Sin that it had come to occupy toward the end of the Middle Ages.

Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (with Albert Sen), Princeton, 1997

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

Bertrand Russell (1872­1970)

If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.

Andrew Lewis

122 page In whatever political or economic game you’re playing, if you don’t know exactly who the mark is, and why and how, then you’re the mark.

Various Late 20th Century Political Philosophers

CORPORATIONS fas­cism (fâsh’iz’em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism. [Ital. fascio, peasant cooperative, worker’s union; Latin. fasces, bundle.] –fas’cist n. ­fas­cis’tic (fa­shis’tik) adj.

The American Heritage Dictionary, Houghton Mifflin, 1983

Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is a merger of state and corporate power.

Giovanni Gentile, Encyclopedia Italiana entry, appropriated by Benito Mussolini

Fascism will come to America, but likely under another name, perhaps anti­fascism.

Huey Long, 1932

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.

Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here, 1935

If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

James Madison

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism, ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any controlling private power.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, message to Congress, 29 April 1938

Criminal. n. A person with predatory instinct who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.

Howard Scott

Man must have an idol. The amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry. [There is]

123 page no idol more debasing than the worship of money.... be careful to choose that life which will be the most elevating in its character.

Andrew Carnegie

Slavery is the legal fiction that a Person is Property. Corporate Personhood is the legal fiction that Property is a Person.

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

Of all the possible values of human society, one and one only is the truly sovereign, truly universal, truly sound, truly and completely acceptable goal of man in America. That goal is money.

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

We thought we were getting something for nothing, but we were getting nothing for everything.

Wendell Berry

Even the most courageous among us only rarely has the courage for what he really knows... But tell me, my brothers, if humanity still lacks a goal, is humanity itself not still lacking too?

Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra

I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

Thomas Jefferson, 1816, quoted by Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment

There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by…corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.

James Madison

Every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add...artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics, and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government.

124 page Andrew Jackson, veto of National Bank Bill, 10 July 1832

In this point of the case the question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions.

Andrew Jackson

We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.

Abraham Lincoln, in a letter of 21 November 1864 to Colonel William F. Elkins

Shall the railroads govern the country or shall the people govern the railroads?... This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.

Rutherford B. Hayes, exclaiming in amazement about the Gilded Age a few years after Lincoln’s 1864 letter. Both Hayes and Lincoln had been railroad lawyers.

The system of corporate life is a new power, for which our language contains no life. We have no word to express government by monied corporations.

Charles Francis Adams, A Chapter of Erie, 1869 [The 20th Century repaired that lack: “fascism,” q.v.]

I am more than ever convinced of the dangers to which the free and unbiased exercise of political opinion — the only sure foundation and safeguard of republican government — would be exposed by any further increase of the already overgrown influence of corporate authorities.

Martin Van Buren

As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear, or is trampled beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters. 125 page Grover Cleveland, Fourth Annual Message to Congress, 3 December 1888

Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with those institutions.

Theodore Roosevelt, 1901, First Annual Message to Congress

Where a trust becomes a monopoly the state has an immediate right to interfere.

Theodore Roosevelt, speech to New York legislature, 3 January 1900

I again recommend a law prohibiting all corporations from contributing to the campaign expenses of any party… Let individuals contribute as they desire; but let us prohibit in effective fashion all corporations from making contributions for any political purpose, directly or indirectly.

Theodore Roosevelt

The fortunes amassed through corporate organization are now so large, and vest such power in those that wield them, as to make it a matter of necessity to give to the sovereign — that is, to the Government, which represents the people as a whole — some effective power of supervision over their corporate use. In order to insure a healthy social and industrial life, every big corporation should be held responsible by, and be accountable to, some sovereign strong enough to control its conduct.

Theodore Roosevelt

When men attempt to amass such stupendous capital as will enable them to suppress competition, control prices, and establish a monopoly, they know the purpose of their acts. Men do not do such things without having it clearly in mind.

President William Taft, in the Message of the President of the United States to the Sixty­ second Congress, December 5, 1911, on the anti­trust statute

We all know that, as things actually are, many of the most influential and most highly remunerated members of the Bar in every center of wealth, make it their special task to work out bold and ingenious schemes by which their wealthy clients, individual or corporate, can evade the laws which were made to regulate, in the interests of the public, the uses of great wealth.

Theodore Roosevelt, Harvard Commencement Address, 1905

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the 126 page unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.

Theodore Roosevelt, 19 April 1906

A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men ... We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world ... no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in the condemnation of it.

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country.

Woodrow Wilson, in reference to his signing the Federal Reserve Act in 1913

An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

Woodrow Wilson (apocryphal)

Every single empire, in its official discourse, has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.

Edward Said

When the President signs this act [Federal Reserve Act of 1913], the invisible government by the money power — proven to exist by the Monetary Trust Investigation — will be legalized. The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation. From now on, depressions will be scientifically created.

Charles Lindbergh

Our government, national and state, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks today... The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being. There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be 127 page neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.

Theodore Roosevelt, 1910 (from http://www.grannyd.com)

We are a business people. The tillers of the soil, the wage workers, the business men — these are the three big and vitally important divisions of our population. The welfare of each division is vitally necessary to the welfare of the people as a whole.

The great mass of business is of course done by men whose business is either small or of moderate size. The middle­sized business men form an element of strength which is of literally incalculable value to the nation. Taken as a class, they are among our best citizens. They have not been seekers after enormous fortunes; they have been moderately and justly prosperous, by reason of dealing fairly with their customers, competitors, and employees. They are satisfied with a legitimate profit that will pay their expenses of living and lay by something for those who come after, and the additional amount necessary for the betterment and improvement of their plant. The average business man of this type is, as a rule, a leading citizen of his community, foremost in everything that tells for its betterment, a man whom his neighbors look up to and respect; he is in no sense dangerous to his community, just because he is an integral part of his community, bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. His life fibers are intertwined with the life fibers of his fellow citizens…

So much for the small business man and the middle­sized business man. Now for big business. …

It is imperative to exercise over big business a control and supervision which is unnecessary as regards small business. All business must be conducted under the law, and all business men, big or little, must act justly. But a wicked big interest is necessarily more dangerous to the community than a wicked little interest. ‘Big business’ in the past has been responsible for much of the special privilege which must be unsparingly cut out of our national life.

I do not believe in making mere size of and by itself criminal. The mere fact of size, however, does unquestionably carry the potentiality of such grave wrongdoing that there should be by law provision made for the strict supervision and regulation of these great industrial concerns doing an interstate business, much as we now regulate the transportation agencies which are engaged in interstate business. The antitrust law does good in so far as it can be invoked against combinations which really are monopolies or which restrict production or which artificially raise prices. …

The important thing is this: that, under such government recognition as we may give to that which is beneficent and wholesome in large business organizations, we shall be most vigilant never to allow them to crystallize into a condition which shall make private initiative difficult. It is of the utmost importance that in the future we shall keep the broad path of opportunity just as open and easy for our children as it was for our fathers during the period which has been the glory of America’s industrial history — that it shall be not only possible but easy for an ambitious men, whose character has so impressed itself upon his neighbors that they are willing to give him capital and credit, to start in business for himself, and, if his superior efficiency deserves it, to triumph 128 page over the biggest organization that may happen to exist in his particular field. Whatever practices upon the part of large combinations may threaten to discourage such a man, or deny to him that which in the judgment of the community is a square deal, should be specifically defined by the statutes as crimes. And in every case the individual corporation officer responsible for such unfair dealing should be punished. …

We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. We have only praise for the business man whose business success comes as an incident to doing good work for his fellows. But we should so shape conditions that a fortune shall be obtained only in honorable fashion, in such fashion that its gaining represents benefit to the community. …

We stand for the rights of property, but we stand even more for the rights of man. … We will protect the rights of the wealthy man, but we maintain that he holds his wealth subject to the general right of the community to regulate its business use as the public welfare requires.

Theodore Roosevelt

Big business is not dangerous because it is big, but because its bigness is an unwholesome inflation created by privileges and exemptions which it ought not to enjoy.

Woodrow Wilson, Acceptance Speech, Democratic National Convention, 7 July 1912

If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of government. I do not expect monopoly to restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.

Woodrow Wilson

If it can be done, it will be done.

Andy Grove, CEO of Intel Corporation. A variation of Murphy’s Law.

The first thing to understand is the difference between the natural person and the fictitious person called a corporation. They differ in the purpose for which they are created, in the strength which they possess, and in the restraints under which they act.

Man is the handiwork of God and was placed upon earth to carry out a Divine purpose; the corporation is the handiwork of man and created to carry out a money­making policy.

There is comparatively little difference in the strength of men; a corporation may be one hundred, one thousand, or even one million times stronger than the average man. Man acts under the restraints of conscience, and is influenced also by a belief in a future life. A corporation has no soul 129 page and cares nothing about the hereafter…

A corporation has no rights except those given it by law. It can exercise no power except that conferred upon it by the people through legislation, and the people should be as free to withhold as to give, public interest and not private advantage being the end in view.

William Jennings Bryan, U.S. Secretary of State and three­time Presidential candidate

No business is above government; and government must be empowered to deal adequately with any business that tries to rise above government.

Private enterprise is ceasing to be free enterprise. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (quoted in Money Talks)

Out of this modern civilization royalists carved new dynasties... The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Renomination Speech, 27 June 1936

That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy — from the eighteenth­ century royalists who held special privileges from the crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without the consent of the governed; that they denied the right of free assembly and free speech; that they restricted the worship of God; that they put the average man’s property and the average man’s life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they regimented the people.

And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

Since that struggle, however, man’s inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution — all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks, and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital — all undreamed 130 page of by the Fathers — the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small­businessmen and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive­minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor — these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small­businessmen, the investments set aside for old age — other people’s money — these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.

Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: “Necessitous men are not free men.” Liberty requires opportunity to make a living — a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people’s money, other people’s labor — other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people’s mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They 131 page granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half­and­half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over­privileged alike.

The brave and clear platform adopted by this convention, to which I heartily subscribe, sets forth that government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.

But the resolute enemy within our gates is ever ready to beat down our words unless in greater courage we will fight for them.

For more than three years we have fought for them. This convention, in every word and deed, has pledged that the fight will go on.

The defeats and victories of these years have given to us as a people a new understanding of our government and of ourselves. Never since the early days of the New England town meeting have the affairs of government been so widely discussed and so clearly appreciated. It has been brought home to us that the only effective guide for the safety of this most worldly of worlds, the greatest guide of all, is moral principle.

We do not see faith, hope, and charity as unattainable ideals, but we use them as stout supports of a nation fighting the fight for freedom in a modern civilization.

Faith ­ in the soundness of democracy in the midst of dictatorships. Hope ­ renewed because we know so well the progress we have made. Charity ­ in the true spirit of that grand old word. For charity literally translated from the original means love, the love that understands, that does not merely share the wealth of the giver, but in true sympathy and wisdom helps men to help themselves.

We seek not merely to make government a mechanical implement, but to give it the vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity.

132 page We are poor indeed if this nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not needed in the world. We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in the books of human fortitude.

In the place of the palace of privilege we seek to build a temple out of faith and hope and charity.

It is a sobering thing, my friends, to be a servant of this great cause. We try in our daily work to remember that the cause belongs not to us, but to the people. The standard is not in the hands of you and me alone. It is carried by America. We seek daily to profit from experience, to learn to do better as our task proceeds.

Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold­blooded and the sins of the warm­hearted on different scales.

Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

In this world of ours in other lands, there are some people, who, in times past, have lived and fought for freedom, and seem to have grown too weary to carry on the fight. They have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of a living. They have yielded their democracy.

I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope. They begin to know that here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.

I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Acceptance Speech, Democratic Nominating Convention, 1936

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net 133 page income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for the development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very nature of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military­industrial[­congressional*] complex. The potential for disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial­military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task­forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific­ technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system — ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

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 asking 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.

134 page Dwight David Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 17 January 1961 [* in original draft, per Susan Eisenhower, Granddaughter]

Vietnam showed us that foreign wars don’t end when the invader can no longer fight, but when the invasion is no longer profitable.

Greg Palast

Democracy maintains that government is established for the benefit of the individual, and is charged with the responsibility of protecting the rights of the individual and his freedom in the exercise of his abilities. Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice.

Harry Truman

The best argument against democracy is a five­minute conversation with the average voter.

(A) lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Winston Churchill

I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

We haven’t done anything for business this week — but it is only Monday morning.

Lyndon Baines Johnson, speech to U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 27 April 1964

Oligarchy? A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it.

Plato (428­347 B.C.), The Republic, Book VIII

In 1945, corporations paid 50 percent of all federal tax revenues. Today they pay 7 percent. The government is borrowing money from the people it should be taxing — a major reason for the huge deficits.

Michael Parenti, Against Empire

In 1886, in a stunning victory for the proponents of corporate sovereignty, the Supreme Court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad [118 U.S. 394] that a private corporation is a natural person under the U.S. Constitution — although the constitution makes no mention of 135 page corporations — and is thereby entitled to the protections of the Bill of Rights, including the right to free speech and other constitutional protections extended to individuals.

Thus corporations finally claimed the full rights enjoyed by individual citizens while being exempted from many of the responsibilities and liabilities of citizenship. Furthermore, in being guaranteed the same right to free speech as individual citizens, they achieved, in the words of Paul Hawken, “precisely what the Bill of Rights was intended to prevent: domination of public thought and discourse.” The subsequent claim by corporations that they have the same right as any individual to influence the government in their own interest pits the individual citizen against the vast financial and communications resources of the corporation and mocks the constitutional intent that all citizens have an equal voice in the political debates surrounding important issues.

David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

The court does not wish to hear argument on the question of whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.

Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394, 396 (1886)

Also see: http://www.thomhartmann.com/search/node/Waite

The Personification of Corporation

IN which it is explained how great organizations can be treated as individuals, and the curious ceremonies which attend this way of thinking.

One of the essential and central notions which give our industrial feudalism logical symmetry is the personification of great industrial enterprise. The ideal that a great corporation is endowed with the rights and prerogatives of a free individual is as essential to the acceptance of corporate rule in temporal affairs as was the ideal of the divine right of kings in an earlier day. Its exemplification, as in the case of all vital ideals, has been accomplished by ceremony. Since it has been a central ideal in our industrial government, our judicial institutions have been particularly concerned with its celebration. Courts, under the mantle of the Constitution, have made a living thing out of this fiction. Men have come to believe that their own future liberties and dignity are tied up in the freedom of great industrial organizations from restraint, in much the same way that they thought their salvation in the future was dependent on their reverence and support of great ecclesiastical organizations in the Middle Ages. This ideal explains so many of our social habits, rituals, and institutions that it is necessary to examine it in some detail. (page 186)

The origin of this way of thinking about organization is the result of a pioneer civilization in which 136 page the prevailing ideal was that of the freedom and dignity of the individual engaged in the accumulation of wealth. The independence of the free man from central authority was the slogan for which men fought and died. This free man was a trader, who got ahead by accumulating money. There was something very sacred in the nineteenth­century conception of this activity. In the ‘seventies the most popular text in economics was one originally written by a clergyman, Bishop Francis Wayland, and revised in 1878 by A. L. Chapin, President of the Congregational College at Beloit. Joseph Dorfman, in his brilliant book on Thorstein Veblen and His America, summarizes this philosophy of the holy character of the trader’s function as follows:

1) “God has made man a creature of desires” and has established the material universe “with qualities and powers . . . for the gratification of those desires.” Desire is the stimulus to production and invention. 2) To satisfy desires, to obtain pleasures, man must by “irksome” labour force “nature to yield her hidden resources.” 3) The exertion of labour establishes a right of PROPERTY in the fruits of labour, and the “idea of exclusive possession is a necessary consequence.” Originally the object belongs to the producer “by an intuitive conception of right, and the act of appropriation is as instinctive as the act of breathing.” The right of property may be conceived as “a law of natural justice,” as Bowen of Harvard put it, because “the producer would not put forth his force and ingenuity if others deprived him of their fruits.” Thus is established 4) “The Right of EXCHANGE.”

Here is the beginning of the religion of the essential dignity of an individual’s accumulating wealth by trading which later became the mystical philosophy that put the corporate organization ahead of the governmental organization in prestige and power, by identifying it with the individual. Our fathers breathed this atmosphere in every day of their schooling. For a pointed summary of their attitude toward distribution of goods by so­called governmental organizations, we quote again from Mr. Dorfman’s book: (page 187)

Since socialism is the “utter negation” of the right of private property, “man is no more adapted to it than the barn fowl is to live in the water.” Philanthropy or any other aid of the poor is a violation of the same laws of God and property. All attempts to “relieve the natural penalties of indolence and improvidence” bring about “unexpected and severe evil.” The doctrine that the government should provide for the unemployed “is the most subversive of all social order.” Even the claim of Ruskin that “all labours of like amounts should receive the same reward,” means the suppression of “commercial law,” which is “God’s method.” If labour and capital are free, as they are in the “order of nature undisturbed” under “the law of competition,” then “the flow of each . . . toward an equilibrium, is as natural as that of waters of the ocean under gravitation.” In reality the labourer has no complaint against the competitive system. As Perry put it, employer and employee “come together of necessity into a relation of mutual dependence, which God has ordained, and which, though man may temporarily disturb it, he can never overthrow.”

Here was the philosophy of the men who came later to dominate our large industrial organizations and also to work for them. There was nothing in that philosophy which justified far­flung 137 page industrial empires. Indeed, the great organization in which most men were employees, and a few at the top were dictators, was a contradiction of that philosophy. The great organization came in as a result of mechanical techniques which specialized the work of production so that men could not operate by themselves. Nothing could stop the progress of such organization, and therefore in order to tolerate it, men had to pretend that corporations were individuals. When faced with the fact that they were not individuals, they did not seek to control, but denounced and tried to break them up into smaller organizations. Those who did not choose to dissent, however, sought refuge in transferring the symbolism of the individual to the great industrial armies in which they were soldiers.

…

Men cheerfully accept the fact that some individuals are good and others bad. Therefore, since great industrial organizations were regarded as individuals, it was not expected that all of them would be good. Corporations could therefore violate any of the established taboos without creating any alarm about the “system” itself. Since individuals are supposed to do better if let alone, this symbolism freed industrial enterprise from regulation in the interest of furthering any current morality. The laissez faire religion, based on a conception of a society composed of competing individuals, was transferred automatically to industrial organizations with nation­wide power and dictatorial forms of government.

This mythology gave the Government at Washington only a minor part to play in social organization. It created the illusion that we were living under a pioneer economy composed of self­sufficient men who were trading with each other. In that atmosphere the notion of Thomas Jefferson, that the best government was the one which interfered the least with individual activity, hampered any control of our industrial government by our political government. The Government at Washington gradually changed into what was essentially a spiritual government whose every action was designed to reconcile the conflict between myth and reality which men felt when a creed of individualism was applied to a highly organized industrial world. Government in Washington was supposed to act so as to instill “confidence” in great business organizations. The Supreme Court of the United States, because it could express better than any other institution the myth of the corporate personality, was able to hamper Federal powers to an extent which foreigners, not realizing the emotional power of the myth, could not understand. This court invented most of the ceremonies which kept the myth alive and preached about them in a most dramatic setting. It dressed huge corporations in the clothes of simple farmers and merchants and thus made attempts to regulate them appear as attacks on liberty and the home. So long as men instinctively thought of these great organizations as individuals, the emotional analogies of home and freedom and all the other trappings of “rugged individualism” became their most potent protection.

…

Symbolism made practical legislation legalistic and complicated so that it would not contradict 138 page fixed beliefs. For example, the Social Security Act was drawn to resemble an insurance corporation, because insurance corporations were supposed to be very pious and respectable individuals indeed. The Government put money in a huge reserve. This reserve had to be invested in its own bonds and therefore had no meaning whatever, except to make social security legislation look like an old­line insurance company. In other enterprises the Government found that by adopting the device of a government corporation it gave its activities a little of the freedom which was enjoyed by private corporations and escaped the rules and principles which hampered action when it was done by a government department instead of a government corporation. In other words, it gave the Government some of the robes of the individual.

The extent to which freedom of restraint of great industrial government was dramatized as individual freedom is illustrated by the fact that it was possible for John W. Davis, as late as 1936, to rouse his audience to a high pitch of indignation against an act regulating holding companies by speaking as follows:

There is something in this act that arouses me far beyond the scope and tenor of the act itself. In one respect it is unique in the history of our legislation; in one respect it constitutes the gravest threat to the liberties of American citizens that has emanated from the halls of Congress in my lifetime. That is strong language. But I mean to make it so. (New York Times, August 26, 1936.)

It was the personification of the corporation as an individual which gave moving force to such remarks, which otherwise would seem almost incredible. Anyone who actually struggled for the liberties of actual individuals, rather than idealized ones, was greeted with the hostility that greets anyone who tears the veil away from a great symbol.

Thurmond Arnold, Chapter VIII in The Folklore of Capitalism, 1937

The exercise of the police power of the state shall never be so abridged or construed as to permit corporations to conduct their business in such manner as to infringe the rights of individuals or the general well­being of the State.

California Constitution of 1879, Article XII, Section 8

The legal make­believe that the corporation is a person, the ingenuities by which it has been fitted out with a domicile, the elaborate web of ‘as­ifs’ which the courts have woven, have put corporate affairs pretty largely out of the regulations we decree. [The corporation, unlike real persons, has] no anatomical parts to be kicked or consigned to the calaboose; no conscience to keep it awake all night; no soul for whose salvation the parson may struggle; no body to be roasted in hell or purged for celestial enjoyment. [No one can lay] bodily hands upon General Motors or Westinghouse...or incarcerate the Pennsylvania Railroad or Standard Oil of New Jersey with all its works.

Walton H. Hamilton, economist and lawyer, On the Composition of the Corporate Veil, 194_ 139 page A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. As such, unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetimes of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself… It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.

Wendell Berry, The Idea of a Local Economy, Orion, Winter 2001

The corporation is not a person and it does not live. It is a lifeless bundle of legally protected financial rights and relationships brilliantly designed to serve money and its imperatives. It is money that flows in its veins, not blood. The corporation has neither soul nor conscience.

David Korten, The Post­Corporate World, page 75

As a socially responsible business, our intention is to take an active role in providing educational and life­enhancing experiences that have significantly positive effects on the quality of life. This requires much more than an intellectual stance. It calls forth a daily commitment to honor the sacredness of all life... to value wisdom, flexibility, and the cultivation of compassion.

David C. Korten

Our challenge is to create a global system that is biased toward the small, local, cooperative, resource­conserving, and long­term. One that empowers people to create good living in balance with nature. Healthy societies depend on healthy, empowered local communities that build caring relationships among people and help us connect to a particular piece of the living Earth with which our lives are intertwined. Such societies must be built through local­level action, household by household, community by community, individual by individual. To correct the deep dysfunction, we must shed the illusions of our collective cultural trance, reclaim the power we have yielded to failing institutions, take back responsibility for our lives, and reweave the basic fabric of caring families and communities to create places for people and other living things.

David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes…

140 page There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its ‘finger men’ (to point out enemies), its ‘muscle men’ (to destroy enemies), its ‘brain guys’ (to plan war preparations), and a ‘Big Boss’ (supernationalistic capitalism). It may seem odd for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to do so. I spent 33 years and four months in active military service as a member of our country's most agile military force — the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to Major General. And during that period I spent more of my time being a high­class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just a part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher­ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909­12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that the Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals and promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. I operated on three continents

Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, U.S. Marine Corps (1881­1940), two­time recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, in Common Sense, 1935. Butler also exposed a planned coup d’etat in Washington in 1934.

Oil has literally made foreign and security policy for decades. Just since the turn of this century, it has provoked the division of the Middle East after World War I; aroused Germany and Japan to extend their tentacles beyond their borders; the Arab Oil Embargo; Iran versus Iraq; the Gulf War. This is all clear.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, 9 December 1999

You never hear of any disturbances in Northern Luzon [Philippines]... because there isn’t anybody there to rebel. That country was marched over and cleared out... The good lord in Heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under the ground; our soldiers took no prisoners; they kept no records; they simply swept the country and wherever or however they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him.

A Republican member of Congress in an eyewitness report on the US invasion of the Philippines, 1899 (apocryphal)

141 page Corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Impunity: wealth.

Conservative: a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; they look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs. Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.

G.K. Chesterton, The Secret People

Corporations are “worms in the body politic.”

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Jefferson, the man who wanted an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting monopoly, would be aghast at our billion­dollar corporations. Jefferson, who abolished primogeniture and entail in Virginia in order to prevent monopoly in land, would be appalled by our high percentage of tenancy. Jefferson as the man who dreaded the day when many of our citizens might become landless, would perhaps feel our civilization was trembling on the brink of ruin, if he were to find so many of our people without either land or tools, and subject to the hire and power of distant corporations. If the Jefferson of 1820 could see his name used by men crying ‘States’ rights!’ in order to protect not individual liberties but corporate property, then he would shudder.

Henry A. Wallace, former populist U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and Vice­ President of the United States, 17 November 1937

In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of the citizens to give to another.

Voltaire

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776, Book V, Chapter I, Part II

142 page Government has no other end but the preservation of property.

John Locke, Civil Government

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Was there ever domination that did not appear natural to those who possess it?

John Stuart Mill

Whenever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it. They will use whatever means are convenient to that end and will seek to justify them by the most plausible arguments they are able to devise.

Reinhold Neibuhr

Commerce is entitled to a complete and efficient protection in all its legal rights, but the moment it presumes to control a country, or to substitute its fluctuating expedients for the high principles of natural justice that ought to lie at the root of every political system, it should be frowned on, and rebuked.

James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat, 1838

Subject to compensation when compensation is due, the legislature may forbid or restrict any business when it has sufficient force of public opinion behind it.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1926

I know of no original product invention, not even electric shavers or heating pads, made by any of the giant laboratories or corporations... The record of the giants is one of moving in, buying out, and absorbing the small creators.

General Electric Vice President John Molloy, Live for Success, New York, Bantam, 1983

Why shouldn’t the American people take half my money away from me? I took all of it from them.

Edward Filene, quoted in Schlesinger’s The Coming of a New Deal, 1959

If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold. 143 page Andrew Lewis

Do you want to know the cause of war? It is capitalism, greed, the dirty hunger for dollars. Take away the capitalist and you will sweep war from the earth.

Henry Ford, interview, Detroit News, 1915(?)

Capitalism, inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization, creates, educates, and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1942

If small business goes, big business does not have any future except to become the economic arm of a totalitarian state.

Philip D. Reed

Corporations have at different times been so far unable to distinguish freedom of speech from freedom of lying that their freedom has to be curbed.

Carl Becker, 1873­1945

There is nothing mutually exclusive about making a profit and serving the needs of society. Personally, I have no doubt that the companies that will be the most profitable in the long run will be those that serve society best... Society will reward those that help unclog our highways, rebuild and vitalize our cities, cleanse our streams and conquer poverty and disease — not those whose pursuit of the dollar blinds them to such needs.

Charles B. McCoy, Du Pont Corporation

Business is a means to an end for society and not an end in itself, and therefore business must act in concert with a broad public interest and serve the objectives of mankind and society or it will not survive.

Lammot du Pont Copeland, Chairman of Du Pont

Capitalism in the United States has undergone profound modification, not just under the New Deal but through a consensus that continued after the New Deal... Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country.

Norman Cousins

144 page What kind of society isn’t structured in greed? The problem of social organization is now to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system.

Milton Friedman, in Playboy Magazine, 1973

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

Lord Keynes

Free enterprise is dead in some segments of our economy and seemingly on its death bed in others. It, however, is not beyond cure. The medicine I propose is a large dose of antitrust.

U.S. Senator Philip A. Hart, 1912­1976

I have a consistent rule: the American people should know as much about the Pentagon as the Soviet Union and China do, as much about General Motors as Ford does, and as much about City Bank as Chase Manhattan does.

Ralph Nader

The business of government is to keep government out of business — that is, unless business needs government aid.

Will Rogers

There is nothing written in the sky that says the world would not be a perfectly satisfactory place if there were only 100 companies.

Reagan anti­trust chief William Baxter, quoted in Plant Closures: Myths, Realities and Responses, by Gilda Haas & Plant Closures Project; Boston, South End Press, Pamphlet No. 3, 1985, page 22

Nothing is illegal if 100 businessmen decide to do it.

Andrew Young

The limited liability corporation is the greatest single discovery of modern times.

Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University

The power of capitalism to mediate the gap between rich and poor is pretty incredible. Indeed, I think, year by year, the gap gets less. 145 page Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, at the World Economic Forum, Switzerland, 1997, quoted in Seattle Weekly, Oct. 15, 1998

The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest, the working out of a law of nature and a law of God... The time was ripe for it. It had to come, though all we saw at the moment was the need to save ourselves from wasteful conditions... The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return.

John D. Rockefeller, cited in Trachtenberg's The Incorporation of America

Giant corporations... trusts and mergers... [are] the natural, even logical outcome of [the profit motive] coupled with the new technologies of mass production and corporate organization... Mergers... sought to... remove the disturbing influences of the marketplace from the production and distribution of commodities. Mergers... were efforts to replace the invisible hand of market forces with the visible hand of managerial administration

Heilbroner and Singer, The Economic Transformation of America: 1600 to the Present, page 220

The men who run the global corporations are the first in history with the organisation, technology, money, and ideology to make a credible try at managing the world as an integrated economic unit.

Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Mueller, Global Reach (1974)

The freest government if it could exist would not be accepted if the tendency of the laws was to create a rapid accumulation of property in a few hands and to render the great mass of the people dependent.

Daniel Webster, cited in The Monopoly Makers

There is not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in the free market. Not one. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.

Wayne Andreas, CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, Z Magazine, April 1997, page 29

So great is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the common good of the whole community.

Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765­1769, cited in Zinn, A People's History of the United States, page 256

When one of J.P. Morgan’s lawyers advised him about something he was about to do, “I don’t 146 page think you can do that legally,” Morgan replied, “I don’t know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.”

Ida M. Tarbell, The Life of Elbert H. Gary: The Story of Steel, New York, D. Appleton & Co, 1925, page 81

When the streets run with blood, I buy.

____ Rothschild, quoted in The House of Morgan, page 13

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well­lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails, and smooth­shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like... the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

There are never wanting some persons of violent and undertaking natures, who, so they may have power and business, will take it at any cost.

Francis Bacon, quoted on the title page of The Robber Barons, by Matthew Josephson

The thief who is in prison is not necessarily more dishonest than his fellows at large, but mostly one who, through ignorance or stupidity steals in a way that is not customary. He snatches a loaf from the baker’s counter and is promptly run into gaol. Another man snatches bread from the table of hundreds of widows and orphans and similar credulous souls who do not know the ways of company promoters; and, as likely as not, he is run into Parliament.

George Bernard Shaw

Mendoza to Tanner: “I am a brigand; I live by robbing the rich.” Tanner to Mendoza: “I am a gentleman; I live by robbing the poor. Shake hands.”

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

I can be free only to the extent that others are forbidden to profit from their physical, economic, or other superiority to the detriment of my liberty.

Emile Durkheim, Social Anthropologist

When a country is well governed, poverty and a mean condition are something to be ashamed of. 147 page When a country is ill governed, riches and honors are to be ashamed of.

Confucius

A newspaper must at all times antagonize the selfish interests of that very class which furnishes the larger part of a newspaper's income... The press in this country is dominated by the wealthy few...that it cannot be depended upon to give the great mass of the people that correct information concerning political, economical and social subjects which it is necessary that the mass of people Shall have in order that they vote...in the best way to protect themselves from the brutal force and chicanery of the ruling and employing classes.

E.W. Scripps

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where the interests are involved.

Henry Adams, quoted in Derrick Jensen, Remembering (April 1997 draft)

The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it.

Henry Adams (1838­1918), 1910

News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising.

Rubin Frank, former NBC news President

We fall short of presenting all, or even a goodly part, of the news each day that a citizen would need to intelligently exercise his franchise in this democracy. So as he depends more and more on us, presumably the depth of knowledge of the average man is diminished. This clearly can lead to a disaster in democracy.

Walter Cronkite

Be not intimidated, therefore, by any terrors, from publishing with the utmost freedom whatever can be warranted by the laws of your country; nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberty by pretenses of politeness, delicacy or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.

John Adams

Hear me people: We now have to deal with another race, small and feeble when our fathers first 148 page met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possessions is a disease with them. These people have made many rules which the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.

Chief Sitting Bull, speaking at the Powder River Conference, 1877

The war against working people should be understood to be a real war. It’s not a new war. It’s an old war. Furthermore, it’s a perfectly conscious war everywhere, but specifically in the US... which happens to have a highly class­conscious business class... And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.

There’s no doubt that one of the major issues of twentieth century history, surely in the US, is corporate propaganda... Its goal from the beginning, perfectly openly and consciously, was to “control the public mind,” as they put it. The reason was that the public mind was seen as the greatest threat to corporations.

Noam Chomsky, Harvard Trade Union Program, Cambridge, MA, 7 February 1997

Propaganda depicting unions as the enemy of the worker, welfare queens driving Cadillacs and breeding like rabbits, liberal elites and pointy­headed bureaucrats stealing our money and interfering in our lives, and the rest of the familiar refrain, may have left attitudes substantially unchanged. But it has reduced much of the population to bewilderment and irrationality. If the current mood is one of anti­politics, that is in no small measure a tribute to the success of campaigns to erase the understanding of elementary reality expressed by the UMW leader quoted earlier. That reality, traceable back at least to Adam Smith, was well­described by John Dewey: Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, and as long as this is so, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.

The scale and intensity of these propaganda crusades is rarely appreciated, and little studied. What has been unearthed confirms the judgment of the late Alex Carey, the Australian social scientist who pioneered the investigation of corporate propaganda, including his study of Americanization campaigns, from which I drew earlier. The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance, Carey wrote in a 1978 paper: the growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy. From their modern origins, the corporations that now dominate much of the domestic and global economies, casting their shadow on all other aspects of life, recognized the need to control the public mind and engineer consent by what their leaders frankly called propaganda in more honest days.

Letter from Noam Chomsky, http://mediafilter.org/caq/caq54chmky.html

History will be kind to us because I plan to write it. 149 page I will leave judgements on this matter to history – but I will be one of the historians.

Winston Churchill, various instances after 1939

I agree that we had better leave the past to history, but remember if I live long enough I may be one of the historians.

Winston Churchill, in a 1944 letter to Joseph Stalin

The point of public relations slogans like “Support our troops” is that they don’t mean anything... That’s the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody’s going to be against, and everybody’s going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That’s the one you're not allowed to talk about.

Noam Chomsky

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.

Edward Bernays

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928

The average citizen is the world’s most efficient censor. His own mind is the greatest barrier between him and the facts. His own ‘logic­proof compartments,’ his own absolutism are the obstacles which prevent him from seeing in terms of experience and thought rather than in terms of group reaction.

Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion

150 page Mass mind control was an art in Old Testament times and it is not a lost art now, but a perfected one.

Unattributed

Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys — legally enacted game­playing — agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members.

Buckminster Fuller, The Grunch of Giants

To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean. Giovanni da Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. The men of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory.

Frederick Turner

Dependable sociopaths are all around us. They don't care how much misery they cause, they don’t care how much the public hates them, nor do they care how much beauty they destroy. Their only interest is in doing their jobs. They are called “corporations.”

Jay Hanson

Capitalism has defeated communism. It is now well on its way to defeating democracy.

David Korten

We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.

Dwight David Eisenhower

Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life.

151 page Guy Debord, Society of Spectacle, 1967

I’m talking about the real owners now, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. They’re irrelevant. They are there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses; the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the information you get to hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want: they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

But I’ll tell you what they don’t want — they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. You know something, they don’t want people that are smart enough to sit around their kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. Because the owners of this country know the truth, it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

George Carlin, 2008

...the media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.

Noam Chomsky

Them, Inc.: if you don’t know who They are, you’re not one of us.

Unattributed

If the corporations only can be stopped by human die­off, then the corporations will be stopped by human die off.

Jay Hanson’s Theorem, 11 November 1997

Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce, and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.

James A. Garfield, 20th U.S. president, two weeks before he was assassinated in 1881 152 page A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, it did not seem urgent that we understand the relationship between business and a healthy environment, because natural resources seemed unlimited. But on the verge of a new millennium we know that we have decimated ninety­seven percent of the ancient forests in North America; every day our farmers and ranchers draw out 20 billion more gallons of water from the ground than are replaced by rainfall; the Ogalala Aquifer, an underwater river beneath the Great Plains larger than any body of fresh water on earth, will dry up within thirty to forty years at present rates of extraction; globally we lose 25 billion tons of fertile topsoil every year, the equivalent of all the wheat­fields in Australia. These critical losses are occurring while the world population is increasing at the rate of 90 million people per year. Quite simply, our business practices are destroying life on earth. Given current corporate practices, not one wildlife reserve, wilderness, or indigenous culture will survive the global market economy. We know that every natural system on the planet is disintegrating. The land, water, air and sea have been functionally transformed from life­supporting systems into repositories for waste. There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world.

Paul Hawkin, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, 1993

We are now pretty obviously facing the possibility of a world that the supranational corporations, and the governments and educational systems that serve them, will control entirely for their own enrichment — and, incidentally and inescapably, for the impoverishment of all the rest of us.

Wendell Berry

Corporations care very much about maintaining the myth that government is necessarily ineffective, except when it is spending money on the military­industrial complex, building prisons, or providing infrastructural support for the business sector.

Michael Lerner, The Politics of Meaning, 1997, page 315

The hope that we can cure the ills of industrialism by the homeopathy of more technology seems at last to be losing status.

Wendell Berry, Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits, Harpers Magazine, May 2008. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/05/0082022

It is a paradox of the acquisitive society in which we now live that although private morals are regulated by law, the entrepreneur is allowed considerable freedom to use — and abuse — the public in order to make money. The American pursuit of happiness might be less desperate if the situation were reversed.

Gore Vidal

153 page Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence — those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are over­consuming, the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.

Aldous Huxley, Island

POLITY

“Truth? You don’t want to know the truth; you can’t handle the truth!”

Colonel Jessep, played by Jack Nicholson in the film A Few Good Men, 1992

Many people today don’t want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.

Louis Kronenberger

The general population doesn’t know what is happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.

Noam Chomsky

Logic and reason are not the primary determinants of human affairs.

Barbara Tuchman

So I have just one wish for you — the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced to lose your integrity by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, May you have that freedom.

Richard Feynman, 1974

If an ethical foundation is lacking, a civilization collapses. Civilization exists in the effort to perfect humanity, and originates when a population is inspired to attain progress and to serve.

Albert Schweitzer

For the first time in its history, Western Civilization is in danger of being destroyed internally by a corrupt, criminal ruling cabal which is centered around the Rockefeller interests, which include elements from the Morgan, Brown, Rothschild, Du Pont, Harriman, Kuhn­Loeb, and other [Bush?] 154 page groupings as well. This junta took control of the political, financial, and cultural life of America in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Carroll Quigley, (1910­1977) Professor of International Relations, Georgetown University Foreign Service School, Washington, D.C., member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), mentor to Bill Clinton, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, 1966

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.

Carroll Quigley

The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

Morpheus, in The Matrix

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell

In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet it was planned that way.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Even the most courageous among us only rarely has the courage for what he really knows... But 155 page tell me, my brothers, if humanity still lacks a goal, is humanity itself not still lacking too?

Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra

Courage consists not in hazarding without fear; but being resolutely minded in a just cause.

Plutarch

The Abnormal Is Not Courage

The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German Tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers, A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace. And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question The bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion. Would say courage isn't that. Not at its best. It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight, Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal. Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches. The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment. It is too near the whore’s heart: the bounty of impulse, And the failure to sustain even small kindness. Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being. Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality. Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh. Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope. The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo. The real form. The culmination . And the exceeding. Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage, Not the month’s rapture. Not the exception. The beauty That is of many days. Steady and clear. It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.

Jack Gilbert (1925­2012), in Views of Jeopardy, 1962

Cowardice asks the question ­ is it safe? Expediency asks the question ­ is it politic? Vanity asks the question ­ is it popular? But conscience asks the question ­ is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Corruptissima republicae, plurimae leges. 156 page (The more corrupt the state, the more laws it has.)

Tacitus, ______

The more restrictions and prohibitions there are, the poorer the people become. The sharper the people’s weapons are, the more national confusion increases. The more skill artisans require, the more bizarre their products are.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.

Warren Bennis

Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.

General Norman Schwartzkopf

The true romance which the world exists to realize will be the transformation of genius into practical power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience

In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning and cruelty.

Count Leo Tolstoy

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

Abraham Lincoln

It is one of the many paradoxes of power that it can never be safely bought.

Timothy Leary, The Curse of the Oval Room

Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most.

Thucydides (ca. 460­ca. 395 B.C.), Greek Historian

157 page Money to gain power, power to protect money.

Motto of the Medici family (apocryphal)

Among the barbarians, and among animals, we find courage associated not with the greatest ferocity, but with a gentle and lion­like temper.

Aristotle (384­322 B.C.), Politics, VII

“Captain, it is far easier for civilized men to behave like barbarians than for barbarians to behave like civilized men.”

Lieutenant Spock, Mirror, Mirror episode, Star Trek

“There’s a reason we separate military and the police: one fights the enemy of the state; the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”

Commander William Adama, Water episode, Battlestar Galactica, 2004

Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

Adolf Hitler (1936? 1940? explaining to nervous generals his plan to rid the Earth of Jews)

Ab honesto virum bonum nihil deterret. (Nothing deters a good man from doing what is honorable.)

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C. ­ A.D. 65)

Difficile est saturam non scribere. (It’s difficult to not write satire.)

Juvenal, Satires, i. 30

The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.

Italo Calvino

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will protect us from our guardians? or Who will guard our guardians?) 158 page Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347

And if the Guardians are not happy, who else can be?

Aristotle, The Politics, Book 2, Chapter 5

If evils come not, then our fears are in vain; and if they do, fear but augments the pain.

Sir Thomas More, English Divine

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

Michel de Montaigne (1533­1592)

Justitiae soror fides. (Faith is the sister of Justice.)

Roman Saying

A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood of ideas in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

John F. Kennedy

We live at a time when one cannot speak the truth without running the risk of outraging some group or other.

Alexander Dumas fils, 1878

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.

Mark Twain's Notebook, 1898

History doesn’t repeat but it sure does rhyme.

Mark Twain (apocryphal)

History will be kind to us because I plan to write it.

Winston Churchill, to his Tory associates 159 page Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.

Louis D. Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1916­1939

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government.

Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from his government.

Thomas Paine

Patriotism means being loyal to your country all the time and to its government when it deserves it.

Mark Twain

A true patriot would keep the attention of his fellow citizens awake to their grievances, and not allow them to rest till the causes of their just complaints are removed.

Samuel Adams, 1771

If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our Country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.

Samuel Adams, 1780

I like to think of myself as a patriot, but even more so as a man. Where the two disagree, I say the man is right.

Hermann Hesse (1877­­1962)

When power shifts, men shift with it.

George Orwell

We’ve got the fools on our side, and that’s a majority in any town.

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

160 page Samuel Clements, aka “Mark Twain”

When a true genius appears in this world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

Jonathan Swift

If you protect men from folly, you will soon have a nation of fools.

William Penn (1644­1718)

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

Herbert Spencer (1820­1903), State Tamperings with Money Banks

It is impossible to treat quietly and dispute orderly with a fool.

Montaigne, French Writer

There is nothing more terrifying than ignorance in action.

Goethe

The most difficult thing of all is to see what is right in front of your eyes.

Goethe.

Behold, these are a small troop, and indeed they are enraging us; and we are a host on our guard.

The Koran

In that hour when the Egyptians died in the Red Sea the ministers wished to sing the song of praise before the Holy One, but he rebuked them saying, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would you utter a song before me in honor of that?”

The Sanhedrin

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self­satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

161 page At any given moment of history it is the function of associations of devoted individuals to undertake tasks which clear­sighted people perceive to be necessary, but which nobody else is willing to perform.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead (apocryphal)

The moment one definitely commits oneself, providence moves too... Things occur...that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising...all manner of unforeseen incidents...and material assistance, which no man could have [foreseen].

W.H. Murray

...it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.

Samuel Adams

Forget about likes and dislikes; they are of no consequence. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.

George Bernard Shaw

If there are still men who really want to live in this world, they should first dare to speak out, to laugh, to cry, to be angry, to accuse, to fight — that they may at least cleanse this accursed place of its accursed atmosphere.

Lu Xun, Chinese Writer

Whoever thinks he is objective must already be half drunk.

Lu Xun, Chinese Writer

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Scandal in Bohemia

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do. 162 page Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To learn and not to think over what you have learned is perfectly useless. To think without having first learned is dangerous.

A gentleman should be cautious in speech but quick in action.

Confucius, Minor Chinese Bureaucrat

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

George Bernard Shaw

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end as superstitions.

Thomas Huxley, The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species, xii

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561­1626)

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

Eric Hoffer

Why sit in judgment when you can stand in contempt?

Richard Aubrey Stewart, American

The conspiracy theory of society...comes from abandoning God and then asking, “Who is in his place?”

Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, London, Routelege, 1969, iv, page 123

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.

John Arbuthnot

In [Plato’s] Republic, reason is for the few; honor and social commitments are for another minority, separate from the first; the majority has nothing but appetite. It’s therefore fair to say that in the Republic, nobody is allowed to be more than one­third of a complete human being. 163 page That’s always the problem with utopian schemes; the inhabitants are never allowed to be fully human, though the restrictions are rarely handled with the geometric precision Plato displayed. When a utopian scheme is put into practice, in turn, what inevitably happens is that whatever dimension of the human is supposedly abolished happens anyway, and defines the fault line along which the scheme breaks down. Marxism is a great example; in theory, people in Marxist societies are motivated solely by noble ideals; in practice, getting people to go through the motions of being motivated solely by noble ideals required an ever­expanding system of apparatchiks, secret police, and prison camps, and even that ultimately failed to do the job. One way or another, trying to create heaven on earth reliably yields the opposite; whatever resembles Plato’s Republic on paper turns into Pluto’s Republic in practice.

The would­be political thaumaturge, the person who wants to use magical manipulation to make people do what he thinks is the right thing, is subject to the same rule. He’s trying to do the same thing Plato wanted to do in his imaginary Republic by different means. As thaumaturgy is subtler than jackboots, the political thaumaturge gets his disastrous results in a subtler way.

When you’re practicing thaumaturgy for yourself or another person who wants to work with you, it’s possible to aim symbolic and ritual stimuli very carefully at specific details of the nonrational mind, and the effects are observed and managed by the rational mind; this sort of thaumaturgy very often spills over into theurgy if the person receiving the work is open to that. When a client comes to a practitioner of old­fashioned Southern conjure magic, for example, most of what happens on the first visit is meant to give the root doctor a clear idea of exactly what the client’s real issues are. Many practitioners have a canned divination rap — the term for this in the trade is “cold reading” — that covers all the usual bases; it sounds very impressive, which is good for building the client’s confidence, but the skilled root doctor watches the client carefully while giving the cold reading, looking for the signs that show what’s really going on, so the magic can be aimed precisely where it’s needed.

You can’t do that with political thaumaturgy. If you want to influence the thinking of a nation, or even a community, you have to paint with a very broad brush. That means, first, you have to aim at one of a few powerful nonrational drives that affect most people in much the same way; second, you have to pile as much pressure as possible onto whatever drive you have in mind, so that you can overwhelm whatever the psyche of the individual might throw at you; and third, you have to weaken the reasoning mind, because that’s the part of the self that most often trips up efforts to work magic off basic drives, especially when those efforts aim at goals that most of the targets think are against their best interests.

Two awkward consequences follow from these considerations. The first is that there are things that political thaumaturgy can’t do at all, because they contradict the requirements of the method. Getting people to think clearly by encouraging them not to think clearly is not a promising strategy, and it’s not much better to try to use basic drives to convince people not to give in to their basic drives. The old delusion that techniques are value­free is as misleading here as elsewhere; 164 page any technique is better for some ends than others, and thus privileges the values that favor those ends above others. (It’s probably worth pointing out that a sane response to peak oil, which requires clear reasoning and the ability to look beyond those basic biological drives, is among the things political thaumaturgy is almost uniquely unsuited to accomplish.)

The second awkward consequence is that the political thaumaturge is always affected by his or her own magic. The old­fashioned Southern root doctor just mentioned is in no danger of being caught in the work he does for his client; he aims his magic at the client’s psychological buttons rather than his own, and the root doctor isn’t even present for most of the work — the cleansing baths that remove unwanted emotional states, the daily rite of putting a drop of Van Van oil on a mojo bag that directs consciousness toward certain things and away from others, and a good deal more, are done by the client in private. Political thaumaturgy can’t be precisely aimed, though, and can’t usually rely on talking people into practicing complex rituals in their spare time; instead, it relies on mass media, and relies on repetition and compelling verbal or visual patterns that sidestep the critical faculties of the reasoning mind.

Just as you can’t spread raspberry jam on toast without getting it on your fingers, though, you can’t spend your time creating words and images that appeal to the nonrational mind without your own nonrational mind being influenced by them, and the more compelling your thaumaturgy is, the more surely you will be caught by your own spell. Since political thaumaturgy requires you to weaken the reasoning mind and overwhelm the defenses of the self by pounding on simple, powerful nonrational drives, the impact of this work on the mind of the political thaumaturge is far from helpful, and it helps explain why practitioners of political thaumaturgy so often end up messily dead. …

[M]odern industrial societies are “magician states” that rule by manufacturing a managed consensus by the manipulation of nonrational lures...

John Michael Greer, Pluto’s Republic, The Archdruid Report, http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/10/plutos­republic.html, October 2011

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

Karl Kraus, Austrian satirist

Whenever a people or an institution forgets its hard beginnings, it is beginning to decay.

Carl Sandberg, 1963

While public school history courses in the United States stress the horrors of the German Nazi murder of six million Jews and Josef Stalin’s pogroms against racial minorities and political dissidents in the Soviet Union, the facts that the U.S. Army’s solution to the ‘Indian Problem’ was 165 page the prototype for the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Problem’ and that the North American Indian Reservation was the model for the twentieth century gulag and concentration camp, are conveniently overlooked.

Jonathan Ott

Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.

We would often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them.

la Rochefoucauld

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists.

Bertrand Russell

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

H.G. Wells, English Writer

Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.

Abba Eban, Israeli Politician

The world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered, and colonized. To think of these stars that we see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me so sad to see them so clear and yet so far.

Cecil Rhodes, Last Will and Testament, 1902

The earth, that is sufficient. I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, “Song of the Open Road,” 1855

Idealists make a great mistake in not facing the real facts sincerely and resolutely. They believe in the power of the spirit, in the goodness which is at the heart of things, in the triumph which is in store for the great moral ideals of the race. But this faith only too often leads to an optimism which is sadly and fatally at variance with actual results. It is the realist and not the idealist who is 166 page generally justified by events. We forget that the human spirit, the spirit of goodness and truth in the world, is still only an infant crying in the night, and that the struggle with darkness is as yet mostly an unequal struggle... [The post­World­War­I armistice terms exacted in] Paris proved this terrible truth once more. It is not Wilson who failed there, but humanity itself. It was not the statesmen that failed so much as the spirit of the peoples behind them.

Jan Christiaan Smuts, South African, 1870­1950

The Allied statesmen who came together in Paris in January 1919 to make the peace settlement were in a very different situation from their predecessors in Vienna in 1814. They were responsible to electorates still in the grip of war fever whose passions and prejudices could not be ignored.

Michael Howard, The First World War

While totalitarian regimes were consolidating their power in Russia and Italy [after World War I], an experiment was being conducted in Germany to determine whether a democratic republic could be made to work in that country. After fifteen years of trial and crisis it failed, and the ultimate consequences of that failure were a second world war and the deaths of millions of men, women, and children.

If some benevolent spirit had granted the peoples of Germany and the neighboring European states even a fragmentary glimpse of what lay in store for them in the 1940s, it is impossible to believe that they would not have made every possible sacrifice to maintain the Weimar republic against its enemies. But that kind of foresight is not given in this world, and the German republic always lacked friends and supporters when it needed them most.

Gordon A. Craig, Europe since 1815

Grown men do not need leaders.

Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

Modern man will never find peace until he comes into harmony with the place where he lives.

Carl Gustav Jung

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.

167 page Ralph Waldo Emerson (also, in error, attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes)

There is no institution more corruptible than a priest­king.

Alexander Carpenter, American

We must remember that anthropology is in its infancy, in spite of the heaven­descended precept of antiquity and the copy­book pentameter line of Pope. Instinct still moves in us as it did in Cain and those relatives of his who he was afraid would lynch him. Law comes to us from a set of marauders who cased themselves in iron, and the possessions they had won by conquest in edicts as little human in their features as the barred visors that covered their faces. Poor fantastic Dr. Robert Knox [a Scottish race theorist] was still groaning in 1850 over the battle of Hastings; not quite inaptly, it may be. Our most widely accepted theologies owe their dogmas to a few majority votes passed by men who would have hanged our grandmothers as witches and burned our ministers as heretics.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in The Atlantic Monthly, April 1875

Our civilization is a dingy ungentlemanly business; it drops so much out of a man.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.

Bible, Proverbs 29:18

The Visionary is the only true realist.

Frederico Fellini

A shared vision is not an idea. It is, rather, a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power.

Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

Vision: the art of seeing things invisible.

Jonathan Swift

It is not information or knowledge, but vision, that equals power.

Dominique Goupil, President, FileMaker, Inc.

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare. 168 page Japanese Proverb

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

Bible, Hosea 4:16

In a consumer society, there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction, and the prisoners of envy.

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 1973

Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

Henry Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

If there is a problem with democracy, the solution is more democracy.

Andrew Jackson, 7th American President and the original “Washington Outsider”

The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture, 1970

The only justifiable purpose of political institutions is to insure the unhindered development of the individual.

Albert Einstein

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of the civilized community against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

John Stuart Mill

Mankind always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.

Karl Marx, A Critique of Political Economy, 1859, Preface 169 page The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. or

It is impossible to truly solve a problem from within the mindset that created. (paraphrased) or

You can’t solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that created it in the first place. (paraphrased) or

The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level as the level we created them at. (paraphrased by Ram Dass) or

Our thinking has created problems which cannot be solved by that same level of thinking. (Ram Dass paraphrasing himself)

Albert Einstein

I’m an old man and I’ve had a lot of problems, most of which never occurred.

Mark Twain

It ain’t what ya don’t know that hurts ya. What really puts a hurtin’ on ya is what ya knows for sure, that just ain’t so.

Uncle Remus

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.

Dee Hock, personal communication

I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self­respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you yourself believe and are acting from.

William Faulkner

If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact, not to be solved, but to be coped with over time. [i.e., a “predicament”]

Shimon Perez

170 page If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

Dwight David Eisenhower

BRITTANNUS (shocked): Caesar, this is not proper! THEODOTUS (outraged): How? CAESAR (recovering his self­possession): Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra, Act II

In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.

Edward Gibbon (1737­1794)

If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else’s expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.

Thomas Sowell

A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

George Bernard Shaw

Bernard Shaw has no enemies, but he is intensely disliked by his friends.

Oscar Wilde

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores 171 page We hate our politicians so much that even if they tell us they lied, we don’t believe them.

Peter Newman

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.

Oscar Ameringer

The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.

Edward Dowling

They are afraid of the old for their memory. They are afraid of the young for their innocence. They are afraid of the graves of their victims in faraway places. They are afraid of history. They are afraid of freedom. They are afraid of truth. They are afraid of democracy. So why the hell are we afraid of them? ... For they are afraid of us.

Czech Group, Plastic People of the Universe, Prague, 1968

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

There is no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken, 1918

We find two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt ends — the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.

Friedrich Engels

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

Plato (428­347 B.C.) 172 page Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is, in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention.

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.

Charles Austin Beard, historian

They came first for the Communists, but I was not a Communist and so I did nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat and so I did nothing. Then they came for the Jews, and I did nothing because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. And then they came for me and by that time no one was left to stand up for me.

Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892­1984), a Confessing Church minister in Nazi Germany who opposed Hitler publicly, in 1945 after seven years of imprisonment (including Dachau); from Political Quotations, Daniel B. Baker, ed. Also attributed to Dietrich Boenhoeffer, whose execution was personally ordered by Adolf Hitler.

When they took the fourth amendment, I was silent because I don’t deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I kept quiet because I know I’m innocent. When they took the second amendment, I said nothing because I don’t own a gun. Now they’ve come for the first amendment, and I can't say anything at all.

Tim Freeman, [email protected]

I guess you will have to go to jail. If that is the result of not understanding the Income Tax Law, I will meet you there. We shall have a merry, merry time, for all our friends will be there. It will be an intellectual center, for no one understands the Income Tax Law except persons who have not sufficient intelligence to understand the questions that arise under it.

Senator Elihu Root of New York, 1913

A sure sign of a genius is that all of the dunces are in a confederacy against him.

Frank Lloyd Wright 173 page The politicians don’t just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless.

When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.

James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

Virtually all reasonable laws are obeyed, not because they are the law, but because reasonable people would do that anyway. If you obey a law simply because it is the law, that's a pretty likely sign that it shouldn’t be a law.

The U.S. Constitution may be flawed, but it’s a whole lot better than what we have now.

It’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

The welfare state reduces a citizen to a client, subordinates them to a bureaucrat, and subjects them to rules that are anti­work, anti­family, anti­opportunity, and anti­property... Humans forced to suffer under such anti­human rules naturally develop pathologies. The evening news is the natural result of the welfare state.

Unattributed

If CON is the opposite of PRO, does that mean that CONgress is the opposite of PROgress?

Gallagher

Since when is “public safety” the root password to the Constitution?

C. D. Tavare

America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well­wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

John Quincy Adams

I do not believe that the government should have its long nose poked into the private consensual 174 page relationships between people.

John Anderson, Independent presidential candidate, 1980

When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

When plunder has become a way of life for a group of people living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it.

Fredric Bastiat (1801­1850), French social philosopher and “economist”

Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.

Ludwig Mises, Socialism

For every new mouth to feed, there are two hands to produce.

Peter T. Bauer (and Mao Tse Dong)

[The makers of the Constitution] conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil­minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438, 1928

Tariffs, quotas and other import restrictions protect the business of the rich at the expense of high cost of living for the poor. Their intent is to deprive you of the right to choose, and to force you to buy the high­priced inferior products of politically favored companies.

Alan Burris, A Liberty Primer

Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout the world would do more for the cause of universal peace than can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers. 175 page Frank Chodorov

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river.

Nikita Khrushchev

We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money.

David “Davey” Crockett, Congressman 1827­35

The legacy of Democrats and Republicans approaches: Libertarianism by bankruptcy.

Nick Nuessle, 1992

Truth and news are not the same thing.

Katharine Graham, owner of The Washington Post

The truth is more important than the facts.

Frank Lloyd Wright

The difficult we do right away; the impossible takes a little longer.

The motto of the SeeBees, the U.S. Army Construction Battalions of World War II

The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.

The [apocryphal] motto of Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor

I’m a politician, and as a politician I have the prerogative to lie whenever I want.

Charles Peacock, ex­director of Madison Guaranty, the Arkansas S&L at the center of Whitewatergate.

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

Stephen Schneider, climate scientist and environmental activist, in Discover, October 1989 176 page I believe it is appropriate to have an ‘over­representation’ of the facts on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience.

Al Gore, former U.S. Vice President and High Priest of Anthropogenic Global Warming

Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark, Mapp v. Ohio

A policy of subsidizing failures will end in an economy strewn with capital­guzzling industries long past their time of profitability — old companies that cannot create jobs themselves, but can stand in the way of job creation.

George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

Barry Goldwater

No man has ever ruled other men for their own good.

George D. Herron

The principal function of modern government is to keep people apart. or

Keeping citizens apart has become the first maxim of modern politics.

Jean­Jacques Rousseau (1712­1778)

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicity.

Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliance with none.

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question. 177 page That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.

The care of every man’s soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the care of it? Well what if he neglect the care of his health or his estate, which would more nearly relate to the state. Will the magistrate make a law that he not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills.

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Thomas Jefferson, various

Our forefathers made one mistake. What they should have fought for was representation without taxation.

Fletcher Knebel, historian

...You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer...

Abraham Lincoln

Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them. or

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana (1863­1952)

People place themselves first, family second, tribe third, and the rest of the world a distant fourth. Their genes also predispose them to plan ahead for at most one or two generations. So today the human mind still works comfortably backward and forward only a few years, spanning a period not exceeding one or two generations.

E.O. Wilson, Is Humanity Suicidal?, 1996

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his. 178 page John Locke, 1690

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation...

James Madison

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of any of their number is self­protection.

John Stuart Mill

The primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.

Albert Jay Nock

To lay with one hand the power of government on the property of a citizen, and with the other to bestow it on favored individuals...is none the less robbery because it was done under the forms of law and is called taxation.

Justice Miller, U.S. Supreme Court, Loan Association v. Topeka, 20 Wall (87 US) 664 (1874)

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Robert Nozick, Harvard philosopher

The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no­win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.

U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, 1987

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

William Pitt in the House of Commons, 18 November 1783

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (apocryphal) 179 page World War Three will be a guerilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

Marshall McLuhan, 1968

The concept of military necessity is seductively broad, and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security “necessities” to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties. For that reason, the military­ security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism.

Justice William Brennan, Brown v. Glines, 444 US 348 (1980)

Altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation­­ and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone's suffering.

The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.

It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there is service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be master.

I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics.

Ayn Rand

Pragmatism is the convenient conclusion reached by those who lack the patience or intelligence to formulate a consistent ideology.

Mark G. Hanley

Regulation — which is based on force and fear — undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. A fly­ by­night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory.

Alan Greenspan

I oppose registration for the draft... because I believe the security of freedom can best be achieved 180 page by security through freedom.

Ronald Reagan

When I was a kid I was told anyone could become President. Now I’m beginning to believe it.

The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.

Will Rogers, in the 1920s

It’s no longer an issue of contention that privatization is a solution. You can always rely on government to make the right decision, but only after it has exhausted every other conceivable alternative.

E.S. Savas, a management professor at Baruch College in New York who advised Giuliani during his mayoral campaign (c.f. Abba Eban)

Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffers, not the state.

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that the only distinctly native American criminal class is Congress.

Mark Twain

In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.

Edward Gibbon (1737­1794)

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. During those 200 years, these Nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from 181 page great courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back in to bondage.

Alexander Fraser Tyler [Scottish Lord Woodhouslee, Alexander Fraser Tytler] (1748­ 1813), The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic, 1787 (apocryphal)

The average age of the world’s greatest democratic nations has been 200 years ... from bondage to spiritual faith, from faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency, from complacency to selfishness, from selfishness to apathy, from apathy to dependency, and from dependency back again into bondage.

Lord Macaulay (1857)

Democracy...while it lasts is more bloody than either [aristocracy or monarchy]. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.

John Adams, in a letter to John Taylor, 1814

As for the rage to believe that we have found the secret of liberty in general permissiveness from the cradle on, this seems to me a disastrous sentimentality, which, whatever liberties it sets loose, loosens also the cement that alone can bind society into a stable compound — a code of obeyed taboos. I can only recall the saying of a wise Frenchman that “liberty is the luxury of self­ discipline.” Historically, those peoples that did not discipline themselves had discipline thrust on them from the outside. That is why the normal cycle in the life and death of great nations has been first a powerful tyranny broken by revolt, the enjoyment of liberty, the abuse of liberty — and back to tyranny again. As I see it, in this country — a land of the most persistent idealism and the blandest cynicism — the race is on between its decadence and its vitality.

Alistair Cooke

Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States, including on some college campuses.

George Herbert Walker Bush, 4 May 1991

To think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying that one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just another attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand the question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action; fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man ... Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect.

182 page Thucydides, referring to the disastrous 415 B.C. Athenian military expedition to invade Sicily and kick Alcibiades’ ass.

People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.

Dan Quayle

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics, in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such, and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future; the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

Tom Robbins

Even the most Bush­happy, flag­suckling jack­arse knows deep­down inside that something is wrong. America is over and everyone knows it. The New World Order has a dying empire odor and changing the channel ain’t going to make this go away.

Jello Biafra

A protective tariff is a typical conspiracy in restraint of trade.

Thorstein Veblen, economist

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

Voltaire

It's illegal to say to a voter “Here’s $100, vote for me.” So what do the politicians do? They offer the $100 in the form of Health Care, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Food Stamps, tobacco subsidies, grain payments, NEA payments, and jobs programs.

Don Farrar, “Average guy, age 51”

We propose a five­word constitutional amendment: There shall be open borders. People are the great resource, and so long as we keep our economy free, more people means more growth, the more the merrier. Study after study shows that even the most recent immigrants give more than they take.

Wall Street Journal

183 page If the jury feels the law is unjust, we recognize the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by a judge, and contrary to the evidence ... and the courts must abide by that decision.

U.S. v. Moylan, 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, 1969, 417 F.2d at 1006

It is not only his right, but his duty...to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.

John Adams

Love your country but fear its government.

N.E. folk wisdom, U.S.A., from an Almanac

It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world. The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.

George Washington

Where is it written in the Constitution, in what section or clause is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battle in any war in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it?

Daniel Webster

Reduced employment opportunities is one effect of minimum wage legislation. The minimum wage law has imposed incalculable harm on the disadvantaged members of our society. The only moral thing to do is to repeal it.

There are many farm handouts; but let’s call them what they really are: a form a legalized theft. Essentially, a congressman tells his farm constituency, “Vote for me. I’ll use my office to take another American’s money and give it to you.”

Walter Williams, economist and syndicated columnist

The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti­black laws on the statute books.

Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize­winning economist

184 page Minimum wage laws tragically generate unemployment, especially among the poorest and least skilled or educated workers... Because a minimum wage, of course, does not guarantee any worker’s employment; it only prohibits, by force of law, anyone from being hired at the wage which would pay his employer to hire him.

Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty

Be wary of strong spirits. It can make you shoot at tax collectors ... and miss.

Robert A. Heinlein

Substituting God for alcohol or any other drug is indeed a swapping of dependencies. But last I looked, God didn’t eat your liver.

Judex

National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the I.R.S....and the cost accounting of the Pentagon.

Louis Sullivan/Connie Horner, quoted by Novak in Forbes

Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution...

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Dec. 10, 1948) Approved by the United Nations with the nations of the Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia, & South Africa abstaining.

See, when the Government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of Taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs.

Most of the presidential candidates’ economic packages involve ‘tax breaks,’ which is when the government, amid great fanfare, generously decides not to take quite so much of your income. In other words, these candidates are trying to buy your votes with your own money.

Dave Barry

The pig if I am not mistaken Supplies us sausage, ham, and bacon. Let others say his heart is big I call it stupid of the pig. 185 page Ogden Nash

I swear by my life and my love for it that I will never live for the sake of another man or ask another man to live for mine.

Ayn Rand’s John Galt (apocryphal)

As all those who write about civic matters show and as all history proves by a multitude of examples, whoever organizes a state and establishes its laws must assume that all men are wicked and will act wickedly whenever they have the chance to do so. He must also assume that whenever their wickedness remains hidden for a time there is a hidden reason for it which remains unknown for want of occasion to make it manifest. But time, which is called the father of all truth, uncovers it.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469­1527), Discourses

Nor did a prince ever lack legitimate reasons by which to color his bad faith. One could cite a host of modern examples and list the many peace treaties, the many promises that were made null and void by princes who broke faith, with the advantage going to the one who best knew how to play the fox. But one must know how to mask this nature skillfully and be a great dissembler. Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469­1527), The Prince

A corrupt and disorderly multitude can be spoken to by some worthy person and can easily be brought around to the right way, but a bad prince can not be spoken to by anyone, and the only remedy for his case is cold steel.

Government is the management of citizens so that they are neither able nor inclined to oppose you.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469­1527), Discourses

The least corrupt governments in history are those who spend their first day in office cleaning their predecessors’ bloodstains out of the carpets.

Michael Rivero, http://www.whatreallyhappened.com

During the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Austria’s Prince von Metternich, when told that the Russian ambassador had died, is said to have replied, “What can have been his motive?”

(apocryphal) 186 page ...and through this means [‘separation of powers’ leading to ‘free trade’] commerce could elude violence, and maintain itself everywhere; for the richest trader had only invisible wealth which could be sent everywhere without leaving any trace. In this manner we owe.., to the avarice of rulers the establishment of a contrivance which somehow lifts commerce right out of their grip.

Since that time, the rulers have been compelled to govern with greater wisdom than they themselves might have intended; for, owing to these events, the great and sudden arbitrary actions of the sovereign (les grands coups d’autorité) have been proven to be ineffective and ... only good government brings prosperity [to the prince].

Baron de Montesquieu (1689­1755)

...commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived in almost in a continual state of war with their neighbors, and of servile dependency upon their superiors.

Adam Smith (1723­1790), Wealth of Nations

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometric ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio ... the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

The “Dismal Theorem,” Thomas Robert Malthus (1766­1834), The Principle of Population, 1, 1798

If the only thing which can check the growth of population is starvation and misery, then the ultimate result of any technological improvement is to enable a larger number of people to live in misery.

The “Utterly Dismal Theorem,” Kenneth Boulding, The Meaning of the Twentieth Century, 1964

First Theorem: “The Dismal Theorem” 187 page “If the only ultimate check on the growth of population is misery, then the population will grow until it is miserable enough to stop its growth.”

Second Theorem: "The Utterly Dismal Theorem"

This theorem “states that any technical improvement can only relieve misery for a while, for so long as misery is the only check on population, the [technical] improvement will enable population to grow, and will soon enable more people to live in misery than before. The final result of [technical] improvements, therefore, is to increase the equilibrium population which is to increase the total sum of human misery.”

Third Theorem: “The moderately cheerful form of the Dismal Theorem”

“Fortunately, it is not too difficult to restate the Dismal Theorem in a moderately cheerful form, which states that if something else, other then misery and starvation, can be found which will keep a prosperous population in check, the population does not have to grow until it is miserable and starves, and it can be stably prosperous.”

Kenneth Boulding, Collected Papers [by] Kenneth E. Boulding, Volume 2, Colorado Associated University Press, Boulder, Colorado (1971), page 137

Politics is the dismal science because we have learned from it that there are no equilibria to predict. In the absence of equilibria we cannot know much about the future at all, whether it is likely to be palatable or unpalatable, and in that sense our future is subject to the tricks and accidents of the way questions are posed and the way alternatives are offered and eliminated.

William H. Riker, Implications from the Disequilibrium of Majority Rule for the Study of Institutions, American Political Science Review, 74, 1980: page 443

Moyers: What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if population growth continues at its present rate?

Asimov: It will be completely destroyed. I will use what I call my bathroom metaphor. Two people live in an apartment and there are two bathrooms, then both have the freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want, and stay as long as you want, for whatever you need. Everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in the freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, “Aren't you through yet?” and so on…

Right now most of the world is living under appalling conditions. We can’t possibly improve the conditions of everyone. We can’t raise the entire world to the average standard of living in the 188 page United States because we don't have the resources and the ability to distribute well enough for that. So right now as it is, we have condemned most of the world to a miserable, starvation level of existence. And it will just get worse as the population continues to go up...

The same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies. The more people there are the less one individual matters.

Issac Asimov, quoted in A World of Ideas by Bill Moyers (26 May 1989), page 276

Animal lovers and professional biologists should be able to agree on the ultimate goal of game management: to minimize the aggregate suffering of animals. They differ in their time horizons and in the focus of their immediate attention. Biologists insist that time has no stop and that we should seek to maximize the wellbeing of the herd over an indefinite period of time. To do that we must “read the landscape,” looking for signs of overexploitation of the environment by a population that has grown beyond the carrying capacity.

By contrast, the typical animal lover ignores the landscape while focusing on individual animals. To assert preemptive animal rights amounts to asserting the sanctity of animal life, meaning each and every individual life. Were an ecologist to use a similar rhetoric he would speak of the “sanctity of carrying capacity.” By this he would mean that we must consider the needs not only of the animals in front of us today but also of unborn descendants reaching into the indefinite future.

Time has no stop, the world is finite, biological reproduction is necessarily exponential: for these combined reasons the sanctity strategy as pursued by animal lovers in the long run saves fewer lives, and these at a more miserable level of existence, than does the capacity strategy pursued by ecologically knowledgeable biologists. …

There is nothing more dangerous than a shallow­thinking compassionate person.

Garrett Hardin

If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.

Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden

When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war; which provideth for every man, by victory, or death.

Thomas Hobbs, Leviathan

189 page Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. ...The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.

Frank Herbert, Dune

What becomes of the surplus of human life? It is either, 1st. destroyed by infanticide, as among the Chinese and Lacedemonians; or 2d. it is stifled or starved, as among other nations whose population is commensurate to its food; or 3d. it is consumed by wars and endemic diseases; or 4th. it overflows, by emigration, to places where a surplus of food is attainable.

James Madison, quoted in If Men Were Angels: James Madison & The Heartless Empire of Reason, page 44, Richard K. Matthews, Kansas, 1995

Today, infectious diseases cause approximately 37% of all deaths worldwide. Moreover, we have calculated that an estimated 40% of world deaths can be attributed to various environmental factors, especially organic and chemical pollutants. In addition, more than 3 billion humans suffer from malnutrition, and 4 million infants and children die each year from diarrhea, which is caused largely by contaminated water and food.

David Pimentel, et al., Population Growth and Environmental Degradation; Bioscience Vol. 48 No. 10, October, 1998

The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to people but to poor ideology and land­use management is sophistic.

E.O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, 1992, pages 328­329

The evolution of a species like Homo sapiens may be an integral part of the life process, anywhere in the universe it happens to occur. As life develops, autotrophs expand and make a place for heterotrophs. If organic energy is sequestered in substantial reserves, as geological processes are bound to do, then the appearance of a species that can release it is all but assured. Such a species, evolved in the service of entropy, quickly returns its planet to a lower energy level. In an evolutionary instant, it explodes and is gone.

Even if world population could be held constant, in balance with “renewable” resources, the creative impulse that has been responsible for human achievements during the period of growth would come to an end. And the spiraling collapse that is far more likely will leave, at best, a handful of survivors. These people might get by, for a while, by picking through the wreckage of civilization, but soon they would have to lead simpler lives, like the hunters and subsistence farmers of the past. They would not have the resources to build great public works or carry forward scientific inquiry. They could not let individuals remain unproductive as they wrote 190 page novels or composed symphonies. After a few generations, they might come to believe that the rubble amid which they live is the remains of cities built by gods.

People who believe that a stable population can live in balance with the productive capacity of the environment may see a slowdown in the growth of population and energy consumption as evidence of approaching equilibrium. But when one understands the process that has been responsible for population growth, it becomes clear that an end to growth is the beginning of collapse.

David Price, Energy and Human Evolution

In order, then, that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence. In this lies the key to the working of the political machine; this alone legitimizes civil undertakings, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to the most frightful abuses.

Jean­Jacques Rousseau (1712­1778), 1762

When government takes responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves.

George Pataki

The reasonable man recognizes the way that the world works and adapts himself to it. The unreasonable man recognizes the way that the world works and tries to force the world to adapt to him. Thus all progress is made because of the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw

Seven Blunders Of The World That Lead To Violence

Wealth without work Pleasure without conscience Knowledge without character Commerce without morality Science without humanity Worship without sacrifice Politics without principle Rights [Privileges] without responsibilities [added by grandson Arun Gandhi]

191 page Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Technology without direction [i.e., morality? A restatement of K w/o C or S w/o H?] Connection without community Teaching without joy Learning without hope [added by Steven W. Gilbert] Authority without accountability [added by Alexander; a restatement of R w/o R?]

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

Dr. Samuel Johnson

Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your words positive because your words become your behaviors. Keep your behaviors positive because your behaviors become your habits. Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence… Where choice is set between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence… I prefer to use arms in defense of honor rather than remain the vile witness of dishonor.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844­1900)

Humans exist in perfect freedom. Obedience is a choice. Government is therefore an illusion.

Wolf DeVoon, De Facto Anarchy

Freedom is actually a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash.

Harriet Rubin, Contributing Editor at Fast Company Magazine (?)

Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? 192 page For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

Sir John Harington of Kelston (1561­1612)

In a free state every man can think what he wants and say what he thinks.

Baruch Spinoza (1632­1677)

Democracy is the institutionalization of nonviolent problem­solving in the social order.

Richard Deats, The Global Spread of Active Nonviolence, Fellowship, July­August 1996

This historical discussion gives a perspective on what it means to be practical and sustainable. A few years ago I described about two dozen societies that have collapsed (Tainter 1988). In no case is it evident or even likely that any of these societies collapsed because its members or leaders did not take practical steps to resolve its problems (Tainter 1988). The experience of the Roman Empire is again instructive. Most actions that the Roman government took in response to crises — such as debasing the currency, raising taxes, expanding the army, and conscripting labor — were practical solutions to immediate problems. It would have been unthinkable not to adopt such measures. Cumulatively, however, these practical steps made the empire ever weaker, as the capital stock (agricultural land and peasants) was depleted through taxation and conscription. Over time, devising practical solutions drove the Roman Empire into diminishing, then negative, returns to complexity. The implication is that to focus a problem­solving system, such as ecological economics, on practical applications will not automatically increase its value to society, nor enhance sustainability. The historical development of problem­solving systems needs to be understood and taken into consideration.

Most who study contemporary issues certainly would agree that solving environmental and economic problems requires both knowledge and education. A major part of our response to current problems has been to increase our level of research into environmental matters, including global change. As our knowledge increases and practical solutions emerge, governments will implement solutions and bureaucracies will enforce them. New technologies will be developed. Each of these steps will appear to be a practical solution to a specific problem. Yet cumulatively these practical steps are likely to bring increased complexity, higher costs, and diminishing returns to problem solving. Richard Norgaard has stated the problem well: "Assuring sustainability by extending the modern agenda ... will require, by several orders of magnitude, more data collection, interpretation, planning, political decision­making, and bureaucratic control" (Norgaard, 1994).

Donella Meadows and her colleagues have given excellent examples of the economic constraints of contemporary problem solving. To raise world food production from 1951­1966 by 34%, for example, required increasing expenditures on tractors of 63%, on nitrate fertilizers of 146%, and on pesticides of 300%. To remove all organic wastes from a sugar­processing plant costs 100 times 193 page more than removing 30%. To reduce sulfur dioxide in the air of a U.S. city by 9.6 times, or particulates by 3.1 times, raises the cost of pollution control by 520 times (Meadows et al., 1972). All environmental problem solving will face constraints of this kind.

Bureaucratic regulation itself generates further complexity and costs. As regulations are issued and taxes established, those who are regulated or taxed seek loopholes and lawmakers strive to close these. A competitive spiral of loophole discovery and closure unfolds, with complexity continuously increasing (Olson, 1982). In these days when the cost of government lacks political support, such a strategy is unsustainable. It is often suggested that environmentally benign behavior should be elicited through taxation incentives rather than through regulations. While this approach has some advantages, it does not address the problem of complexity, and may not reduce overall regulatory costs as much as is thought. Those costs may only be shifted to the taxation authorities, and to the society as a whole.

It is not that research, education, regulation, and new technologies cannot potentially alleviate our problems. With enough investment perhaps they can. The difficulty is that these investments will be costly, and may require an increasing share of each nation’s gross domestic product. With diminishing returns to problem solving, addressing environmental issues in our conventional way means that more resources will have to be allocated to science, engineering, and government. In the absence of high economic growth this would require at least a temporary decline in the standard of living, as people would have comparatively less to spend on food, housing, clothing, medical care, transportation, and entertainment.

To circumvent costliness in problem solving it is often suggested that we use resources more intelligently and efficiently. Timothy Allen and Thomas Hoekstra, for example, have suggested that in managing ecosystems for sustainability, managers should identify what is missing from natural regulatory process and provide only that. The ecosystem will do the rest. Let the ecosystem (i.e., solar energy) subsidize the management effort rather than the other way around (Allen and Hoekstra, 1992). It is an intelligent suggestion. At the same time, to implement it would require much knowledge that we do not now possess. That means we need research that is complex and costly, and requires fossil­fuel subsidies. Lowering the costs of complexity in one sphere causes them to rise in another.

Agricultural pest control illustrates this dilemma. As the spraying of pesticides exacted higher costs and yielded fewer benefits, integrated pest management was developed. This system relies on biological knowledge to reduce the need for chemicals, and employs monitoring of pest populations, use of biological controls, judicious application of chemicals, and careful selection of crop types and planting dates (Norgaard, 1994). It is an approach that requires both esoteric research by scientists and careful monitoring by farmers. Integrated pest management violates the principle of complexity aversion, which may partly explain why it is not more widely used.

Such issues help to clarify what constitutes a sustainable society. The fact that problem­solving systems seem to evolve to greater complexity, higher costs, and diminishing returns has significant 194 page implications for sustainability. In time, systems that develop in this way are either cut off from further finances, fail to solve problems, collapse, or come to require large energy subsidies. This has been the pattern historically in such cases as the Roman Empire, the Lowland Classic Maya, Chacoan Society of the American Southwest, warfare in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and some aspects of contemporary problem solving (that is, in every case that I have investigated in detail) (Tainter, 1988, 1992, 1994b, 1995a). These historical patterns suggest that one of the characteristics of a sustainable society will be that it has a sustainable system of problem solving­ one with increasing or stable returns, or diminishing returns that can be financed with energy subsidies of assured supply, cost, and quality.

Industrialism illustrates this point. It generated its own problems of complexity and costliness. These included railways and canals to distribute coal and manufactured goods, the development of an economy increasingly based on money and wages, and the development of new technologies. While such elements of complexity are usually thought to facilitate economic growth, in fact they can do so only when subsidized by energy. Some of the new technologies, such as the steam engine, showed diminishing returns to innovation quite early in their development (Wilkinson, 1973; Giarini and Louberge, 1978; Giarini, 1984). What set industrialism apart from all of the previous history of our species was its reliance on abundant, concentrated, high­quality energy (Hall et al., 1992). With subsidies of inexpensive fossil fuels, for a long time many consequences of industrialism effectively did not matter. Industrial societies could afford them. When energy costs are met easily and painlessly, benefit/cost ratio to social investments can be substantially ignored (as it has been in contemporary industrial agriculture). Fossil fuels made industrialism, and all that flowed from it (such as science, transportation, medicine, employment, consumerism, high­technology war, and contemporary political organization), a system of problem solving that was sustainable for several generations.

Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. If our efforts to understand and resolve such matters as global change involve increasing political, technological, economic, and scientific complexity, as it seems they will, then the availability of energy per capita will be a constraining factor. To increase complexity on the basis of static or declining energy supplies would require lowering the standard of living throughout the world. In the absence of a clear crisis very few people would support this. To maintain political support for our current and future investments in complexity thus requires an increase in the effective per capita supply of energy — either by increasing the physical availability of energy, or by technical, political, or economic innovations that lower the energy cost of our standard of living. Of course, to discover such innovations requires energy, which underscores the constraints in the energy­complexity relation.

Joseph A. Tainter, Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies, from Getting Down To Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics, 1996

In my humble opinion, Joseph Tainter understands this aspect of the problem better than anyone else. If you read what he says, our system can’t be solved with practical solutions to immediate 195 page problems (which as we all know, is the way we evolved to behave):

“Over time, devising practical solutions drove the Roman Empire into diminishing, then negative, returns to complexity. The implication is that to focus a problem­solving system, such as ecological economics, on practical applications will not automatically increase its value to society, nor enhance sustainability.”

The obvious conclusion is that the only way to mitigate our present crisis, is to follow my (and Hubbert’s, et al.) advice by terminating capitalism and starting completely over with an extremely simple, top­down system of rationing needs to people (e.g., the society of sloth.)

Jay Hanson, http://www.warsocialism.com/unnecessary.htm

Our principal constraints are cultural. During the last two centuries we have known nothing but exponential growth and in parallel we have evolved what amounts to an exponential­growth culture, a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of non­growth.

M. King Hubbert

Hegemony is as old as mankind.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard – American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives

To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a worthy object of any good government.

Abraham Lincoln, 1 December 1847 speech

When the men in Russia foul up, they are dismissed, sometimes losing their necks. But we protect those who fail and press them to the government bosom.

Admiral Hyman Rickover, U.S. Navy

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

H.L. Mencken

It is no longer a single historical world — as it has been from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards. Nor is it any longer ours. We, in our culture of commodities, are living our crisis; the rest of the world are living theirs. Our crisis is that we no longer believe in a future. Their crisis is us. The most we want is to hang on to what we’ve got. They want the means to live. That is why 196 page our principal preoccupations have become private and our public discourse is compounded of spite. The historical and cultural space for public speech, for public hopes and action, has been dismantled. We live and have our being today in private coverts.

John Berger

I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must, of course, admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system; since both are at present faultless, this must weigh against it.

Bertrand Russell, Skeptical Essays, I, 1928

In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious.

The Grand Inquisitor, to Christ, in Dostoevsky’s parable in The Brothers Karamazof, Chapter 5

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well­armed lamb contesting the vote.

Benjamin Franklin (apocryphal)

...when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people...will hate the new world order...and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful­looking people.

H.G. Wells, The New World Order, 1939,

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and 197 page so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. …

Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about — we were decent people — and kept us so busy with continuous changes and “crises” and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the “national enemies,” without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted,” that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these “little measures” that no “patriotic German” could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head. …

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self­deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

Milton Meyer, They Thought They Were Free; The Germans, 1933­1945, 1955, pages 166ff

When an opponent declares, “I will not come over to your side,” I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already.... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the 198 page new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”

Adolf Hitler (1889­1945), in a speech, 6 November 1933. Quoted in William L. Shirer, “Education in the Third Reich,” Chapter 8, of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 1959

The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself... Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable.

H.L. Mencken

Freedom is participation in the exercise of power. (a paraphrase?)

Unattributed

A society of sheep must, in time, beget a government of wolves.

Bertrand de Juvenal

We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.

Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, Chief U.S. Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal

If self deception increases political power, then it is impossible for a ruler to understand human nature.

Henry(?) James

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy. Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.

Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, 1966), pp. 1247­1248.

199 page The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.

Genghis Khan

It seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labour and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm, the ruler­ administrator in his frail barque, holding on with a boat­hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat­hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, feeble man.

Count Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy. And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists. Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question. Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill­judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties. For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.

John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address as Honorary Lord Rector of the University of St. Andrews, 1867 (found in Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, J.M. Robson ed. (University of Toronto Press, 1984). Often attributed to Edmund Burke as “The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.”

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people 200 page to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

Robert A. Heinlein

There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest — why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked be evil­minded neighbors... The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs... Even less than in cases that have already been discussed, can an attempt be made here to comprehend these wars of conquest from the point of view of concrete objectives. Here there was neither a warrior nation in our sense, nor, in the beginning, a military despotism or an aristocracy of specifically military orientation. Thus there is but one way to an understanding: scrutiny of domestic class interests, the question of who stood to gain.

Joseph Schumpter, The Roman Empire, 1919

Folks, remember that you heard it here first. We evolved to behave in ways that always lead to the point where war becomes the only logical choice. I have called it "subconscious conspiracy." Human social choices are, in the largest sense, biologically determined, and will always lead to war.

Jay Hanson

The history of the great events of this world is scarcely more than the history of crime.

In all business of state there is always a pretext which is put forward, and a real reason which is kept in the background.

Voltaire

I, (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

U.S. Military Enlisted Service­members Oath (10 U.S.C. §502)

I, (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully execute the duties of the office on which I am about to enter, so 201 page help me God.

U.S. Military Commissioned Officers Oath

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Oath of Office of the President of the United States (Article II, §1)

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

Oath of Office for Vice­President, Members of Congress, and federal civil servants (5 U.S.C. §3331)

I, (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as Supreme Court Justice under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.

Oath of Office for U.S. Supreme Court Justices

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

Albert Camus

Nothing will change in this world until fathers love their children more than they hate heir enemies.

Jennifer Stone, KPFA.org

Given the right leadership and sufficient external threat, the primary product of such spirituality may be extraordinary social cohesion. ... Almost every leader of note has, either consciously or unconsciously, fished these murky waters at some time or other.

Their reward is a united people armed with humanity's shining Excalibur. To unsheathe this magic blade, such visionary leaders must first win over the populace with the primal fairy tale, which invariably contains two ingredients;

1.) A Monster — preferably one who speaks an alien tongue, prays to heathen gods, wears peculiar 202 page clothing, and/or has different­colored skin.

2.) A Miracle — earned only by sacrifice, but culminating in triumph for the home team and a nasty end for the Monster.

This tired old routine has worked its magic with astonishing regularity since the dawn of history, and no one with fully functioning DNA seems wholly immune to the lure of it. Its genetic nature shines through the grisly statistics that follow every major conflict, especially those that incorporate genocidal slaughter.

Reg Morrison, The Spirit in the Gene, Humanity’s Proud Illusion and the Laws of Nature, 1999

Spiritual enlightenment is an infallible means for making men unsure, weaker in will, so they are more in need of company and support — in short, for developing the herd animal in man. Therefore all great artists of government so far (Confucius in China, the imperium Romanum, Napoleon, the papacy at the time when it took an interest in power and not merely in the world), in the places where the dominant instincts have culminated so far, also employed spiritual enlightenment — at least let it have its way (like the popes of the Renaissance). The self­deception of the mass concerning this point, e.g., in every democracy, is extremely valuable: making men smaller and more governable is desired as “progress.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values, Book I, 129, 1885

Libertarianism is about conferring liberty and concomitant responsibility where they most rightly should rest — on the individual. Liberalism is about granting the individual choice (at least socially) but spreading the economic risks (the consequences) over the entire group.

Unattributed

It is natural that the country whose theories of government are the most unrealistic in the world should develop the greatest and most powerful sub rosa political machinery.

Thurman W. Arnold

Economics is nothing more than politics in disguise. It is the art of privatizing gains and socializing losses. It is the state religion of the United States. Its god is growth and its idol is greed.

Z.B.F. Alexander

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society — its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its 203 page key institutions — rearranges itself… We are currently living through such a time.

Peter F. Drucker

With more and more of our daily human interactions based on exchange rather than gifting, we have developed polite ways of being around each other on a daily basis while maintaining an exchange­mediated social distance.

Richard Heinberg, Museletter 215, April 2010 [cf. Marx’s “exchange value” versus “use value.”]

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

Eric Hoffer

These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous To admire the tragic beauty they build. It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering Glacier on a high mountain rock­face, Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November, The gold and flaming death­dance for leaves, Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and kissing. I would burn my right hand in a slow fire To change the future … I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern Man is not in the persons but in the Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the Dream­led masses down the dark mountain.

Robinson Jeffers, Rearmament, 1935

I cannot tell you How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, then, when the crowded fish Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted with flame, like a live rocket A comet’s tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside the narrowing Floats and cordage of the net great sea­lions come up to watch, sighing in the dark; the vast walls of night

204 page Stand erect to the stars.

Lately I was looking from a night mountain­top On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could I help but recall the seine­net Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible. I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated

From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is closed, and the net Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they shine already. The inevitable mass­disasters Will not come in our time nor in our children’s, but we and our children Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers — or revolution, and the new government Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls — or anarchy, the mass­disasters.

These things are Progress; Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria, splin­ tered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are quite wrong. There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life’s end is death.

Robinson Jeffers, from The Purse Seine, 1937

There are not two sides to every story. There is only the truth.

Edward R. Morrow

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience... Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem. 205 page Howard Zinn

The more numerous public instrumentalities become, the more is there generated in citizens the notion that everything is to be done for them, and nothing by them. Every generation is made less familiar with the attainment of desired ends by individual actions or private agencies; until, eventually, governmental agencies come to be thought of as the only available agencies.

Herbert Spencer

Great military peoples have conquered their known world time and time again through the centuries, only to die out in the inevitable ashes of their fire. Well over two thousand years ago, the Chinese philosopher, Laotzu, concluded that: “Weapons often turn upon the wielder, An army’s harvest is a waste of thorns.” We may have to resort to arms in the future, as we have in the past. We may have to use them to prevent atomic war from being launched against us. But let us have the wisdom to realize that the use of force is a sign of weakness on a higher plane, and that a policy based primarily on recourse to arms will sooner or later fail.

Charles Lindbergh, Of Flight and Life, 1948

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good­bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If... if... We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

I used to be Normal, now I'm Sane.

Edmund Fitzgerald

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most 206 page normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.

Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, University of California Medical School, circa 1960

It’s not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it.

Aung San Suu Kyi

When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing — When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors — When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you — When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self­sacrifice — You may know that your society is doomed.

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

This experience [that there is nothing in another person which we cannot feel as part of ourselves] 207 page requires that we free ourselves from the narrowness of being related only to those familiar to us, either by the fact that they are blood relations or, in a larger sense, that we eat the same food, speak the same language, and have the same ’common sense.’ Knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society, race, or culture and penetrate to the depth of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human. True compassion and knowledge of man has been largely underrated as a revolutionary factor in the development of man, just as art has been.

Erich Fromm (1900­1980), The Revolution of Hope, Revised 1970, page 87

“You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is.”

I can never forget it. It was deeply impressed upon me. By my mother. Not upon my memory, but elsewhere. She had slipped in upon me while I was absorbed and not watching. The black philosopher's idea was that a man is not independent, and cannot afford views which might interfere with his bread and butter. If he would prosper, he must train with the majority; in matters of large moment, like politics and religion, he must think and feel with the bulk of his neighbors, or suffer damage in his social standing and in his business prosperities. He must restrict himself to corn­pone opinions — at least on the surface. He must get his opinions from other people; he must reason out none for himself; he must have no first­hand views.

Mark Twain (1835­1910), Corn Pone Opinions, written in 1901, published in 1923 in Europe and Elsewhere, Albert Bigelow Paine, Editor.

Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest accumulation of depotentiated social units.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875­1961), The Undiscovered Self, 1957

Madison’s primary political concern centered on the maintenance of social stability by the political and social control of competing factions; control by government itself was a secondary consideration. The framers crafted an elaborate political system:

• Where “first object of government” (highest priority) was “the faculties” of acquiring property. [12] • Where the struggle of classes and passions (e.g., religious conflict) was replaced with the struggle of interests in the economic sphere. • Where the political system was extremely resistant to change. • Where political power was reserved for a white male minority while projecting the illusion of self­government to the majority.

Madison scholar Richard K. Matthews explains: 208 page By consciously denying virtually all but a handful of citizens any role in a governmental structure that, by design, was to be run by an elite of superior ability (who nonetheless would have to check and balance each other), Madison left [economic struggle] as the prime avenue for humanity to search for meaning. [13]

Madison even went so far as to boast that “the true distinction” between ancient regimes and the proposed experiment in government “lies in the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity.” [14]

Matthews continues:

These passages all too neatly anticipate Madison's conception of citizenship: do not give “the people” any power when they are assembled; allow some of the white males, acting in isolation, the fleeting participation of voting for their representatives and restrict the right for as long as politically possible to one branch of the legislature. Beyond this minimalist approach to politics, ask little else of the people, except under extraordinary conditions. [15]

That's the theory; here is how it works:

In 1884, one of the wealthiest men of his time, Henry B. Payne, wanted to become the next United States senator from Ohio. Payne's son Oliver, the treasurer of Standard Oil, did his best to help. Just before the election for Ohio's seat, son Oliver “sat at a desk in a Columbus hotel with a stack of bills in front of him, paying for the votes of the state legislators,” who then elected U.S. senators. [16]

Jay Hanson, at http://www.jayhanson.us/page168.htm

Wake up and smell the pheromones of the class war you were bred to lose.

Z.B.F.A.

One of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed and nothing can be known… nothing of significance, that is.

E. Martin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy

[Political parties] serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community.

209 page They are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

George Washington, farewell address, 1796.

SELF

This is what you should do: Love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning god, have patience and indulgence toward people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to anyone or number of people... reexamine all you have been told at school or church, or in any book, dismiss what insults your soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Walt Whitman

Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.

Edward Said, 1994

…a man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

Albert Camus

The only absolute knowledge that man can achieve is that life is meaningless.

Count Leo Tolstoy (1828­1910)

Even if life is without meaning, we are not obliged to find it without value.

Alexander Carpenter, American, 1984

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

Count Leo Tolstoy

210 page If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives.

Bruno Bettelheim, On the Uses of Enchantment

This question has no answer except in the history of how it came to be asked. There is no answer because words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself. Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.

Julian Jaynes, Princeton psychology professor and author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, when asked, with other luminaries such as Armand Hammer and Norman Vincent Peale, in 1988 by Life Magazine to provide a statement on the “Meaning of Life.”

Is there meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we are better off if we ignore them completely.

G.G. Simpson

The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.

Sir Peter Medawar

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more. It is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems much henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow. This is what evolution is.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Love alone is capable of uniting human beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.

211 page Ashleigh Brilliant

The first principle [of science] is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman, commencement address at Caltech, in 1960s

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Richard Feynman

We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women who pass by without exciting attention, and who betray to the world nothing of the conflicts that rage within them except possibly by a nervous breakdown. What is so difficult for the layman to grasp is the fact that in most cases the patients themselves have no suspicion whatever of the internecine war raging in their unconscious. If we remember that there are many people who understand nothing at all about themselves, we shall be less surprised at the realization that there are also people who are utterly unaware of their actual conflicts.

Carl Gustav Jung, New Paths in Psychology, 1912. In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, page 425

Things become complicated to the degree that symbols are substituted for feelings.

The purpose behind any action is to feel something or to avoid feeling something. When a being is motivated by an avoidance to feeling something, he acts out of fear. Fear will eventually move one into this intellectual level, where symbols have been substituted for feelings. Feelings are no longer safe. People who have the purpose to create feel; people who have the purpose to avoid feeling think.

The most creative people not only feel, but they can translate feelings into symbols that will arouse feelings in another. In answer, the one who is avoiding feeling often imagines the creative person is enforcing feeling on him, and he usually counters with some act of resistance. This causes suffering.

What is the meaning of life? Life is. Life doesn’t come with a meaning. You can study the symbols or you can go out and feel alive.

Harry Palmer, Avatar

If it’s a symbol, to Hell with it.

212 page Flannery O’Connor

The search in life is not for meaning, but for passion.

Joseph Campbell

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: ‘Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.’

W.H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition, 1951

We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

Alfred North Whitehead

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

Japanese Proverb

Conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action.

Goethe

In this life, one can have either one’s reasons or one’s results.

Werner Erhard, est

The best substitute for eternity is perfect suggestion of the momentary.

Christopher Morely, English Writer

Focus is a substitute for time.

John L. Warren

213 page Eternity has nothing to do with the hereafter... This is it... If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here’s the place to have the experience.

Joseph Campbell

Appreciation of sacredness begins very simply by taking an interest in all the details of your life.

Chögyam Trungpa, short­path Tibetan Buddhist Teacher

A man’s life is dyed the color of his imagination.

Marcus Aurelius

Imagination rules the world.

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769­1821)

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Albert Einstein

Intuition, not intellect, is the ‘open sesame’ of yourself.

Albert Einstein, in Einstein and the Poet – In Search of the Cosmic Man by William Hermanns (Branden Press, 1983, page 16)

A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone.

Henry David Thoreau

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.

Simone Weil

The awakened one moves about in the world like a dry brown leaf, blown by the winds of his own previous tendencies.

Ashtavakra

How do you empower yourself? Give up trying to control the events of your life.

214 page Gurudev

You cannot leave a situation without spiritual injury unless you leave it lovingly.

Peace Pilgrim

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of the years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who come after us may have a clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Once my fancy was soothed by dreams of virtue, of fame and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.

Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. You shall repent of the injuries you inflict.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

Marcel Proust

That which we experience in dreams, if we experience it often, is in the end just as much a part of the total economy of our soul as is anything we “really” experience: we are by virtue of it richer or poorer.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844­1900), Beyond Good and Evil

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, ‘till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

William Blake

Between the retina and the higher centers of the cortex the innocence of vision is irretrievably lost — it has succumbed to the suggestion of a whole series of hidden persuaders.

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

The distresses of choice are our chance to be blessed. 215 page W. H. Auden

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

Eleanor Roosevelt, American Icon

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

J.P. Sartre

If you want a little freedom, let go a little. If you want complete freedom, let go completely.

Achan Chah

Without the conscious acknowledgement and acceptance of our kinship with those around us there can be no synthesis of personality.

...self has somewhat the character of a result, of a goal attained, something that has come to pass very gradually and is experienced with much travail.

Carl Gustav Jung

…your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. … Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can still see it. … It’s impossible not to end up being a parody of what you thought you were.

Keith Richards, Rolling Stone, Life, 2010

Our interest is in the dangerous edge of things.

Robert Browning

For Don Juan it was not only ruins of past cultures that held a dangerous element in them; anything which was the object of an obsessive concern had a harmful potential.

Carlos Casteneda, The Eagle’s Gift, page 26

Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.

William Blake

Those who tell, cannot know; those who know, cannot tell. or 216 page The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

Pattern is his who can see beyond shape; Life is his who can tell beyond words.

He who grasps, loses.

Lao Tzu, Chinese Mystic

The world is his who can see through its pretension.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

Qui plus sait, plus se tait. (The more a man knows, the less he says.)

French Saying

All that can be spelled out is without importance.

Zhou Zuoren, Chinese Critic

Whoever reflects on four things, it were better he had never been born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, and that which is after.

Talmud, Hagigah, 2.1

When a man feels the pangs of loneliness, he is able to create. As soon as he reaches detachment, he ceases to create, for he loves no more. Every creation originates in love. Creation, even when it is a mere outpouring from the heart, wishes to find a public. By definition, creation is sociable. Yet it can be satisfied with merely one single reader, an old friend, a lover.

Lu Xun, Chinese Writer

One after one, the petals fall. As from the rose, so from us all.

Gurth Ernest Carpenter, M. D.

217 page Threnody

Drew Kermit Carpenter D. 1940 AET 28

So you too, my dear young brother, Have met the pale friend Who waits us all, Waits with no question of our love Waits with no askance of our faith Patient beyond the crowing of the cock : to brook denial thrice : the friend who plenishes life’s empty purse : at the last throwing of the dice. Salve!

Gurth Ernest Carpenter, M. D.

Goal­orientation is inherently obsessive. Teleology is inherently obsessive.

Alexander Carpenter, American

...so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected; it is recognized and obeyed.

George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere; they’re in each other all along.

Jalaludin Rumi

There are only two emotions: fear and love. Love is letting go of fear.

Gerald G. Jampolsky

Virtue is not always amiable.

John Adams, American Statesman and Diarist

Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself.

Rainer Maria Rilke, German Poet

218 page Madness is an enormous pavilion Where it receives folk from every region, Especially if they have gold in profusion.

Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff, 1494, page 46

Come t’è picciol fallo amarso morso! (What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!)

Dante, Italian Writer

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Antoine DeSaint­Exupery, The Little Prince

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. (The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.)

Blaise Pascal (1623­1662)

The central demand of the body is to be felt.

Arthur Jonav

You have to lose your mind to come to your senses.

Fritz Pearls, American Gestalt Therapist

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

Charles Darwin (1809­1882)

There is a criterion by which you can judge whether the thoughts you are thinking and the things you are doing are right for you. That criterion is, “Have they brought you inner peace?”

Peace Pilgrim

The intellect, divine as it is, and all worshipful, has a habit of lodging in the most seedy of carcasses, and often, alas, acts the cannibal among the other faculties so that often, where the mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

219 page Virginia Wolfe, Orlando, page 4

The first thing in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered.

Oscar Wilde, English Wit

You can be anything you want the second time around...

Timothy Leary, American Mystic

Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

T. S. Eliot, The Rock

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. [Indeed, we’re certain we’re inadequate] Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of god. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Variously attributed to Marianne Williamson, Maya Angelou, and Nelson Mandela (e.g., Inaugural Speech, 1994)

Fear and dull disposition, lukewarmness and sloth, are not seldom wont to cloak themselves under the affected name of moderation.

John Milton, English Poet

Most people live for security and therefore wind up in constant insecurity.

Krishnamurti

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. [To keep our 220 page faces towards change and behave as free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.] [Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.]

Helen Keller, Unusual American

There is no security on this earth, only opportunity.

General Douglas McArthur

There are no premature ideas, only opportunities for which we must learn to wait.

Jean Monnet, United Europe visionary and organizer, 1957

We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.

Walt Kelly

It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves — in finding themselves.

André Gide

The essence of an adventure is that one doesn’t know its outcome. The essence of a joyous adventure is that one doesn’t need to know its outcome.

Alexander Carpenter

I expect nothing. I am not afraid. I am free.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Greek Writer

Where there is no solution, there is no problem. [so deal with it as a predicament and enlarge its scope…]

Zen Baba Famous Alexander, 1994

If there is no redress, there is no offence.

Common Law Principle

I’m an old man and I’ve had a lot of problems, most of which never occurred.

Mark Twain

221 page Sometimes you just have to give up your principles and do what's right.

Dr. Henry Kemp, American

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

Carl Gustav Jung, German Psychologist and Mystic

Society is a chaos which can be brought into harmonious order only by wit. If one does not jest and toy with the elements of passion, it forms thick masses and darkens everything.

...Man is naturally a serious animal. We must work against this shameful and abominable propensity with all our strength, and attack it from all sides. To that end, ambiguities are also good, except that they are so seldom ambiguous. When they are not, and allow only one interpretation, that is not immoral, it is only obtrusive and vulgar. Frivolous talk must be spiritual and dainty and modest, so far as possible; for the rest, as wicked as you choose.

Friedrich Von Schlegel (1772­1829)

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.

Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

Wit is cultured insolence.

Aristotle (apocryphal)

There are moments in life when true invective is called for, when it becomes an absolute necessity, out of a deep sense of justice, to denounce, mock, vituperate, lash out, in the strongest possible language.

Charles Simic, The Argument Culture

Humor is not brash. It is not cheap. It is not heartless. Among other things, it is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit…So here we are, several million of us, crowded into our global concentration camp for the duration. How are we to survive? Solemnity is not the answer, any more than witless and irresponsible frivolousness. I think our best chance — a good chance — lies in humor, which, in this case, means a wry acceptance of our predicament.

Ogden Nash, Commencement Address, Miss Porter’s School, Connecticut, 1970

Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious.

222 page Albert Einstein

If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!

Albert Einstein, when informed of the publication of a book entitled 100 Scientists Against Einstein (that it had been commissioned by Hitler is apocryphal)

All true wisdom is only to be learned far from the dwellings of men, out in the great solitudes, and is only to be attained through suffering. Privation and suffering are the only things that can open the minds of men to those things which are hidden from others.

Igjugarjuk, Eskimo, 1927

Being and non­being is the central theme of all philosophy, East and West. These words are not harmless and innocent verbal arabesques, except in the professional philosophism of decadence. We are afraid to approach the fathomless and bottomless groundlessness of everything. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” The ultimate reassurance, and the ultimate terror.

If there are no meanings, no values, no source of sustenance or help, then man, as creator, must invent, conjure up meanings and values, sustenance and succor out of nothing. He is a magician.

The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances. But it seldom extends to all men. In the name of our freedom and our brotherhood we are prepared to blow up the other half of mankind, and to be blown up in turn.

Ronald D. Laing, The Politics of Experience

Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward.

Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

If God did not exist, man would have to invent him...

Voltaire (apocryphal)

L’enfant abdique son extase. (The child abdicates his ecstasy.)

Malarmé

Curae leves loquuntur ingentes stupent. 223 page (Light griefs are loquacious, but the great are dumb.)

Seneca, Hippolytus, ii. 3, 607

There is a profound interdependence of world without and world within, and experience in either one of them is valid also in the other.

Laurens van der Post, A Far­Off Place

Vocation: the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

Frederick Buechner

Having come from the light and from the Gods, here I am in exile, separated from them.

Fragment of Turfa’n M7

But you must know that we are all in agreement, whatever we say.

Turba Philosophorum

The analogy of opposites is the relation of light to shadow, peak to abyss, fullness to void. Allegory, mother of all dogmas, is the replacement of the seal by the hallmark, of reality by shadow; it is the falsehood of truth, and the truth of falsehood.

Eliphas Levi, Dogme de la haute magie, Paris, Ballière, 1856, XXII, page 22

For I am the first and the last. I am the honored and the hated. I am the saint and the prostitute.

Fragment of the Nag Hammadi, 6, page 2

The prince of darkness is a gentleman.

Wm. Shakespeare, King Lear, III, iv

If our hypothesis is correct, the Holy Grail...was the breed and descendant of Jesus, the “Sang Real” of which the Templars were the guardians. ...At the same, the Holy Grail must have been, literally, the vessel that had received and contained the blood of Jesus. In other words it must have been the womb of the Magdalene.

224 page M. Baigent, R. Leigh, H. Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, London, Cape, 1982, xiv

The knights of the Graal wanted to face no further questions.

Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, XVI, page 819

The Graal...is a weight so heavy that creatures in the bondage of sin are unable to move it from its place.

Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, IX, page 477

If anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there’s no longer anything to add, but when there’s no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, on aircraft design [ref Praxilites]

Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

Charles Darwin, 1871

Man’s higher nature rests upon man’s lower nature, needing it as a foundation and collapsing without this foundation.

Abraham Maslow

For more than 50 years sane voices have called for an end to the debate. Nature versus nurture has been declared everything from dead and finished to futile and wrong — a false dichotomy. Everybody with an ounce of common sense knows that human beings are a product of a transaction between the two.

During most of the twentieth century “determinism” was a term of abuse, and genetic determinism was the worst kind of term. Genes were portrayed as implacable dragons of fate, whose plots against the damsel of free will were foiled only by the noble knight on nurture. (page 98)

Matt Ridley, Nature via Nurture

I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe...that the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one 225 page another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy...and that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

W. B. Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil

We inhabit a vast ocean of energy which is outside the reach of our senses and our measuring instruments.

David Bohm

The most demanding part of being an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s most intimate sensitivity.

Ann Truitt, American Sculptor

Out beyond all ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing There is a field... I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass The world is too full to talk about. Ideas, thoughts, even the phrase “each other,” have no meaning.

Jalaludin Rumi

Since there is nothing to meditate on, there is no meditation. Since there is nothing to go astray, there is no going astray. Although there is an innumerable variety of profound practices, they do not exist for your mind in its true state. Since there are no two such things as practice and practitioner; if, by those who practice or do not practice, the practitioner of practice is seen not to exist, thereupon the goal of practice is reached and also the end of practice itself.

Padmasambhava

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

R. D. Laing

For the listener who listens in the snow And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there 226 page And the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens

I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside!

Jalaludin Rumi

What more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, and the future on another.

Virginia Wolfe, Orlando, page 6

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Anxious, we keep longing for a foothold — we, at times too young for what is old and too old for what has never been.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Do you think I know what I’m doing? That for one breath or half­breath I belong to myself? As much as a pen knows what it’s writing, or the ball can guess where it’s going next.

Jalaludin Rumi

Late, by myself, in the boat of myself, No light and no land anywhere, Cloudcover thick. I try to stay Just above the surface, Yet I’m already under And living Within the ocean.

Jalaludin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks

The named and the nameless 227 page Appear from the darkness Darkness within darkness The gate to all mystery

Lao Tsu

I went forth unobserved In darkness and obscurity... Oh night more lovely than the dawn! Lost to all things and to myself.

St. John of the Cross

If you are willing serenely to bear the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter.

St. Theresa of Lysieux, Collected Letters (trans. by Sheed), page 303

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

Theodore Roethke

While living, Be a dead man. Be completely dead. And then do as you please. All will be well.

Buddhist sutra about Nirvana

While dying, Be an alive man. Be completely alive. Do as you please. All is well.

Restated with 2000 years more perspective….

First let go of knowing, then let go of not knowing.

Personal Identity is just a thought.

One simply cannot suffer when one is feeling gratitude; nor when one is laughing. 228 page Experience fully without story.

When I say, “Be still,” I do not mean to struggle to still the mind, which just makes more busyness, but rather to focus the mind on that which is already still. This can liberate the most amazing creativity.

If you want to conclude something, include it. But the mind is subtle — it won’t suffice to include something in order to conclude it. True surrender is called­for. Knowing how to suffer ends the pseudo­suffering of trying to avoid suffering. When one can suffer, one doesn’t.

Antoinette “Gangaji” Varner, American Hindu Guru of the Ramana Maharshi lineage

How I’m doing is none of my business.

Jack “Kamal” Ruane, of the Ramana Maharshi lineage

You will know you are enlightened when you are no longer trying to become enlightened. Suffering is essentially the resistance to experiencing reality as it is. Once enlightened you will no longer be forever seeking to change, deny, defend, or deify your experience of reality. You will naturally experience the present moment for what it is.

Kiara Windrider

We never do anything well ‘till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.

William Hazlitt

Let Bramha drive the chariot.

Hindu recommendation

The way to truly help another being is to not give rise to a single thought.

Sri “Papaji” Poonja, of the Ramana Maharshi lineage

... At present you alternate between desire and renunciation and are afraid all the time. All that must be overcome. Let me tell you a story.

And she told me about a youth who had fallen in love with a planet. He stood by the sea, stretched out his arms and prayed to a planet, dreamed of it, and directed all his thoughts to it. But he knew, or felt he knew, that a star cannot be embraced by a human being. He considered it to be his fate to love a heavenly body without any hope of fulfillment and out of this insight he constructed 229 page an entire philosophy of renunciation and silent, faithful suffering that would improve and purify him. Yet all his dreams reached the planet. Once he stood again on the high cliff at night by the sea and gazed at the planet and burned with love for it. And at the height of his longing he leaped into the emptiness toward the planet, but at the instant of leaping “it’s impossible” flashed once more through his mind. There he lay on the shore, shattered. He had not understood how to love. If at the instant of leaping he had had the strength of faith in the fulfillment of his love he would have soared into the heights and been united with the star.

“Love must not entreat,” she added, “or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract. Sinclair, your love is attracted to me. Once it begins to attract me I will come. I will not make a gift of myself. I must be won.”

Another time she told me a different story, concerning a lover whose love was unrequited. He withdrew completely within himself, believing his love would consume him. The world became lost to him, he no longer noticed blue sky and green woods, he no longer heard the brook murmur; his ears had turned deaf to the notes of the harp: nothing mattered anymore; he had become poor and wretched. Yet his love increased and he would rather have died or been ruined than renounce possessing this beautiful woman. Then he felt that his passion had consumed everything else within him and become so strong, so magnetic that the beautiful woman must follow. She came to him and he stood with outstretched arms ready to draw her to him. As she stood before him she was completely transformed and with awe he felt and saw that he had won back all he had previously lost. She stood before him and surrendered herself to him and sky, forest, and brook all came toward him in new and resplendent colors, belonged to him, and spoke to him in his own language. And instead of merely winning a woman he embraced the entire world and every star in heaven glowed within him and sparkled with joy in his soul. He had loved and found himself. But most people love to lose themselves.

Herman Hesse, Demian

‘Time’ is eternity living dangerously.

Celtic Proverb (apocryphal)

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope.

Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

The Metaphysics of Quality translated karma as “evolutionary garbage...” Karma is the pain, the suffering, that results from clinging to the static patterns of the world... [i.e., the “is­world”] The only exit from the suffering is to detach yourself from these static patterns, that is, to “kill” them.

230 page Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, page 398

The human body is the cave upon which are cast the shadows we mistake for reality.

Jamake Highwater, Myth and Sexuality

In love there are two things: bodies and words. [How about Spirit...? Soul...?]

Joyce Carol Oates

Anybody any good at what they do, that’s what they are, right? You gotta jack, I gotta tussle.

William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984

I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain but for the heart to conquer it.

Rabindranath Tragore

I feel that through strange forgotten connections I have been evolved arriving at my present state of expression. The great memory of those series of existences running through me lies in the subconscious. That is why I can feel an old bond of unity with creepers and trees, birds and beasts of this world. That is why this vastly mysterious and immense Universe does not appear terrifying or unfriendly.

Rabindranath Tagore

We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value.

Joseph Campbell

We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.

Joseph Campbell 231 page If he was to become himself, he must find a way to assemble the parts of his dreams into one whole.

George Eliot

Without love in the dream it will never come true.

Robert Hunter

When you reach a certain age and look back over your life, it seems to have had an order, to have been compiled by someone. And those events that when they occurred seemed merely accidental and occasional and just something that happened turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788­1860)

The voice, the smile, is a window on the soul. The seat of the soul is not inside a person, or outside a person, but the very place where they overlap and meet the world.

Gerald de Nerval

The most utterly lost of all days is that in which you have not once laughed.

Sebastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort (1741­1794), Pensées, maximes, et anecdotes, 1803

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.

e e cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings, 1894­1962)

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, and especially on their children, than the unlived life of their parents.

Carl Jung

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

Robert Frost

Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.

Benjamin Disraeli

232 page I salute you. I am your friend and my love for you goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not got; but there is much, very much, while I cannot give it, you can take.

No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take Heaven!

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!

The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it yet within our reach is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see and to see we have only to look. I beseech you to look.

Life is so generous a giver, but we judging its gifts by their covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love, by wisdom, with power. Welcome it, grasp it, and touch the angel's hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, or a duty, believe me, that angel’s hand is there and the wonder of an overshadowing Presence.

Our joys too: be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts. Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering, that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage then to claim it: that is all! But courage you have; and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together, wending through unknown country, home.

And so, this Christmas time, I greet you. Not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you now and forever, the day breaks, and the shadows flee away.

Fr. Giovanni, letter to a friend, Christmas 1513

“I am empty of everything and there is nothing left in my mind,” the monk said to Chao­Chou, “What do you say to that?” “Cast that away,” Chao­Chou said. The monk persisted: “But I have told you, there is nothing left in me. I am completely empty. What can I cast away?” “In that case,” Chao­Chou replied, “keep on carrying it.”

A monk asked Ma­tsu, “Why do you teach ‘Mind is Buddha?’” “To stop a baby from crying,” said Ma­tsu. “When the crying has stopped, what then?” the monk asked. Ma­tsu said, “Then I teach ‘Not mind, not Buddha.’” “How about someone who isn’t attached to either?” “I would tell him ‘Not beings.’” Then the monk said, “And what if you meet a man unattached to all things. What would you tell him?” “I would just let him experience the great Tao.”

Zen Mondo

We don’t see the world as it is. We see it as we are.

Anaïs Nin 233 page Everything is but what we think it.

Marcus Aurelius

If you insist that a teacher is necessary to attain liberation, you are wrong. Why? Because there is a teacher within your own mind who enlightens you spontaneously.

The Sixth Patriarch of Ch'an (Zen), Hui Neng (638 ­ 713)

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.

Norman Cousins

Death is only one of many ways to lose your life.

Alvah Simon, North to the Night

The glory of God is man fully alive.

Saint Iraneaus

Living well is a job; anyone can die.

Jack LaLane

There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

Think of the ways you have been called in the past, toward the love of your life. How did you find the work you are doing now? Your soulmate? How much of this was intentional? Sheer dint of will? How much was by chance, hunch, accident, or good fortune?

Antonio Machado

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian­Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for 234 page inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

Buckminster Fuller, quoted in New York Magazine, 30 March 1970

Da neigt sich die Stunde und rührt mich an

The hour is striking so close above me, so clear and sharp, that all my senses ring with it. I feel it now: there’s a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real Without my beholding it. All becoming has needed me. My looking ripens things and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, I, 1

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you are coming to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you are coming because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

Australian aboriginal woman

I long not for the perfect life but for the complete, and there is some thing incomplete about a life that is dedicated to escape from life.

Here they teach that much of existence amounts only to misery; that misery is caused by desire; therefore, if desire is eliminated, then misery will be eliminated. Now, that is true enough, as far as it goes. There is plenty of misery in the world, all right, but there is ample pleasure, as well. If a person forswears pleasure in order to avoid misery, what has he gained? A life with neither misery nor pleasure is an empty, neutral existence, and indeed, it is the nothingness of the void that is the 235 page lamas’ final objective. To actively seek nothingness is worse than defeat; why, Kudra, it is surrender; craven, chickenhearted, dishonorable surrender. Poor little babies are so afraid of pain that they spurn the myriad sweet wonders of life so that they might protect themselves from hurt. How can you respect that sort of weakness, how can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointments can bring? …

If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire. Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls against temptation, why not get better at fulfilling desire? Salvation is for the feeble, that’s what I think. I don’t want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb. If the gods would tax ecstasy, then I shall pay; however, I shall protest their taxes at each opportunity, and if Woden, or Shiva, or Buddha or that Christian fellow — what’s his name? — cannot respect that, then I’ll accept their wrath. At least I will have tasted the banquet that they have spread before me on this rich, round planet, rather than recoiling from it like a toothless bunny. I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to tempt us, to make it the more difficult for us to capture the grand prize: the safety of the void. To fashion of life such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods. …

The lamas declare that they have no fear of death, yet is it nothing less than fear that causes them to die before they die? In order to tame death, they refuse to completely enjoy life. In rejecting complete enjoyment, they are half­dead in advance — and that with no guarantee that their sacrifice will actually benefit them when all is done.

Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume, pages 96 & 97

You will be called upon to account for all the permitted pleasures in life you did not enjoy while on earth.

The Koran

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

May Sarton

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.

Marcus Aurelius

The Magic Theatre is not for everyone.

Herman Hesse 236 page The day will come when, after harnessing the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of Love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

Teilhard de Chardin

At the end of life you may close your eyes saying, “I have not been dominated by the Dominant Idea of my Age; I have mine own allegiance, and served it.”

Voltairine De Cleyre, American anarchist writer, in Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, 1910

Yes, we suffer pain, we become ill, we die. But we also hope, laugh, celebrate; we know the joy of caring for one another; often we are healed and we recover by many means. We do not have to pursue the flattening­out of human experience. I invite all to shift their gaze, their thoughts, from worrying about health care to cultivating the art of living. And today with equal importance, the art of suffering, the art of dying.

Ivan Illich, near the end of his life, quoted by Jerry Brown in Utne, March­April 2003

In times of stress, people like to believe they will rise to the level of their expectations. Instead, they rise to the level of their training.

Bruce Lee (apocryphal)

The lure of the distant and difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.

John Burroughs

Narcissism is fundamentally the central expression of the alienation from one’s true self, where this true self is not only the vitality of the experience of the body and the emotions, but also and most significantly, the inner core of the self, its essential presences. In this context, disturbances of the development of the psychic structure of the self are manifestations of relatively severe alienation manifesting as pathological forms of narcissism. Again we note that theories of depth psychology account for the development of narcissism only partially.

A.H. Almass, The Point of Existence: Transformations of Narcissism in Self­Realization, 1996, Book II, pages 174 and 174

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I 237 page am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self­centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default­setting, hard­wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real ­­ you get the idea. But please don’t worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other­ directedness or the so­called “virtues.” This is not a matter of virtue – it’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard­wired default­setting, which is to be deeply and literally self­centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default­setting this way are often described as being “well adjusted,” which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

David Foster Wallace, from a commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College.

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and to assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates. Every rational creature, ‘tis said, is oblig’d to regulate his actions by reason; and if any other motive or principle challenge the direction of his conduct, he ought to oppose it, till it be entirely subdu’d, or at least brought to a conformity with that superior principle. On this method of thinking the greatest part of moral philosophy, ancient and modern, seems to be founded... In order to shew the fallacy of all this philosophy, I shall endeavour to prove first, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.

David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature,

People are extremely simple. The two special keys to unlocking the human mystery are:

The brain finishes the work half a second before the information it processes reaches our consciousness. (Michael S. Gazzaniga)

Watch the action without the sound track and this truth becomes obvious. (Reg Morrison) 238 page Jay Hanson

The pain, the discomfort, the sickness are what they are. We can always cope with the way life moves and changes. The mind of an enlightened human being is flexible and adaptable. The mind of the ignorant person is conditioned and fixed.

Ajahn Sumedho, Seeing the Way

The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints.

Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, Simon & Schuster, 1968, page 72

I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.

Emily Jane Bronté

In a sense, the whole of creation may be said to be a movement between two involutions, Spirit in which all is involved and out of which all evolves downward to the other pole of Matter, Matter in which also all is involved and out of which all evolves upward to the other pole of Spirit.

Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Observe how the life of this world deceives those around you. It lures them into the traps of vanity, wealth, and fame, and exalts them above others. This splendor blinds them, and they are lost forever in illusion. But then in one instant, life deals the blow of death, and all is gone, and with the Beguiler it stands laughing at their sad end. So overcome your egos that you may be saved from the snares that devoured kings and paupers alike.

Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jillani, “Fayuz E Yazdani”

The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self­interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

John Steinbeck

There are two kinds of people, those who think there are two kinds of people, and those who know there is only One. 239 page Anonymous

...if one accepts an evolutionary concept and thus believes that man is constantly changing, what is left as a content for an alleged “nature” or “essence” of man? This dilemma is also not solved by such “definitions” of man as that he is a political animal (Aristotle), an animal that can promise (Nietzsche), or an animal that produces with foresight and imagination (Marx); these definitions express essential qualities of man, but they do not refer to the essence of man.

I believe that the dilemma can be solved by defining the essence of man not as a given quality or substance, but as a contradiction inherent in human existence. This contradiction is to be found in two sets of facts: (1) Man is an animal, yet his instinctual equipment, in comparison with that of all other animals, is incomplete and not sufficient to ensure his survival unless he produces the means to satisfy his material needs and develops speech and tools. (2) Man has intelligence, like other animals, which permits him to use thought processes for the attainment of immediate, practical aims; but man has another mental quality which the animal lacks. He is aware of himself, of his past and of his future, which is death; of his smallness and powerlessness; he is aware of others as others­as friends, enemies, or as strangers. Man transcends all other life because he is, for the first time, life aware of itself. Man is in nature, subject to its dictates and accidents, yet he transcends nature because he lacks the unawareness which makes the animal a part of nature — as one with it. Man is confronted with the frightening conflict of being the prisoner of nature, yet being free in his thoughts; being a part of nature, and yet to be as it were a freak of nature; being neither here nor there. Human self­awareness has made man a stranger in the world, separate, lonely, and frightened.

Eric Fromm, The Heart of Man

Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called “the love of your fate” (Amor fati). Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, “This is what I need.” It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge.

If you bring love to that moment — not discouragement — you will find the strength is there. Any disaster that you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now.

You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you’re required to exhibit strength, it comes.

Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living 240 page Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future.

Deepak Chopra

THE MIRAGE OF CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION

Humans are the most adventitious of creatures — a result of blind evolutionary drift. Yet, with the power of genetic engineering, we need no longer be ruled by chance. Humankind — so we are told — can shape its own future. According to E.O. Wilson, conscious control of human evolution is not only possible but inevitable:

...genetic evolution is about to become conscious and volitional, and usher in a new epoch in the history of life. ...The prospect of this “volitional evolution” — a species deciding what to do about its own heredity — will present the most profound intellectual and ethical choices, humanity has ever faced. ..humanity will be positioned godlike to take control of its own ultimate fate. It can, if it chooses, alter not just the anatomy and intelligence of the species but also the emotions and creative drive that compose the very core of human nature.

The author of this passage is the greatest contemporary Darwinian. He has been attacked by biologists and social scientists who believe that the human species is not governed by the same laws as other animals. In that war Wilson is undoubtedly on the side of truth. Yet the prospect of conscious human evolution he invokes is a mirage. The idea of humanity taking charge of its destiny makes sense only if we ascribe consciousness and purpose to the species; but Darwin’s discovery was that species are only currents in the drift of genes. The idea that humanity can shape its future assumes that it is exempt from this truth.

It seems feasible that over the coming century human nature will be scientifically remodeled. If so, it will be done haphazardly, as an upshot of struggles in the murky realm where big business, organised crime, and the hidden parts of government vie for control. If the human species is re­ engineered it will not be the result of humanity assuming a godlike control of its destiny. It will be another twist in man’s fate.

John Gray, Straw Dogs, Granta, 2002, pages 5­6

Persons have to keep from going mad by biting off small pieces of reality which they can get some command over and some satisfaction from. This means that their noblest passions are played out in the narrowest and most unreflective ways, and this is what undoes them.

From this point of view the main problem for human beings has to be expressed in the following paradox; Men and women must have a fetish in order to survive and to have “normal mental health.” But this shrinkage of vision that permits them to survive also at the same time prevents 241 page them from having the overall understanding they need to plan for and control the effects of their shrinkage of experience. A paradox this bitter sends a chill through all reflective people.

Self­knowledge is the hardest human task because it risks revealing to persons how their self­ esteem was built; on the powers of others in order to deny their own death.

Life imagines its own significance and strains to justify its beliefs. It is as though the life force itself needed illusion in order to further itself. Logically, then, the ideal creativity for humans would strain toward the “grandest illusion.”

Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil, page 153

The spiritual principle of equality, which forms the basis of Christian faith and which still forms the ideological basis for our methods of government and education, cannot be translated into realistic terms of political equality and economic freedom. Equality does not flourish under natural conditions of freedom, as Rousseau, the father of the French Revolution, wanted to believe; real natural conditions rather foster inequality and the reign of competition as Darwin saw it in nature.

Man, no matter under how primitive conditions never did live on a purely biological, that is, on a simple natural basis. The most primitive people known show strange and complicated modes of living which become intelligible only from their supernatural meaning. (page 62)

This is basically identical with what we call “culture,” the world that human beings create in every civilization in order to sustain themselves spiritually. This world includes not only all spiritual values of mankind, from the early soul belief to religion, philosophy and its latest offspring psychology, but also social institutions. These too were originally built up to maintain man’s supernatural plan of living, that is, were meant to guarantee his self perpetuation as a social type. (page 63)

Otto Rank, Beyond Psychology, 1941 (?)

Soon will the earth cover us all: then the earth, too, will change, and the things also which result from change will continue to change forever, and these again forever. For if a man reflects on the changes and transformations which follow one another like wave after wave, and their rapidity, he will despise everything which is perishable.

Contemplate the whole of time and the whole of substance, and consider that all individual things as to substance are a grain of a fig, and as to time the turning of a gimlet.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (written in his camp on the Danube, far from home, defending the Empire from the Germans)

Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives, and few are able to raise themselves above the 242 page ideas of the time.

Voltaire (1694­1778)

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., (1809­1894)

SCIENCE and GNOSIS

A definition is the beginning of knowledge. [a distinction?]

Demosthenes

The only true wisdom is to know that you know nothing.

If you would converse with me, define your terms.

Socrates

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumoured by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

Gautama Buddha

Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and progress, everything on earth that is man­made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of someone’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent.

Robert Anton Wilson

A system of natural philosophy may appear very plausible, and be for a long time very generally received in the world, and yet have no foundation in nature, nor any sort of resemblance to the 243 page truth. …

But it is otherwise with systems of moral philosophy, and an author who pretends to account for the origin of our moral sentiments, cannot deceive us so grossly, nor depart so very far from all resemblance to the truth.

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (first published 1759, 6th edition 1790, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Glasgow edition, 1976), page 313

He who is not aware of his ignorance will be only misled by his knowledge.

Unattributed

The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.

Terence McKenna

Our task is to look at the world and see it whole.

E.F. Schumacher

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory

The God of the scientists, one is tempted to think, created man in his own image and put him into the world with only one commandment: Now try to figure out by yourself how all this was done and how it works.

Dr. [Hannah?] Arendt

There is no shortage of energy, but there is a great shortage of intelligence.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

Frank Zappa

The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to 244 page regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

Confucius, Great Learning

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds — it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

Albert Einstein, The World As I See It; Ideas and Opinions (NY: Laurel, 1954), pages 22­23.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence . . . truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.

Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, Preface to the Second Edition

Science for me, and for the vast majority of respectable scientists, is not about the secrets of nature or even about truths. Science is simply the method we use to try and postulate a minimum set of assumptions that can explain, through a straightforward logical derivation, the existence of many phenomena of nature.

Somehow we have restricted the connotation of science to a very selective, limited assemblage of natural phenomena. We refer to science when we deal with physics, chemistry, or biology. We should also realize that there are many more phenomena of nature that do not fall into these 245 page categories, for instance those phenomena we see in organizations. If these phenomena are not phenomena of nature, what are they? Do we want to place what we see in organizations to the arena of fiction rather than into reality?

Eliyahu L. Goldratt, The Goal, Introduction to the Revised Edition.

Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived­at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality.

Albert Einstein (apocryphal)

Not only will men of science have to grapple with the sciences that deal with man, but — and this is a far more difficult matter — they will have to persuade the world to listen to what they have discovered. If they cannot succeed in this difficult enterprise, man will destroy himself by his halfway cleverness.

Bertrand Russell, 1951

Knowledge is no longer widely felt as an ideal; it is seen as an instrument. In a society of power and wealth, knowledge is valued as an instrument of power and wealth, and also, of course, as an ornament in conversation.

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

The sophist, in contradistinction to the philosopher, is not set in motion and kept in motion by the sting of the awareness of the fundamental difference between conviction or belief and genuine insight. But this is clearly too general, for unconcern with the truth about the whole is not a preserve of the sophist. The sophist is a man who is unconcerned with the truth, or does not love wisdom, although he knows better than most other men that wisdom or science is the highest excellence of man. Being aware of the unique character of wisdom, he knows that the honor deriving from wisdom is the highest honor. He is concerned with wisdom, not for its own sake, not because he hates the lie in the soul more than anything else, but for the sake of the honor or the prestige that attends wisdom. He lives or acts on the principle that prestige or superiority to others or having more than others is the highest good.

Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, 1950, page 116

If science always insists that a new order must be immediately fruitful, or that it has some new predictive power, then creativity will be blocked. New thoughts generally arise with a play of the mind, and the failure to appreciate this is actually one of the major blocks to creativity. Thought is generally considered to be a sober and weighty business. But here it is being suggested that creative play is an essential element in forming new hypotheses and ideas. Indeed, thought which 246 page tries to avoid play is in fact playing false with itself. Play, it appears, is the very essence of thought.

David Bohm

Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he adopts an expression that is at once solemn and shifty­eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty­eyed because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.

Sir Peter Medawar

The mind of man is more intuitive than logical, and comprehends more than it can coordinate.

Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues, 1746

We must recollect that all our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably one day be based on an organic substructure.

Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism, 1914

The trouble is that the balls go where you throw them.

Jugglers’ Saying

It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our century, but the victory of scientific method over science.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844­1900), 1868

Science is the religion with the most flexible belief system.

Unattributed

1. If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke, Laws of Prediction, 1962­1973

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature.

Karl Schroeder, The Deepening Paradox, 2011 247 page Perfectly compressed information is indistinguishable from noise.

Max Kaehn

I could never have known so well how paltry men are, and how little they care for really high aims, if I had not tested them by my scientific researches. Thus I saw that most men only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 12 October 1825, in Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth — that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

H.L. Mencken

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

The basic texture of research consists of dreams into which the threads of reasoning, measurement, and calculation are woven.

Albert Szent­Györgyi, Hungarian, 1937 Nobel Prize in Medicine for work on oxidation in tissues, Vitamin C, and fumaric acid.

Research is what I’m doing when I don't know what I’m doing.

Wernher von Braun

That which we experience in dreams, if we experience it often, is in the end just as much a part of the total economy of our soul as is anything we “really” experience: we are by virtue of it richer or poorer.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844­1900), Beyond Good and Evil

There is no joy more intense than coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of currently accepted ideas. 248 page Cecilia Payne­Gaposchkin (1900­1979), An Autobiography and Other Recollections, 1984

No experiment should be believed until it has been confirmed by theory.

Arthur S. Eddington

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

Robert Frost, Mowing, 1913, in A Boy's Will (?)

From a human point of view, the difference between the mind of a human being and that of a mountain goat is wonderful; from the point of view of the infinite ignorance that surrounds us, the difference is not impressive.

Wendell Berry, American Farmer and Essayist

With every passing hour, our solar system comes forty­three thousand miles closer to globular cluster 13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress.

ransom k. fern

The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.

Wendell Berry, The Wild Birds

Is it a fact that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables, 1851

Matter is condensed or “frozen” light moving back and forth at speeds which are less than light.

David Bohm

Matter accumulates in the eddies where energy slows; and builds itself out on the living arcs of energy fields we barely recognize.

Alexander Carpenter, American 249 page Against its will, energy is doing something productive, like the devil in medieval Europe. The principle is that nature does something against its own will, and, by self­entanglement, produces beauty.

Otto Rössler, quoted by Gary Snyder in Mountains and Rivers Without End

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts. They come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803­1882), Self­Reliance

Nothing is permanent but change. Character is destiny.

Heraclitus of Ephesus

If we want everything to stay as it is, everything will have to change.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard (Il Gattopardo)

How can those of us trained as scientists in the Western tradition learn to live with the subversive and terrifying truth that genuine and effective knowing can happen without thinking, talking, or doing?

Robert Alexander Carpenter, 1981

The mind is a squadron of simpletons. It is not unified, it is not rational, it is not well designed — or designed at all. It just happened, an accumulation of innovations of the organisms that lived before us. The mind evolved, through countless animals and through countless worlds.

Like the rest of biological evolution, the human mind is a collage of adaptations (the propensity to do the right thing) to different situations. Our thought is a pack of fixed routines — simpletons. We need them. It is vital to find the right food at the right time, to mate well, to generate children, to avoid marauders, to respond to emergency quickly. Mental routines to do so have evolved over millions of years and developed in different periods in our evolution, as Rumi noted.

We don’t think of ourselves as of such humble origins. The triumphs that have occurred in the short time since the Industrial Revolution have completely distorted our view of ourselves. Hence, the celebrated triumph of humanity is its rationality: the ability to reason through events and act logically, to organize business. To plan for the future, to create science and technology. One influential philosopher, Daniel Dennet, wrote recently: “When a person falls short of perfect rationality...there is no coherent...description of the person’s mental states.”

250 page Yet to characterize the mind as primarily rational is an injustice; it sells us short, it makes us misunderstand ourselves, it has perverted our understanding of our intelligence, our schooling, our physical and mental health. Holding up rationality, and its remorseless deliberation, as the model of the mind has, more important, set us along the wrong road to our future. Instead of the pinnacle, rationality is just one small ability in a compound of possibilities.

The mind evolved great breadth, but it is shallow, for it performs quick and dirty sketches of the world. This rough­and­ready perception of reality enabled our ancestors to survive better. The mind did not evolve to know the world or to know ourselves. Simply speaking, there has never been, nor will there ever be, enough time to be truly rational.

Rationality is one component of the mind, but it is used rarely, and in a very limited area. Rationality is impossible anyway. There isn’t time for the mind to go through the luxurious exercises of examining alternatives. Consider the standard way of examining evidence, the truth table, a checklist of information about whether propositions are correct or not. To know whether Aristotle is a hamburger, you would look up “Aristotle” or “hamburger” in this table. Now think of the number of issues you immediately know well — what Yugoslavia is, whether skateboards are used at formal dinners, how chicken sandwiches should taste, what your spouse wore this morning — and you will see that your own truth table, if entered randomly, would have millions of entries just waiting! (pages 2­3)

A mind built up with countless specific adaptations can never be rational. We piece together the results of a small set of probes to judge the world, picking up a few signals and making quick assessments of what is outside, in the case of marauders, and inside, in the case of memories and dreams. Such a mind will never be rational; but it will always try to adapt. And it cannot always be correct either. If we consider a mind that has evolved to meet most situations adequately, say 95 percent of them, we may have a better idea of what being correct is. (page 221)

Since the mind evolved to select a few signals and then dream up a semblance, whatever enters our consciousness is overemphasized. It does not matter how the information enters, whether via a television program, a newspaper story, a friend's conversation, a strong emotional reaction, a memory — all is overemphasized. We ignore other, more compelling evidence, overemphasizing and overgeneralizing from the information close at hand to produce a rough­and­ready realty. (page 258)

The [mental] system we recruited had the primary aim of reacting quickly to immediate danger — those who did lived long enough to produce us. Those who acted more thoughtfully and with due deliberation of the proper course, who could avoid panic when confronted by mild threats — who acted rationally, that is — probably lived shorter, and thus less generative, lives. The survival argument against rationality in primeval conditions is that payoff is very lopsided: Fail to respond to a real danger, even if that danger would kill you only 1/10,000 as often, and you will be dead. A few years later, you will be deader in evolutionary terms, for fewer of your genes will be around. However, an overreaction to danger produces only a little hysteria, a little stress, and maybe a little 251 page embarrassment — probably little or no loss of reproductive ability. Maybe the excitement would even recruit a little more reproductive effort!

Running from every snake or tiger or loud noise probably doesn’t disrupt life too much. Not running, while it might kill you only slightly more often, can eventually produce major changes in the population. The same numbers hold in this example as for the height difference cited earlier. If panic in response to a threat in all cases improved survival by even 1/10,000, those who panicked would be 484 million times more populous than those who did not. And so it was good to respond emotionally and quickly to the average dangers threatening most of our ancestors. Rationality is a great idea and ideal, but we never had the time for it; we don’t have time for it now, and thus we don’t have the mind for it. (page 262)

Robert Ornstein, The Evolution of Consciousness, Prentice Hall, 1991, ISBN 0­13­587569­2

It’s a complex story, really; most of one’s thinking that’s worth anything comes not from reason but from intuition. Many of my scientist friends don’t like that — they’re still back in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where you did everything rationally and the word “irrationally” implied loose or bad thinking. I’m afraid it isn’t like that; all the things that really matter are intuitive. Understanding the Earth’s system is one of those things you cannot express in mathematical terms easily. The climate scientists tried to do it — there was a man called Lorenz, many years ago, who discovered that if you try to model a system containing more than two differential equations — and you need hundreds, thousands of them to look at the Earth’s system — it goes chaotic as soon as you put real­world data into it. So what they tend to do, because they have to model it that way, with hundreds of thousands of equations, they either fudge the equations with linearizing modifications, so that the model never goes chaotic, or they never run it beyond what they call equilibrium conditions, that is they never allow it to behave dynamically as a living thing. Now this is absolutely fatal as far as modeling goes and it applies both to biology and to climate science (geo­physiology) and this is why we are finding now that the great gathering of scientists that formed the IPCC — some of the best climate scientists in the world — with the very best of intentions and the most modern and expensive equipment, are failing to predict the climate that is with us today. … So to understand the Earth’s system, you can’t avoid approaching the whole problem to a certain extent intuitively and this is where I think Gaia came in because most of the first part of it was intuitive rather than rational. And I think it has some deeper significance in that one of my reasons for being somewhat pessimistic about the future of the present generation of humans is that I think the problem is right beyond us: we do not have the intellectual capacity to solve the problem of living successfully with our planet.

James Lovelock, speaking in London early 2009, at a function in his honor and coin­ ciding with the publication of John Gribbins’ He Knew He Was Right: The Irrepressible Life of James Lovelock and Gaia

Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived­at by purely logical means are 252 page completely empty as regards reality.

Albert Einstein (apocryphal)

Becoming a Scientist because you crave factual certainty and thirst for a meaningful vision of human life is like becoming an Archbishop so you can meet girls.

Anonymous, through David Del Torto

Our tendency is to ponder, to question, to find out. There is no way to do that from within the discipline of sorcery. Sorcery is the art of reaching the place of silent knowledge, and silent knowledge can’t be reasoned out. It can only be experienced.

Carlos Casteneda, The Power of Silence

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

Freeman Dyson has expressed some thoughts on craziness. In a Scientific American article called Innovation in Physics, he began by quoting Niels Bohr. Bohr had been in attendance at a lecture in which Wolfgang Pauli proposed a new theory of elementary particles. Pauli came under heavy criticism, which Bohr summed up for him: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that is not crazy enough.” To that Freeman added: “When a great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete, and confusing form. To the discoverer, himself, it will be only half understood; to everyone else, it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope!”

Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe, 1979

So...we say we understand an aspect of nature when we can say it is similar to some familiar theoretical model. The terms theory and model, incidentally, are sometimes used interchangeably. But really they should not be. A theory is a relationship of the model to the things the model is supposed to represent. The Bohr model of the atom is that of a proton surrounded by orbiting electrons. It is something like the pattern of the solar system, and that is indeed one of its metaphoric sources. Bohr's theory was that all atoms were similar to his model. The theory, with the more recent discovery of new particles and complicated interatomic relationships, has turned out not to be true. But the model remains. A model is neither true nor false; only the theory of its similarity to what it represents.

A theory is thus a metaphor between a model and data. And understanding in science is the 253 page feeling of similarity between complicated data and a familiar model.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1976, pages 52­53

In physics there are only happenings, no doings.

Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, page 74

In modern physics, the more logical you are, the more wrong you are.

Lama Govinda

That’s not right. It’s not even wrong.

Wolfgang Pauli, on reading a speculative paper by a physicist

Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844­1900)

If we are to have vision, we must learn to participate in the object of the vision. The apprenticeship is hard.

Antoine de Saint­Exupery, French Aeronaut and Writer

The more abstract the truth you want to teach the more you must seduce the senses to it.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844­1900), Beyond Good and Evil

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Antoine de Saint­Exupery, The Little Prince

Le cour a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. (The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.)

Blaise Pascal (1623­1662)

Art is not a mirror; it is a hammer. It does not reflect; it shapes. All power to the imagination!

254 page Berthold Brecht, German Writer

Primum non nocere. (Above all, do no harm.)

Hippocratic Oath

Disease [is] not an entity, but a fluctuating condition of the patient’s body, a battle between the substance of disease and the natural self­healing tendency of the body.

Hippocrates, Greek Physician

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Voltaire

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

Walt Whitman, American Naturalist and Poet

The world is but a canvas to the imagination.

Henry David Thoreau

A hallucination is merely a reality that we normally don’t have to deal with.

Stella Denova

What is reality? It’s just a collective hunch!

Lily Tomlin

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. or

Reality is what doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.

A Character in a novel by Thomas Disch

The task is not to see what has never been seen before, but to think what has never been thought before about what you see everyday.

Erwin Schrödinger

255 page Only those who see the invisible can do the impossible.

Dr. Bernard Lown

Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it. ... The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.

William James, American Philosopher and Philosophologist

Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose. Converting data into information thus requires knowledge. And knowledge, by definition, is specialized. (In fact, truly knowledgeable people tend toward overspecialization because there is always so much more to know.) The information­based organization requires far more specialists overall than does the command­and­ control structure we are accustomed to. Moreover, the specialists work in operations rather than at corporate headquarters. The operating organization becomes an organization of specialists of all kinds. Information­based organizations need central operating work such as legal counsel, public relations, human resources, and labor relations as much as ever. But the need for service staffs — that is, for people without operating responsibilities who advise, counsel, or coordinate — shrinks drastically. In its central management, the information­based organization needs few, if any, specialists.

Peter F. Drucker, The New Realities, 1989, page 209

How knowledge behaves as an economic resource, we do not yet fully understand…We need an economic theory that puts knowledge into the center of the wealth­producing process.

Peter F. Drucker

Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively — and even how to appreciate old books.

Robert Darnton, The Library in the New Age, The New York Review of Books, Volume 55 Number 10, 12 June 2008

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

256 page Pablo Picasso

It’s better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

James Thurber

Control of information by government is no longer possible. Information is now transnational; like money, information has no “fatherland.” Since information knows no national boundaries, it will form new “transnational” communities of people who, maybe without ever seeing each other in the flesh, are in communion because they are in communication.

Peter F. Drucker, The New Realities, 1989, page 260

Technology is not nature, but man. It is not about tools: it is about how man works. It is equally about how man lives and how man thinks... Information is the organizing principle of every biological process... And biological process is not analytical. In a mechanical phenomenon the whole is equal to the sum of the parts and therefore capable of being understood by analysis. Biological phenomena are forever ‘wholes.’ They are different from the sum of their parts. Information is indeed conceptual. But meaning is not; it is perception.

Peter F. Drucker, The New Realities, 1989, page 261

In this world of information overload, the benumbed citizen no longer reads or thinks; he watches and feels.

William Irwin Thompson

The question of what happens to intellectual property on the Net may be summed up like this: value shifts from the transformation of bits rather than bits themselves, to services, to the selection of content, to the presence of other people, and to the reassurance of authenticity — reliable information about sources of bits and their future flows. In short, intellectual assets and property depreciate while intellectual processes and services appreciate.

Esther Dyson, in Release 1.0, December 1994

On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it is getting lower and lower all the time. So we have these two fighting against each other.

Stuart Brand, 1984

The problem facing almost all leaders in the future will be how to develop their organizations’ 257 page social architecture so that it actually generates intellectual capital.

Dr. Warren Bennis

There is little question that the intangibles of databases, personal know­how, technological understanding, communication networks, market knowledge, brand acceptance, distribution capabilities, organizational flexibility, and effective motivation are the true assets of most companies and the primary sources of their future income streams.

James Brian Quinn, The Intelligent Enterprise: A Knowledge and Service Based Paradigm for Industry

Technology...has impoverished the world...[and] become the most powerful agent of historical entropy... It imposes uniformity without furthering unity. It levels the differences between distinctive national cultures and styles, but it fails to eradicate the rivalries and hatreds between peoples and states. After turning rivals into identical twins, it purveys the very same weapons to both.... the danger of technology lies not only in the death­dealing power of many of its inventions but in the fact that it constitutes a grave threat to the very existence of the historical process. By doing away with the diversity of societies and cultures, it does away with history itself.

Octavio Paz, in The Atlantic Monthly, May 1974

In organismic companies (as opposed to mechanistic ones), jobs lose much of their formal definition and are constantly redefined; each employee has to understand the overall situation and strategy of the firm; interaction runs laterally as much as vertically, and communication across ranks tends to resemble consultation more than giving orders. Successful firms in a fast­changing environment become more highly differentiated (internally) as sales, production, R&D, etc. all specialize in their respective functions and adapt to their specific parts of the environment. A key success factor is the ability of management to manage the conflict between the different perspectives and sub­cultures of the different parts of the organization.

Barry Sugarman, writing on numerous empirical studies in Organizational Theory, at http://www.solonline.org/res/kr/Sugarman.html

“The prevailing system of management has destroyed our people,” says Dr. [W. Edwards] Deming. “People are born with intrinsic motivation, self­esteem, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning.” Intrinsic motivation lies at the heart of Deming’s management philosophy. By contrast, extrinsic motivation is the bread and butter of Western management.... A corporate commitment to quality that is not based on intrinsic motivation is a house built on sand.

Peter Senge, Building learning organizations, Journal for Quality and Participation, March 1992

258 page Work should be the skillful expression of our total being, our means to create harmony and balance within ourselves and in the world.

Tarthang Tulku

Metcalfe’s Law of Networks: The value of any network increases in proportion to the square of the number of people using it, so a network with five hundred people attached to it is a hundred times as useful as one with only fifty people attached.

Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com

Copernicus eliminated the discontinuity between the terrestrial world and the rest of the physical universe. Next, Darwin eliminated the discontinuity between human beings and the rest of the organic world. And most recently, Freud eliminated the discontinuity between the rational world of ego and the irrational world of the unconscious. There is one discontinuity that faces us yet. This “fourth discontinuity” is between human beings and the machine.

David Channel, The Vital Machine: A study of Technology and Organic Life

Information Technology is no longer a business resource. It is the business environment.

Browning, The Economist, 1990

Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.

Euripides

Allwissend bin ich nicht; doch viel ist mir bewisst. (All­knowing I am not; still, I do know many things.)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749­1832)

I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.

Edward Everett Hale

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.

Howard Aiken

259 page Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

Aldous Huxley

Restlessness and discontent are the necessities of progress.

Thomas Edison

The end and the beginnings of things are unknown. We see only the intervening formations. Then what cause is there for grief?

Bagavad Gita

We know little of the past and nothing of the future; and the present is so immense that it exceeds our range of experience.

Radhakrishna, paraphrasing Sankara

A long time ago, Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” This is where philosophy begins. But if you are not thinking, what? This is where Zen begins.

Seung Sahn

How do you empower yourself? Give up trying to control the events of your life.

Gurudev

And if such monsters are generated, we must believe them the work of nature, even if they are different from man.

Paracelsus, De Homunculis, in Operum Volumen Secundum, Genevae, De Tournes, 1658, page 465

Alchemy, however, is a chaste prostitute, who has many lovers, disappoints all, and grants her favors to none. She transforms the haughty onto fools, the rich into paupers, the philosophers into dolts, and the deceived into loquacious deceivers...

Trithemius, Annalium Hirsaugensium Tomi II, S. Gallo, 1690, page 141

The analogy of opposites is the relation of light to shadow, peak to abyss, fullness to void. Allegory, mother of all dogmas, is the replacement of the seal by the hallmark, of reality by shadow; it is the falsehood of truth, and the truth of falsehood.

260 page Eliphas Levi, Dogme de la haute magie, Paris, Ballière, 1856 XXII, 22

Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

T. S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock, I

If our eye could penetrate the earth and see its interior from pole to pole, from where we stand to the antipodes, we would glimpse with horror a mass terrifyingly riddled with fissures and caverns.

Thomas Burnet, Telluris Theoria Sacra, Amsterdam Wolters, 1694, page 38

The earth is a magnetic body; in fact, as some scientists have found, it is one vast magnet, as Paracelsus affirmed some 300 years ago.

H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, New York, Boulton, 1877, I, page xxiii

“What does the fish remind you of?” “Other fish.” “And what do the other fish remind you of?” “Other fish.”

Joseph Heller, Catch 22, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1961, xxvii

Whatever you may say something is, it is not! The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing.

Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 1933; 4th edition, The International Non­ Aristotelian Library, 1958, II, 4, page 58

Think things, not words.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., American Jurist

To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized person.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.

261 page Descartes, René (1596­1650), Discours de la Méthode, 1637

The old believe everything, the middle­aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

Oscar Wilde

I consider mathematical quantities not as consisting of very small parts; but as described by continuous motion. Lines are described and thereby generated not by the apposition of parts, but by the continuous motion of points; surfaces by the motion of lines; solids by the motion of surfaces; angles by the rotation of the sides; portions of time by a continued flux; and so in other quantities.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642­1727)

To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty of nature. If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.

Richard Feynman (1918­1988)

When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager, unsatisfactory kind.

Lord Kelvin

It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.

Paul Dirac, British Nobel Prize Winner, Physics

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Albert Einstein

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

Friedrich Nietzsche

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental 262 page reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

David Hume, 1748

Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it — an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis — it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.

Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, 1851, page 4

We now come to the decisive step of mathematical abstraction: We forget about what the symbols stand for ... [The mathematician] need not be idle, there are many operations which he may carry out with these symbols, without ever having to look at the things they stand for.

Hermann Weyl, The Mathematical Way of Thinking

I think numbers are greatly overrated. Mathematics has been remarkably unsuccessful in describing biology and biological forms.

Rupert Sheldrake, morphogenic fields biologist (1960s?)

As far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 1954, page 233

The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements of thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined...The above­mentioned elements are, in any case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a second stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

Albert Einstein, in a letter quoted by Hadamard in The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, 1945

The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with the natural events 263 page could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.

But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress....

If it is one of the goals of religions to liberate mankind as far as possible from the bondage of egocentric cravings, desires, and fears, scientific reasoning can aid religion in another sense. Although it is true that it is the goal of science to discover (the) rules which permit the association and foretelling of facts, this is not its only aim. It also seeks to reduce the connections discovered to the smallest possible number of mutually independent conceptual elements. It is in this striving after the rational unification of the manifold that it encounters its greatest successes, even though it is precisely this attempt which causes it to run the greatest risk of falling a prey to illusion. But whoever has undergone the intense experience of successful advances made in this domain, is moved by the profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence. By way of the understanding he achieves a far­reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason, incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious in the highest sense of the word. And so it seems to me that science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life.

Albert Einstein, from Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A Symposium, published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941.

In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside.

Albert Einstein, in an address in 1918 for Max Planck’s 60th birthday, at the Physical Society, Berlin; published as “Principles of Research” in Essays in Science (1934), 1

Well, science is not religion and it doesn’t just come down to faith. Although it has many of religion’s virtues, it has none of its vices. Science is based upon verifiable evidence. Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the 264 page rooftops. Why else would Christians wax critical of doubting Thomas? The other apostles are held up to us as exemplars of virtue because faith was enough for them. Doubting Thomas, on the other hand, required evidence. Perhaps he should be the patron saint of scientists.

Richard Dawkins, http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/articles/dawkins.html

[Our knowledge of physics] is only an empty shell — a form of symbols. It is knowledge of structural form, and not knowledge of content. All through the physical world runs that unknown content....

Sir Arthur Eddington , Space, Time, and Gravitation, 1920, page 200

[O]ur science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain — that the world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort, of whose residual properties we at present can frame no positive idea.

William James, Is Life Worth Living?

Of all hatreds, there is none greater than that of ignorance against knowledge.

Galileo Galilei, 30 June 1616

What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. ... Up to now scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. …[D]oes [the universe] need a creator, and, if so does he have any other effect on the universe?

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 1998, page 190

…in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy “is.”

Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, 1963, page 4­1

Atoms are not things.

Werner Heisenberg

Not chaos­like together crush’d and bruis’d, But, as the world, harmoniously confus’d: Where order in variety we see, 265 page And where, though all things differ, all agree.

Alexander Pope

“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. “I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.” “You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter, “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Technology is imposed on the land, but technique means conforming to the landscape. One forces a passage, while the other discovers it. The goal of developing technique is to conform to the most improbable landscape by means of the greatest degree of skill and boldness supported by the least equipment.

Doug Robinson, Great Pacific Iron Works Catalog, 1974

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Samuel Johnson

Grace is given of God, but knowledge is bought in the market.

Arthur Hugh Clough, The Bothie of Tober­na­Vuolich, iv

Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est. (Knowledge itself is power.)

Francis Bacon, Religious Meditations, On Heresies.

The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.

Earl of Chesterfield

Books, we are told, seek to instruct or to amuse. Indeed!...The true antithesis to knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power. All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge.

Thomas de Quincy, Letters to a Young Man, iii.

People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them — that does not occur to them.

266 page Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1939

There is a word that is sometimes hung up at the edge of a tram line: the word “Stop.” Written on a metal label by the side of the line, it means that a tram will stop presently. It is an example of pure information... Compare it with another public notice which is sometimes exhibited in the darker cities of England: “Beware of pickpockets, male and female.” Here again there is information. A pickpocket may come along presently, just like a tram, and we take our measures accordingly. But here is something else besides... We have been reminded of several disquieting truths — the general insecurity of life, human frailty, the violence of the poor, and the fatuous trustfulness of the rich, who always expect to be popular without having done anything to deserve it. By taking the form of a warning it has made us afraid... Besides conveying information, it has created an atmosphere, and to that extent it is literature.

E.M. Forster, in The Atlantic Monthly, November 1925

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Sherlock Holmes; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Scandal in Bohemia

There are no facts, only interpretations. or

Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying “there are only facts,” I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations…

Friedrich Nietzsche, Notebooks, 1886­87

All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There may always be another reality To make fiction of the truth we think we’ve arrived at.

Christopher Fry, A Yard of Sun, Act II

In research the horizon recedes as we advance, and is no nearer at sixty than it was at twenty. As the power of endurance weakens with age, the urgency of the pursuit grows more intense... And research is always incomplete.

Mark Pattison

267 page If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

Thomas Huxley, On Elementary Instruction in Physiology, 1877

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end as superstitions.

Thomas Huxley, The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species, xii

The chess­board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the Laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

Thomas Huxley, Lay Sermons, &c., iii. A liberal Education

There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, that’s your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.

Thomas Huxley

Pay heed, my Sons: Gravity never sleeps.

Alexander Carpenter, 1977

As soon as questions of will or decision or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Noam Chomsky, TV interview quoted in The Listener, 6 April 1978

Man is free to do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.

Schopenhauer

I have taken all knowledge to be my province.

Francis Bacon, letter to Lord Burleigh, 1592

Nature is nowhere accustomed more openly to display her secret mysteries than in cases where she shows traces of her workings apart from the beaten path.

Thomas Willis, 15__

268 page I could still discourse concerning the art of transmutation, or alchemy...but I am drawn...to follow the path of mining more willingly...even though mining is a harder task, both physical and mental, is more expensive, and promises less...; it has as its scope...seeing what really exists rather than what one thinks exists.

Vannoccio Biringuccio, Treatise on Metals, Weapons, and Waterpower, 1540

Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly... It then continues with a more or less extended exploration of the area of anomaly. And it closes only when the paradigm theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous has become the expected... and the discovery has been completed.

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962

Normal science is the kind of research in which everything but the most esoteric detail of the result is known in advance.

Thomas Kuhn

The ability to support a tension that can occasionally become almost unbearable is one of the prime requisites for the very best sort of scientific research.

Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension

He who knows nothing is nearer the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

Thomas Jefferson

Perhaps the most important advance in the behavioral sciences in our times has been the growing recognition that the perceiver is not just a passive camera taking a picture, but takes an active part in perception. He sees what experience has conditioned him to see. What perceiver then sees what is really there? Nobody, of course. Each of us perceives what our past has prepared us to perceive. We select and distinguish, we focus on some objects and relationships and we blur others. We distort objective reality to make it conform to our needs or, our hopes, our fears, our hates, our envies, our affections.

Our eyes and brains do not merely register some objective portrait of other persons or groups but our very active scene is warped by what we have been taught to believe, by what we want to believe, and by what we need to believe. It is impossible to reason a man out of something he has not been reasoned into. When people have acquired their beliefs on an emotional level they cannot be persuaded out of them on a rational level, no matter how strong the proof or the logic behind it. People will hold onto their emotional beliefs and twist the facts to meet their version of reality.

269 page Sidney J. Harris, American journalist

Giving people the facts as a strategy of influence has been a failure, an enterprise fraught with a surprising amount of disappointment.

Harry Overstreet, Influencing Human Behavior, 1925

The so­called Enlightenment Model, which posits that the outcomes of decisions will be, and if not yet, can be, determined by reasoned discourse and factual information, is without doubt the most­ falsified hypothesis in the entire history of the human enterprise.

Z.B.F.A.

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning. Science advances one funeral at a time.

Max Planck, Nobel Laureate, 1936

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

Thomas H. Huxley

Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow.

John C. Polanyi

Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.

Richard Feynman.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

Karl Popper

Ever since Francis Bacon, it had been believed that the laws of Nature were there to be “discovered,” if only one made the right experiments. Einstein taught us differently. He stressed the vital role of human inventiveness in the process. Newton “invented” the force of gravity to explain the motion of the planets. Einstein “invented” the curved spacetime and the geodesic law; in his theory there is no force of gravity. If two such utterly different mathematical models can (almost) both describe the same observations, surely it must be admitted that the physical theories 270 page do not tell us what nature is, only what it is like. The marvel is that nature seems to go along with some of the “simplest” models that can be constructed...

Wolfgang Rindler

In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears it ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of the mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.

Albert Einstein

When [once­exceptional observations] are indisputably ascertained and admitted, the academic and critical minds are by far the best fitted ones to interpret and discuss them... but on the other hand if there is anything which history demonstrates, it is the extreme slowness with which the ordinary academic and critical mind acknowledges facts to exist which present themselves as wild facts, with no stall or pigeon­hole, or as facts which threaten to break up the accepted system...

William James, The Will to Believe

I know that most men — not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems — can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.

Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

Paul Valery, The Method of Leonardo da Vinci, 1895, Introduction

When a man desires to know the truth, his first effort will be to imagine what the truth can be... Imagination unbridled is sure to carry him off the track. Yet...there is, after all, nothing but imagination that can ever supply him an inkling of the truth. He can stare stupidly at phenomena; but in the absence of any imagination they will not connect themselves together in any rational way.

C.S. Pierce 271 page The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding. What he knows about events that matter enormously to him, the purposes of governments, the aspirations of peoples, the struggle of classes, he knows at second, third, or fourth hand. ... I know of no man, even among those who devote all their time to watching public affairs, who can even pretend to keep track, at the same time, of his city government, his state government, Congress, the departments, the industrial situation, and the rest of the world. What men who make the study of politics a vocation cannot do, the man who has an hour a day for newspapers and talk cannot possibly hope to do. He must seize catchwords and headlines or nothing.

Walter Lippmann, in The Atlantic Monthly, November 1919

This distinction between the passive resistance of nature and the active resistance of an opponent suggests a distinction between the research scientist and the warrior or the game player. The research physicist has all the time in the world to carry out his experiments, and he need not fear that nature will in time discover his tricks and method and change her policy. Therefore, his work is governed by his best moments, whereas a chess player cannot make one mistake without finding an alert adversary ready to take advantage of it and to defeat him. Thus the chess player is governed more by his worst moments than by his best moments. I may be prejudiced about this claim: for I have found it possible myself to do effective work in science, while my chess has been continually vitiated by my carelessness at critical instants.

The scientist is thus disposed to regard his opponent as an honorable enemy. This attitude is necessary for his effectiveness as a scientist, but tends to make him the dupe of unprincipled people in war and in politics. It also has the effect of making it hard for the general public to understand him, for the general public is much more concerned with personal antagonists than with nature as an antagonist.

Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, 1950, page 36

The separation of matter and spirit is an abstraction.

David Bohm

Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.

Albert Einstein

Verifiable knowledge makes its way slowly, and only under cultivation, but fable has burrs and feet and claws and wings and an indestructible sheath like weed­seed, and can be carried almost anywhere and take root without benefit of soil or water. 272 page Wallace Stegner

I am sometimes moved to wonder whether it may not be necessary to redefine the very concepts of ‘health’ and ‘disease,’ to see these in terms of the ability of the organism to create a new organization and order, one that fits its special, altered disposition and needs, rather than in the terms of the rigidly defined ‘norm.’

Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, 1995

Man can only fully understand what he has made; the corollary to that is that whatever man has made he can understand: it will not, like the physical world, remain impervious to his desire to understand.

‘Old Vico’ (Giambattista Vico, 1668­1744)

Things are much more marvelous than the scientific method allows us to conceive.

Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock, 1983.

Theories today are really emerging out of other theories, and their testing ground is no longer the experimentalist’s laboratory but aesthetics, mathematical consistency, and their inter­relationship to yet other theories.

David Peat, Physicist

The first intelligence reports are almost always wrong.

Admiral Jon Howe

The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists... When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

W.H. Auden, English poet

More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete, and most of what passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

Matthew Arnold, English poet, 1888

273 page Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.

George Braque, French painter

The great obstacle to progress is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.

Daniel Boorstin

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge. In effect, we have redefined the task of science to be the discovery of laws that will enable us to predict events up to the limits set by the uncertainty principle.

Stephen Hawking, English physicist

Our meddling intellect Mis­shapes the beauteous form of things — We murder to dissect. Enough of science and of art; Close up these barren leaves: Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives.

William Wordsworth, English poet

I am not sure how clouds get formed but the clouds know how to do it and that’s the important thing.

An elementary school student in the U.S.

Great minds have always met with severe adversity from smaller minds.

Albert Einstein

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (“I found it!”) but “That’s funny...”

Isaac Asimov

An error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.

Ayn Rand, “John Galt”

274 page The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth — that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

H.L. Mencken

… wherein it is set forth that the doctrine attributed to Copernicus, that the Earth moves around the Sun and that the Sun is stationary in the center of the world and does not move from east to west, is contrary to the Holy Scriptures and therefore cannot be defended or held...To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin... In witness whereof we have written and subscribed these presents with our hand this twenty­sixth day of May, 1616.

Robertro Cardinal Bellarmino

Of all hatreds, there is none greater than that of ignorance against knowledge.

Galileo Galilei, 30 June 1616

Truth is the child of time, not of authority. Our ignorance is infinite; let’s whittle away just one cubic millimeter. Why should we still want to be so clever when at long last we have a chance of being a little less stupid?

One of the main reasons for the poverty of science is that it is supposed to be rich. The aim of science is not to open the door to everlasting wisdom, but to set a limit on everlasting error.

Galileo Galilei, in Bertold Brecht’s The Life of Galileo

As a rule, the philosopher is a kind of mongrel being, a cross between scientist and poet, envious of both.

Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, 1846

There are no facts, only interpretation. The visionary lies to himself, the liar to others.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844­1900) (apocryphal — post­Modern interpolation?)

There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are only consequences.

Robert G. Ingersoll

275 page When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

David Hume, 1748

The distinction between a judgement of fact and a judgement of value has become one of the corner stones of philosophy ever since Hume.

Stanislav Andreski, 1972

The conveniences and comforts of humanity in general will be linked up by one mechanism, which will produce comforts and conveniences beyond human imagination. But the smallest mistake will bring the whole mechanism to a certain collapse. In this way the end of the world will be brought about.

Pir­o­Murshid Inayat Khan, Complete Works, 1922 I, p. 158­9 [Offered in 1998 in a Y2K context]

We simply cannot expect to recognize and discern the finer structure of something to long as we flatly refuse to view it otherwise than with the naked eye. Great caution must be exercised in using the word “real.”

Max Plank

We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination — what we are as ethical creatures — because without that man and beliefs and science will perish together.

Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

When things in life stop working, we have an incentive to re­examine our premises, for a change, more than our conclusions.

Z.B.F. Alexander

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears it’s ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious, he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he 276 page observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison.

Albert Einstein, The Evolution of Physics, 1938

The stillness in stillness is not the true stillness; only when there is stillness in motion does the universal rhythm manifest.

Tao

You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.

Sven Lindqvist

What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horribly cruel works of nature!

Charles Darwin, letter to Joseph Hooker, 1856

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859

Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle. One does, of course, have to put up with the clumsy English style of argument. Despite all shortcomings, it is here that, for the first time, ‘teleology’ in natural science is not only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained.

Karl Marx, in a letter to Ferdinand Lasalle, 16 January 1861

Whatever the cause may be of each slight difference in the offspring from their parents — and a cause for each must exist — it is the steady accumulation, through natural selection, of such differences, when beneficial to the individual, that gives rise to all the more important modifications of structure, by which the innumerable beings on the face of this earth are enabled to struggle with each other, and the best adapted to survive. (page 170)

277 page In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. (page 488)

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859

It should by now be obvious that there is, indeed, a general theory of behavior and that the theory is evolution, to just the same extent and in almost exactly the same ways that evolution is the general theory of morphology.

Anne Roe and G.G. Simpson, Behavior and Evolution

Is there meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we are better off if we ignore them completely.

G.G. Simpson

Effects vary with the conditions which bring them to pass, but laws do not vary. Physiological and pathological states are ruled by the same forces; they differ only because of the special conditions under which the vital laws manifest themselves.

Claude Barnard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine…

Behavior can be changed by changing the conditions of which it is a function.

B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.

George Santayana, Skepticism and Animal Faith, IX

For every apparent change in place occurs on account of the movement either of the thing seen or of the spectator, or on account of the necessarily unequal movement of both. For no movement is perceptible relatively to things moved equally in the same direction; I mean relatively to the thing seen and the spectator.

Nicolous Copernicus, Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, Section 5

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without 278 page knowing in the least what they mean.

Socrates

Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.

Hal Boreland

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Saul Bellow

But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self­satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1977, page 64

No matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with.

Isaac Asimov

The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion.

John Lawton, veteran reporter, speaking to the American Association of Broadcast Journalists, 1995

A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.

Thomas H. Huxley

Reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non­human or possibly supra­human terms. Another way of saying this is that reification is the apprehension of the products as if they were something else than human products — such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world, and further, that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to consciousness. The reified world is, by definition, a dehumanized world. It is experienced by man as a strange facticity, an opus alienum over which he has no control rather than as the opus proprium of his own productive activity.

279 page Berger & Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, Anchor, 1966, page 89

Lop the top­end tail off the distribution of human intelligence and creativity, and it would make no [immediate] measurable difference to the population. Only one person in a billion is out beyond the six­sigma level. That’s what we're talking about here. But eventually those one­in­a­billion make a huge difference. Ninety­five percent of all human progress comes from less than one thousandth of one percent of the population. ... [I]f they were the smartest people in the world, how would we recognize their absence? It's hard to notice what isn’t there.

Charles Sheffield, Proteus in the Underworld, 1995, page 285

Humans are complex creatures. We have a demonstrated capacity for hatred, violence, competition, and greed. We have as well a demonstrated capacity for love, tenderness, cooperation, and compassion. Healthy societies nurture the latter and in so doing create an abundance of those things that are most important to the quality of our living. Dysfunctional societies nurture the former and in so doing create scarcity and deprivation. A healthy society makes it easy to live in balance with the environment, whereas a dysfunctional society makes it nearly impossible. Whether we organize our societies for social and environmental health or for dysfunction is a choice that is ours to make.

David Korten

Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and to assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates. Every rational creature, ‘tis said, is oblig’d to regulate his actions by reason; and if any other motive or principle challenge the direction of his conduct, he ought to oppose it, till it be entirely subdu’d, or at least brought to a conformity with that superior principle. On this method of thinking the greatest part of moral philosophy, ancient and modern, seems to be founded ... In order to shew the fallacy of all this philosophy, I shall endeavour to prove first, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.

David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature

Take stock of those around you and you will ... hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas of this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality. 280 page José Ortega y Gasset

The truth is that upon which we are now insisting, that reason is in its nature an imperfect light with a large but still restricted mission and that once it applies itself to life and action it becomes subject to what it studies and the servant and counsellor of the forces in whose obscure and ill­ understood struggle it intervenes. It can in its nature be used and has always been used to justify any idea, theory of life, system of society or government, ideal of individual or collective action to which the will of man attaches itself for the moment or through the centuries. In philosophy it gives equally good reasons for monism and pluralism or for any halting­place between them, for the belief in Being or for the belief in Becoming, for optimism and pessimism, for activism and quietism. It can justify the most mystic religionism and the most positive atheism, get rid of God or see nothing else. In aesthetics, it supplies the basis equally for classicism and romanticism, for an idealistic, religious or mystic theory of art or for the most earthly realism. It can with equal power base austerely a strict and narrow moralism or prove triumphantly the thesis of the antinomian. It has been the sufficient and convincing prophet of every kind of autocracy or oligarchy and of every species of democracy; it supplies excellent and satisfying reasons for competitive individualism and equally excellent and satisfying reasons for communism or against communism and for State socialism or for one variety of socialism against another. It can place itself with equal effectivity at the service of utilitarianism, economism, hedonism, aestheticism, sensualism, ethicism, idealism or any other essential need or activity of man and build around it a philosophy, a political and social system, a theory of conduct and life. Ask it not to lean to one idea alone, but make an eclectic combination or a synthetic harmony and it will satisfy you; only, there being any number of possible combinations or harmonies, it will equally well justify the one or the other and set up or throw down any one of them according as the spirit in man is attracted to or withdraws from it. For it is really that which decides and the reason is only a brilliant servant and minister of the veiled and secret sovereign.

Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle; The Office and Limitations of the Reason, page 111 http://greatchange.org/ov­aurobindo,human_cycle.html

The idea that low­entropy matter­energy is the ultimate natural resource requires some explanation. This can be provided easily by a short exposition of the laws of thermodynamics in terms of an apt image borrowed from Georgescu­Roegen. Consider an hour glass. It is a closed system in that no sand enters the glass and none leaves. The amount of sand in the glass is constant — no sand is created or destroyed within the hour glass. This is the analog of the first law of thermodynamics: there is no creation or destruction of matter­energy. Although the quantity of sand in the hour glass is constant, its qualitative distribution is constantly changing: the bottom chamber is filling up and the top chamber becoming empty. This is the analog of the second law, that entropy (bottom­chamber sand) always increases. Sand in the top chamber (low entropy) is capable of doing work by falling, like water at the top of a waterfall. Sand in the bottom chamber (high entropy) has spent its capacity to do work. The hour glass cannot be turned upside down: waste energy cannot be recycled, except by spending more energy to power the recycle than would 281 page be reclaimed in the amount recycled. As explained above, we have two sources of the ultimate natural resource, the solar and the terrestrial, and our dependence has shifted from the former toward the latter.

Daly and Cobb, For The Common Good, 1989

Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow.

John C. Polanyi

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. … Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.

Thomas H. Huxley

You just have to be able to drill in very hard wood ... and keep on thinking beyond the point at which thinking begins to hurt.

Werner Heisenberg

The ability to support a tension that can occasionally become almost unbearable is one of the prime requisites for the very best sort of scientific research.

Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension

Newly acquired insights are at first only half understood by the one who begets them, and appear as complete nonsense to all others... Any new idea which does not appear very strange at the outset, does not have a chance of being a vital discovery.

Niels Bohr

Discoveries of any great moment in mathematics and other disciplines, once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before. ... Unfortunately, we find systems of education today which have departed so far from the plain truth, that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance ... [this puts] up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds imposed by one’s ignorance.

George Spencer Brown, Laws of Form, Appendix 1

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do. 282 page Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It’s not enough to have dancing electrons, you gotta have dancing protons, too.

Z. B. F. A.

Decision­based evidence­making isn’t a joke. It’s part of the plan, the policy, the way things are done. In 2005, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which advises the U.S. Government on science policy, published a book, titled Decision Making for the Environment: Social and Behavioral Science Research Priorities. The advice in the book is pretty clear:

By focusing scientific efforts increasingly on decision relevance, such a program of measurement, evaluation, and analysis would increase the influence of empirical evidence and empirically supported theory in environmental decisions relative to the influences of politics and ideology.... Processes for determining which research is most decision­relevant should be participatory.

So there we have it. Decision and policy first, evidence later. That, in our book, is pure junk science.

Terence Corcoran, National Post FP Commentary on Junk Science, 16 June 2009

Where tobacco led the way, coal and chemicals followed. And, of course, the fossil fuel industry has been working overtime – and with shocking success – creating doubt about climate change. Techniques appear to be limited only by the imagination and integrity of the campaigners – which is to say, there don’t appear to be any limits. One of the best is to just flat­out lie.

Richard Littlemore, Manufacturing Doubt, New Scientist, 15 May 2010

Post­Normal Science is a concept developed by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, attempting to characterise a methodology of inquiry that is appropriate for cases where “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent” (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1991). It is primarily applied in the context of the debate over global warming and other similar, long­term issues where there is less available information than is desirable.

According to its advocates, “post­normal science” is simply an extension of situations routinely faced by experts such as surgeons or senior engineers on unusual projects, where the decisions being made are of great importance but where not all the factors are necessarily knowable. Although their work is based on science, such individuals must always cope with uncertainties, and their mistakes can be costly or lethal. Given the greater importance of climate systems and the fact that less is known about them, conventional methods of inquiry, based on determining all relevant information before proceeding, are too slow and uncertain to deal with an issue too 283 page complex to be fully understood and too important to wait for confirmatory results.

Because of this, advocates of post­normal science suggest that there must be an “extended peer community” consisting of all those affected by an issue who are prepared to enter into dialogue on it. They bring their “extended facts,” that will include local knowledge and materials not originally intended for publication such as leaked official information. There is a political case for this extension of the franchise of science; but Funtowicz and Ravetz also argue that this extension is necessary for assuring the quality of the process and of the product.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post­normal_science

Agnotology is the study of culturally­induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. The neologism was coined by Robert N. Proctor, a Stanford University professor specializing in the history of science and technology. More generally, the term also highlights the increasingly common condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before.

A prime example of the deliberate production of ignorance cited by Proctor is the tobacco industry’s conspiracy to manufacture doubt about the cancer risks of tobacco use. Under the banner of science, the industry produced research about everything except tobacco hazards to exploit public uncertainty. Some of the root causes for culturally­induced ignorance are media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness.

Agnotology also focuses on how and why diverse forms of knowledge do not “come to be,” or are ignored or delayed. For example, knowledge about plate tectonics was delayed for at least a decade because key evidence was classified military information related to underseas warfare.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.

Isaac Asimov (1920­1992)

These Holocaust deniers are very slick people. They justify everything they say with facts and figures.

Chairman, New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, in the Newark Star­ Ledger, 23 October 1996, page 15

284 page Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

Richard Feynman

Non­teleological thinking concerns itself primarily not with what should be, or could be, or might be, but rather with what actually ‘is’ — attempting at most to answer the already sufficiently difficult questions what or how, instead of why. ... In the non­teleological sense there can be no ‘answer.’ There can be only pictures which become larger and more significant as one’s horizon increases.

John Steinbeck, Log From the Sea of Cortez, 1941

As a school of thought, teleology can be contrasted with metaphysical naturalism, which views nature as having no design or purpose. Teleology would say that a person has eyes because he has the need of sight, while naturalism would say that a person has sight because he has eyes.

Unattributed. Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology

This idea that nature abhors a gradient, one of the key ideas of this book, is very simple: a gradient is simply a difference (for example, in temperature, pressure, or chemical concentration) across a distance. Nature’s abhorrence of gradients means that they will tend spontaneously to be eliminated most spectacularly by complex growing systems. The simple concept of collapsing gradients encapsulates the difficult science of thermodynamics, demystifies entropy (as important to the universe as gravity), and illuminates how all complex structures and processes, including those of life, come naturally into being.

We are familiar with nature’s breakdown of gradients in one case. Nature abhors a vacuum, and will spontaneously crush a metal can from which the air has been removed. In this example, nature, without prompting or design, rectifies the pressure difference between the low pressure inside and the high pressure (fourteen pounds per square inch) outside of the can. But in this book we vastly extend the pressure example. We show that nature’s abhorrence of this and many other gradients is a law of nature, an unstoppable tendency where energy flow leads to different natural complex systems including life itself. We show the great significance of this law (called the second law of thermodynamics) for the origin, persistence, and eventual demise of complex natural systems even such as the nation­state. We trace the history of scientific thought on energy and matter to where we are: on the eve of a great unification of the sciences. Energy from the sun generates, perpetuates, and elaborates new identities, from whirlwinds and flowers to economies and governments, many of which seem as if they were planned by an invisible hand or eye.

Indeed, life’s emergence and evolution is, we argue, a cyclical process sired by energy flow. Although life is safeguarded by the natural biotechnology of DNA replication, and spread by reproducing cells, it is energy that gives the evolutionary process its impetus to begin and persist. Complex patterns of cycling matter appear in regions of energy flow. Life, from its inconspicuous 285 page microscopic start to its possible interplanetary and interstellar future, is one of these patterns.

The classical students of thermodynamics recognized both the power and limitations of their science. They knew that they lived in a world quite separate from the highly idealized systems where maximum entropy and disorder reigned. Nowhere was this apparent conflict so dramatic as when one compared evolving life to the prediction that random processes would lead to the heat death of the universe. The second law in its original formulation foretold things inexorably losing their ability to do work, burning out and fading away until all states are in or near equilibrium with no energy left to run organisms or machines. But life demonstrates an opposite, evolutionary tendency, of complexity increasing with time.

How? This was the heart of the paradox. In this book we call it the Schrödinger paradox after the quantum physicist who first focused on the need to explain life’s apparent defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. The second law, in its basic original form, states that entropy (atomic or molecular randomness) will inevitably increase in any sealed system. Yet living beings preserve and even elaborate exquisite atomic and molecular patterns over eons.

Eric Schneider had begun a mission, a scientific quest for biological­ecological bedrock. Acquainting himself with the energy ecologists, he looked for the ecological equivalent of Newton’s laws, the F = ma (force equals mass times acceleration) of physics. Where were the simple equations such as those that describe transport in fluids (the so­called Navier­Stokes equations) for ecosystems? Did they even exist? At first it seemed they might not. Yet the search for them, detailed in Erwin Schrödinger’s famous 1944 book, What Is Life? certainly did. The three lectures upon which Schrödinger’s book was based outlined two future sciences: the molecular biology that has proved to be such a force in the world, and the thermodynamics of biology that has yet to prove its mettle. Schrödinger’s second subject is the topic of the present book. Into the Cool should be considered a journey into the heart of an emerging science that combines life with physics in a mix that may some day be as potent as molecular biology and as practical as biotechnology. In this book we test our “biothermodynamic” thoughts against the data and extend them into economics, human health, the sustainability of ecosystems, and the possibility of life in outer space.

In the end several philosophical issues are thrust upon us. Foremost among these is the question of life’s existence. Why life? Does life, scientifically viewed, have an overall function? Our answer is yes. A barometric pressure gradient in the atmosphere, the difference between high and low pressure masses, leads to a tornado, a complex cycling system. The tornado’s function, its purpose, is to eliminate the gradient. Life has a similar natural purpose. Only instead of quickly destroying a pressure gradient and then disappearing, it tends to reduce, over billions of years, the huge solar gradient between hot sun and cold space, growing in complexity as it does so. The growth of complex, intelligent life can be directly traced to the effectiveness of life as a cycling material system adept at reducing gradients. The original and basic function of life, as of the other complex systems that we examine in this book, is to reduce an ambient gradient.

286 page Culture critic C. P. Snow, disapproving the increasing gap between the sciences and the arts, suggested that any educated person should know the second law of thermodynamics. Not knowing the second law was, he said in his Two Cultures and a Second Look (1969) — an early warning shot in the ever­changing battlefield of the culture wars — equivalent to not having read a work by Shakespeare. The second law is neither a guarantor of cosmic death nor an arcane mathematical equation of interest only to polymer chemists. Rather, the second law helps explain the creation and elaboration of complex systems run by energy flow. The second law also directs our attention toward the directional processes we see in many sorts of developing complex systems, including those of our own evolution. In short, the natural phenomena described under the rubric of the second laws not only destroy, but create — by destroying gradients.

Energy and material in enclosed systems will become randomly distributed over time. Living systems, however, are the veritable opposite of such disorder. Living in an environment tending toward disorder, they increase their order. A better word for order is organization — organisms are organized to do something: to live, to reproduce, to keep on going as they are. Said otherwise, organisms are organized to resist thermodynamic equilibrium.

Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan, Into The Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life, Introduction, 2005

If your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist, 1915

He is blind who does not see the Sun, foolish who does not recognise it, ungrateful who is not thankful for it, since so great is the light, so great the good, so great the benefit, the teacher of the senses, the father of substances, the author of life.

Giordano Bruno, Lo spaccio della bestia trionfante, 1584

There is no joy more intense than that of coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of currently accepted ideas.

Cecilia Payne, An Autobiography and other Recollections

There is no empirical method without speculative concepts and systems. There is no speculative thinking whose concepts do not reveal, on closer investigation, the empirical methods from which they stem.

Albert Einstein in the forward to Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Chief Two World Systems (Galilei, 1632), page xvii

287 page I pointed out [to Einstein] that we cannot, in fact, observe such a path [of an electron in an atom]; what we actually record are frequencies of the light radiated by the atom, intensities and transition probabilities, but no actual path. And since it is but rational to introduce into a theory only such quantities as can be directly observed, the concept of electron paths ought not, in fact, to figure in the theory. To my astonishment, Einstein was not at all satisfied with this argument. He thought that every theory in fact contains unobservable quantities. The principle of employing only observable quantities simply cannot be consistently carried out. And when I objected that in this I had merely been applying the type of philosophy that he, too, had made the basis of his special theory of relativity, he answered simply: “Perhaps I did use such philosophy earlier, and also wrote it, but it is nonsense all the same.”

Werner Heisenberg telling of a conversation he had with Albert Einstein in 1926, quoted by Steven Weinberg in Dreams of a Final Theory, 1992, page 180

Reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non­human or possibly supra­human terms. Another way of saying this is that reification is the apprehension of the products as if they something else than human products ­­ such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world, and further, that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to consciousness. The reified world is, by definition, a dehumanized world. It is experienced by man as a strange facticity, an opus alienum over which he has no control rather than as the opus proprium of his own productive activity.

Berger & Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, page 89

When all the logical consequences of an innovation are presented simultaneously, the shock to habits is so great that men tend to reject the whole...

Bertrand Russell

Philosophy arises from an unusually obstinate attempt to arrive at real knowledge. What passes for knowledge in ordinary life suffers from three defects: it is cocksure, vague, and self­ contradictory. The first step towards philosophy consists in becoming aware of these defects, not in order to rest content with a lazy scepticism, but in order to substitute an amended kind of knowledge which shall be tentative, precise and self­consistent.

Bertrand Russell, Outline of Philosophy

I seem to be saying two things that contradict each other. On the one hand, we trust scientific knowledge; on the other hand, we are always ready to modify in­depth part of our conceptual structure about the world. But there is no contradiction, because the idea of a contradiction comes from what I see as the deepest misunderstanding about science: the idea that science is about certainty. 288 page We teach our students: we say that we have some theories about science. Science is about hypothetico­deductive methods, we have observations, we have data, data require to be organized in theories. So then we have theories. These theories are suggested or produced from the data somehow, then checked in terms of the data. Then time passes, we have more data, theories evolve, we throw away a theory, and we find another theory which is better, a better understanding of the data, and so on and so forth.

This is a standard idea of how science works, which implies that science is about empirical content, the true interesting relevant content of science is its empirical content. Since theories change, the empirical content is the solid part of what science is. Now, there’s something disturbing, for me as a theoretical scientist, in all this. I feel that something is missing. Something of the story is missing. I’ve been asking to myself what is this thing missing? I’m not sure I have the answer, but I want to present some ideas on something else which science is.

This is particularly relevant today in science, and particularly in physics, because if I’m allowed to be polemical, in my field, in fundamental theoretical physics, it is 30 years that we fail. There hasn’t been a major success in theoretical physics in the last few decades, after the standard model, somehow. Of course there are ideas. These ideas might turn out to be right. Loop quantum gravity might turn out to be right, or not. String theory might turn out to be right, or not. But we don’t know, and for the moment, nature has not said yes in any sense. I suspect that this might be in part because of the wrong ideas we have about science, and because methodologically we are doing something wrong, at least in theoretical physics, and perhaps also in other sciences.

When I give a thesis to students, most of the time the problem I give for a thesis is not solved. It’s not solved because the solution of the question, most of the time, is not solving in the question, it’s just questioning the question itself. Is realizing that in the way the problem was formulated, there was some implicit prejudice assumption that was the one to be dropped. If this is so, the idea that we have data and theories, and then we have a rational agent that constructs theories from the data using his rationality, his mind, his intelligence, his conceptual structure, and juggles theories and data, doesn’t make any sense, because what is being challenged at every step is not the theory, it’s the conceptual structure used in constructing theories and interpreting the data. In other words, it’s not changing theories that we go ahead, but changing the way we think about the world.

What are then the aspects of doing science that I think are under­evaluated, and should come up­ front? First, science is about constructing visions of the world, about rearranging our conceptual structure, about creating new concepts which were not there before, and even more, about changing, challenging the a priori that we have. So it’s nothing to do about the assembly of data and the way of organizing the assembly of data. It has everything to do about the way we think, and about our mental vision of the world.

Science is a process in which we keep exploring ways of thinking, and changing our image of the world, our vision of the world, to find new ones that work a little bit better. The past knowledge is 289 page always with us, and it’s our main ingredient for understanding. The theoretical ideas which are based on “let’s imagine that this may happen because why not” are not taking us anywhere. Science is not about certainty. Science is about finding the most reliable way of thinking, at the present level of knowledge. Science is extremely reliable; it’s not certain. In fact, not only it’s not certain, but it’s the lack of certainty that grounds it. Scientific ideas are credible not because they are sure, but because they are the ones that have survived all the possible past critiques, and they are the most credible because they were put on the table for everybody’s criticism.

The very expression ‘scientifically proven’ is a contradiction in terms. There is nothing that is scientifically proven. The core of science is the deep awareness that we have wrong ideas, we have prejudices. We have ingrained prejudices. In our conceptual structure for grasping reality there might be something not appropriate, something we may have to revise to understand better. So at any moment, we have a vision of reality that is effective, it’s good, it’s the best we have found so far. It’s the most credible we have found so far, its mostly correct.

If I can make a final comment about this way of thinking about science, or two final comments: One is that science is not about the data. The empirical content of scientific theory is not what is relevant. The data serves to suggest the theory, to confirm the theory, to disconfirm the theory, to prove the theory wrong. But these are the tools that we use. What interests us is the content of the theory. What interests us is what the theory says about the world. General relativity says space­ time is curved. The data of general relativity are that Mercury perihelion moves 43 degrees per century, with respect to that computed with Newtonian mechanics.

Who cares? Who cares about these details? If that was the content of general relativity, general relativity would be boring. General relativity is interesting not because of its data, but because it tells us that as far as we know today, the best way of conceptualizing space­time is as a curved object. It gives us a better way of grasping reality than Newtonian mechanics, because it tells us that there can be black holes, because it tells us there’s a Big Bang. This is the content of the scientific theory.

So summarizing, I think science is not about data; it’s not about the empirical content, about our vision of the world. It’s about overcoming our own ideas, and about going beyond common sense continuously. Science is a continuous challenge of common sense, and the core of science is not certainty, it’s continuous uncertainty. I would even say the joy of taking what we think, being aware that in everything we think, there are probably still an enormous amount of prejudices and mistakes, and try to learn to look a little bit larger, knowing that there is always a larger point of view that we’ll expect in the future.

This may take me to another point, which is should a scientist think about philosophy, or not? It’s sort of the fashion today to discard philosophy, to say now we have science, we don’t need philosophy. I find this attitude very naïve for two reasons. One is historical. Just look back: Heisenberg would have never done quantum mechanics without being full of philosophy; Einstein would have never done relativity without having read all the philosophers and have a head full of 290 page philosophy; Galileo would never have done what he had done without having a head full of Plato. Newton thought of himself as a philosopher, and started by discussing this with Descartes, and had strong philosophical ideas.

But even Maxwell, Boltzmann, I mean, all the major steps of science in the past were done by people who were very aware of methodological, fundamental, even metaphysical questions being posed. When Heisenberg does quantum mechanics, he is in a completely philosophical mind. He says in classical mechanics there’s something philosophically wrong, there’s not enough emphasis on empiricism. It is exactly this philosophical reading of him that allows him to construct this fantastically new physical theory, scientific theory, which is quantum mechanics.

The divorce between this strict dialogue between philosophers and scientists is very recent, and somehow it’s after the war, in the second half of the 20th century. It has worked because in the first half of the 20thcentury, people were so smart. Einstein and Heisenberg and Dirac and company put together relativity and quantum theory and did all the conceptual work. The physics of the second half of the century has been, in a sense, a physics of application of the great ideas of the people of the ’30s, of the Einsteins and the Heisenbergs.

I think that the scientists who say, “I don’t care about philosophy,” it’s not true they don’t care about philosophy, because they have a philosophy. They are using a philosophy of science. They are applying a methodology. They have a head full of ideas about what is the philosophy they’re using; just they’re not aware of them, and they take them for granted, as if this was obvious and clear. When it’s far from obvious and clear. They are just taking a position without knowing that there are many other possibilities around that might work much better, and might be more interesting for them.

I think there is narrow­mindedness, if I might say so, in many of my colleague scientists that don’t want to learn what is being said in the philosophy of science. There is also a narrow­mindedness in a lot of … areas of philosophy and the humanities in which they don’t want to learn about science, which is even more narrow­minded. Somehow cultures reach, enlarge. I’m throwing down an open door if I say it here, but restricting our vision of reality today on just the core content of science or the core content of humanities is just being blind to the complexity of reality that we can grasp from a number of points of view, which talk to one another enormously, and which I believe can teach one another enormously.

Carlo Rivelli, Science Is Not About Certainty: A Philosophy Of Physics, at http://edge.org/conversation/a­philosophy­of­physics

I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral. The intellectual thing I should want to say to them is this. When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only “What are the facts? And what is the truth that the facts bear out?” Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe or by what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only and solely at what are the facts. That is 291 page the intellectual thing that I should wish to say.

The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say “Love is wise, hatred is foolish.” In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things we don’t like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

Bertrand Russell (1872­1970), answering the question, “What would you think it’s worth telling our descendants about the life you’ve lived and the lessons you’ve learned from it?” in a BBC Face to Face interview, 1959. The problem with most social and even physical scientists today is that they practice their “science” guided by Russell’s moral principle, not by his intellectual principle. Such scientists are often guided precisely by “what they wish to believe” and by “what they think could have beneficent social [and personal­status] effects if it were believed.”

The day science begins to study non­physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.

Nikola Tesla (apocryphal)

Silent evidence is what events use to conceal their own randomness.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2007

The science of Ecology has been taken over by the cult of scientific reductionism and has become a weapon in the war on the living world being waged by industrial man.

The more credible epistemologists of the last decades... have generally come to agree that scientific knowledge has no special status – contrary to what logical positivists and many scientists still maintain – that distinguishes it from common or garden knowledge.

At the same time, it has also become clear that, since scientists do not live in a closed scientific community, but are also members of a society with whose world­view, together with the values it reflects, they have, like everybody else, been imbued, and which the scientific paradigm which they entertain also tends to reflect.... Consistency with the reigning social paradigm is thus, in effect, the ultimate criterion of scientific truth.

Edward Goldsmith, Whatever Happened to Ecology?, 2002

Thought, however unintelligible it may be, seems as much function of organ, as bile of liver. This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything. [N]or ought one to 292 page blame others.

Charles Darwin, in a private note to himself, in the 1870s

Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, 1933­34

ENVIRONMENT

The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth.

Thich Nhat Hanh

We have geared the machines and locked all together into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now there is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is closed, and the net Is being hauled in.

Robinson Jeffers, from The Purse Seine, 1937

If you don’t understand how things are connected, the cause of problems is solutions.

Amory B. Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute. This is a rare and relatively sophisticated statement of the so­called “Law of Unintended Consequences.” Less sophisticated is “Watch out; you might get what you wish for.” Least sophisticated is “Shit Happens.”

The chief cause of problems is solutions.

“Sevareid’s Law,” Eric Sevareid, network TV news anchor [Illustrating convergence to the lowest­common­denominator sound­bite. The cult of mediocrity levels all...] 293 page The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system. The political system is simple. It operates with limited information (rational ignorance), short time horizons, low feedback, and poor and misaligned incentives. Society in contrast is a complex, evolving, high­feedback, incentive­driven system. When a simple system tries to regulate a complex system you often get unintended consequences.

Andrew Gelman

Choosing an ineffective or detrimental policy for coping with a complex system is not a matter of random chance. The intuitive processes will select the wrong solution much more often than not. A complex system —a class to which a corporation, a city, an economy, or a government belongs — behaves in many ways quite the opposite of the simple systems from which we have gained our experience.

Most of our intuitive responses have been developed in the context of what are technically called first­order, negative­feedback loops. Such a simple loop is goal­seeking and has only one important state variable. For example, warming one’s hands beside a stove can be approximated as a first­order, negative­feedback loop in which the purpose of the process is to obtain warmth without burning one’s hands. The principal state variable of the loop is the distance from the stove. If one is too close he burns his hands, if too far away he receives little heat. The intuitive lesson is that cause and effect are closely related in time and space. Temperature depends on the distance from the stove. Too much or too little heat is clearly related to the position of the hands. The relation of cause and effect is immediate and clear. Similarly, the simple feedback loops that govern walking, driving a car, or picking things up all train us to find cause and effect occurring at approximately the same moment and location.

But in complex systems cause and effect are often not closely related in either time or space. The structure of a complex system is not a simple feedback loop where one system state dominates the behavior. The complex system has a multiplicity of interacting feedback loops. Its internal rates of flow are controlled by nonlinear relationships. The complex system is of high order, meaning that there are many system states (or levels). It usually contains positive­feedback loops describing growth processes as well as negative, goal­seeking loops. In the complex system the cause of a difficulty may lie far back in time from the symptoms, or in a completely different and remote part of the system. In fact, causes are usually found, not in prior events, but in the structure and policies of the system.

To make matters still worse, the complex system is even more deceptive than merely hiding causes. In the complex system, when we look for a cause near in time and space to a symptom, we usually find what appears to be a plausible cause. But it is usually not the cause. The complex system presents apparent causes that are in fact coincident symptoms. The high degree of time correlation between variables in complex systems can lead us to make cause­and­effect associations between variables that are simply moving together as part of the total dynamic 294 page behavior of the system. Conditioned by our training in simple systems, we apply the same intuition to complex systems and are led into error. As a result we treat symptoms, not causes. The outcome lies between ineffective and detrimental. (pages 8­9)

Jay W. Forrester; Urban Dynamics, 1969

The dynamic characteristics of complex social systems frequently mislead people. … [Urban policies for example] are being followed on the presumption that they will alleviate the difficulties. … In fact, a downward spiral develops in which the presumed solution makes the difficulty worse and thereby causes redoubling of the presumed solution so that matters become still worse.

The same downward spiral frequently develops in national government and at the level of world affairs. Judgment and debate lead to programs that appear to be sound. Commitment increases to the apparent solutions. If the presumed solutions actually make matters worse, the process by which this happens is not evident. So, when the troubles increase, the efforts are intensified that are actually worsening the problems.

Jay W. Forrester, World Dynamics, 1973, pages 93­94

Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks.

Nassim Taleb, in the June 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs

A good solution will: solve more than one problem, while not making new problems; satisfy a whole range of criteria; be good in all respects; accept given limits, using, so far as possible, what is at hand; improve the balances, symmetries, or harmonies within a pattern — it is a qualitative solution — rather than enlarging or complicating some part of a pattern at the expense or in neglect of the rest.

Wendell Berry on Solving for Patterns

Nature’s ecosystems have 3.5 billion years of experience evolving efficient, complex, adaptive, resilient systems. Why should companies reinvent the wheel, when the R&D has already been done?

Gil Friend, of Natural Logic, Inc.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

John Muir

The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialization, 295 page ‘Western civilization,’ or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.

John Gray, Straw Dogs

We thought we were getting something for nothing, but we were getting nothing for everything.

Wendell Berry

The boundary of a system may be drawn around a single company, or around an industry, or the whole country. The bigger the coverage, the bigger be the possible benefits, but the more difficult to manage.

Dr. W. Edwards Deming

Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have “thought globally” (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers have been, and will be, dangerous people.

Global thinking can only be statistical. Its shallowness is exposed by the least intention to do something. Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place.

The only sustainable city ... is a city in balance with its countryside: a city, that is, that would live off the net ecological income of its supporting region, paying as it goes all its ecological and human debts. ... Some cities can never be sustainable, because they do not have a countryside around them, or near them, from which they can be sustained. New York City cannot be made sustainable, nor can Phoenix.

Ecological good sense will be opposed by all the most powerful economic entities of our time, because ecological good sense requires the reduction or replacement of those entities.[For ecological good sense to prevail] our currently prevailing assumptions about knowledge, information, education, money, and political will are inadequate. All our institutions with which I am familiar have adopted the organizational patterns and the quantitative measures of the industrial corporations. Both sides of the ecological debate, perhaps as a consequence, are alarmingly abstract.

Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found. The abstractions of sustainability can ruin the world just as surely as the abstractions of industrial economics. Local life may be as much endangered by “saving the planet” as by “conquering the world.” Such a project calls for abstract purposes and central powers that cannot know, and so will destroy, the integrity of local nature and local 296 page community.

You can’t act locally by thinking globally. If you want to keep your local acts from destroying the globe, you must think locally.

No one can make ecological good sense for the planet. Everyone can make ecological good sense locally, if the affection, the scale, the knowledge, the tools, and the skills are right.

The right scale in work gives power to affection. When one works beyond the reach of one’s love for the place one is working in, and for the things and creatures one is working with, then destruction inevitable results.

If we could think locally, we would do far better than we are doing now. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, “What will this do to our community?” tends toward the right answer for the world.

The real work of planet­saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make one rich or famous.

The great obstacle may not be greed but the modern hankering after glamour. A lot of our smartest, most concerned people want to come up with a big solution to a big problem.

Local foolishness is superior to national and international foolishness because it doesn’t do national and international damage.

Our wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence. Only love can do it.

Wendell Berry, Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse, in The Atlantic Monthly, February, 1991

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer; For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars.

William Blake, Jerusalem, pl. 55, l. 60

Men are able to deceive themselves upon general matters, but not so much so when they come to particulars. ...The quickest way of opening the eyes of the people is to find the means of making them descend to particulars, seeing that to look at things only in a general way deceives them.

Niccolo Machiavelli 297 page After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged with particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every experiment the innate universal laws.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

To generalize is to be an idiot.

William Blake

Appreciation of sacredness begins very simply by taking an interest in all the details of your life.

Chögyam Trungpa, short­path Tibetan Buddhist Teacher

A creation is ethical in direct proportion to its value to those whom it most affects.

Harry Palmer, Avatar

Act Globally, Think Locally. [Yet another slogan implodes upon close examination...]

Alexander Carpenter, American

What man calls civilization always results in deserts.

Don Marquis

Man stalks across the landscape and deserts follow in his footsteps.

Herodotus

Growth is the enemy of progress.

Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long.

Ogden Nash

Progress is the victory of laughter over dogma.

Benjamin DeCasseres

298 page The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true.

James Branch Cabell

Modern man will never find peace until he comes into harmony with the place where he lives.

Carl Gustav Jung, German Psychologist

The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.

Gregory Bateson, in the film An Ecology of Mind

Psychology, so dedicated to awakening human consciousness, needs to wake up to one of the most ancient human truths: we cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.

James Hillman, American Psychologist

If psychosis is the attempt to live a lie, the epidemic psychosis of our time is the lie of believing that we have no ethical obligation to our planetary home... [Health professionals] ignore the greater ecological realities that surround the psyche — as if the soul might be saved while the biosphere crumbles.

Theodore Roszak

When human beings lose their connection to nature, to heaven and earth, then they do not know how to nurture their environment... Healing our society goes hand in hand with healing our personal, elemental connection with the phenomenal world.

Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity — I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But 299 page man is a part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself ... Now I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.

Rachel Carson, April 1963

To know a people, you need only a little patience, a quiet moment, and a place where you might listen to the whispered messages of their land... Landscape holds the key to character. One could depopulate France, resettle it with Tartars, and within a few generations find that the national characteristics had reemerged: the restless, metaphysical curiosity, the passionate individualism, the affection for good living. ... Just as landscape defines a people, culture springs from a spirit of place.

Lawrence Durrell, English Writer

To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean. Giovanni da Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. The men of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory.

Frederick Turner

For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.

Bible, Job 5:23

There is a transnational ecology even newer than the transnational economy. The environment no more knows national boundaries than does money or information. The crucial environmental needs — the protection of the atmosphere, for instance, and of the world’s forests — cannot be met by national action or national law. They cannot be addressed as adversarial issues. They require common transnational policies, transnationally enforced.

Peter F. Drucker, The New Realities

Que la terre est petite à qui la voit des cieux! (How small the Earth to him who looks from heaven!)

300 page Delille

The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, [are called], but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen; [yea], and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.

Bible, 1 Corinthians, 1:25­28

Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture? Must you also trample the rest of your pasture with your feet? Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet?

Ezekiel 34:18

Straddling each a dolphins back And steadied by a fin, Those innocents re­live their death, Their wounds open again.

William Butler Yeats

Do not expect too much of the end of the world.

Stanislaw J. Lec, Aforyzmy. Fraszki, Krakow, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1977, “Mysli nieuczesane”

But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee; and speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee; and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who among these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this, in whose hand is the life of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind.

Bible, Job 12:7­10

This we know — all things are connected like the blood which unites one family.

Chief Seattle (apocryphal) 301 page Some people see things as they are and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not.

George Bernard Shaw

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe;” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task is to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Albert Einstein

Self­absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion.

Daniel Goleman

We will be destroyed unless we create a cosmic conscience. And we have to begin to do that on an individual level, with the youth that are the politicians of tomorrow…. But no one, and certainly no state, can take over the responsibility that the individual has to his conscience. (page 141)

We must change the heart of man. (page 143)

Albert Einstein, in Einstein and the Poet – In Search of the Cosmic Man by William Hermanns (Branden Press, 1983)

I feel that through strange forgotten connections I have been evolved arriving at my present state of expression. The great memory of those series of existences running through me lies in the subconscious. That is why I can feel an old bond of unity with creepers and trees, birds and beasts of this world. That is why this vastly mysterious and immense Universe does not appear terrifying or unfriendly.

Rabindranath Tagore

Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the Earth.

Jalaludin Rumi, Persian Mystical Poet

The rainforest is being destroyed because it has no value. To save the rainforest it must be used.

Steve Meyer, American Economist 302 page Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometric ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio ... the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

The “Dismal Theorem,” Thomas Robert Malthus (1766­1834), The Principle of Population, 1, 1798

If the only thing which can check the growth of population is starvation and misery, then the ultimate result of any technological improvement is to enable a larger number of people to live in misery.

The “Utterly Dismal Theorem,” Kenneth Boulding, The Meaning of the Twentieth Century, 1964

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding

To put this in context, you must remember that estimates of the long­term carrying capacity of Earth with relatively optimistic assumptions about consumption, technologies, and equity (A x T), are in the vicinity of two billion people. Today’s population cannot be sustained on the ‘interest’ generated by natural ecosystems, but is consuming its vast supply of natural capital — especially deep, rich agricultural soils, ‘fossil’ groundwater, and biodiversity — accumulated over centuries to eons. In some places soils, which are generated on a time scale of centimeters per century are disappearing at rates of centimeters per year. Some aquifers are being depleted at dozens of times their recharge rates, and we have embarked on the greatest extinction episode in 65 million years.

Paul Ehrlich, 25 September 1998

Overpopulation, combined with overconsumption, is the elephant in the room. We don’t talk about overpopulation because of real fears from the past — of racism, eugenics, colonialism, forced sterilization, forced family planning, plus the fears from some of contraception, abortion, and sex. We don't really talk about overconsumption because of ignorance about the economics of overpopulation and the true ecological limits of Earth.

Paul Ehrlich, in Mother Jones magazine, 12 May 2010, 42 years after publication of The Population Bomb

The paradox embedded in our future is that the fastest way to slow our population growth is to reduce poverty, yet the fastest way to run out of resources is to increase wealth. The trial ahead is to strike the delicate compromise: between fewer people, and more people with fewer needs...all 303 page within a new economy geared toward sustainability. Perhaps this is the sixth stage in our demographic maturity: the transition from 20th­century family planning to 21st­century civilisational planning.

Julia Whitty, in Mother Jones magazine, 12 May 2010

I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.

Dwight David Eisenhower, in a speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, D.C., 1957

As soon as questions of will or decision or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Noam Chomsky, TV interview quoted in The Listener, 6 April 1978

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

Albert Schweitzer

Why not consider the possibility that a city, like a man or woman or a tree or any other healthy living thing, should grow until it reaches maturity — and then stop; a human who never stopped growing would be a freak, a mutant, a monster, a sideshow geek eating live chickens for supper and toppling dead of diabetes and kidney failure into an early grave... When a city finally stops growing, its citizens can finally begin to live. In peace. Security. With a modicum of domestic tranquility.

Edward Abbey, One Life at a Time, Please

[Nota Bene that other “city” organisms, ants, bees, corals, sponges regulate the final size of their colonies with differing but effective steady­state and migratory stratagems. Other non­“city” organisms such as rats in cages and lemmings in the wild regulate their population through aggressive, cyclic die­out behaviors that result in great swings in their populations, and severe neurosis in individual lives. Dis­regulation within organisms is called cancer.]

An idea, a relationship, can go extinct just like an animal or plant. The idea in this case is “nature,” the separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted, under whose rules he was born and died. In the past, we spoiled and polluted parts of that nature, inflicted environmental “damage.” But that was like stabbing a man with toothpicks: though it hurt, annoyed, degraded, it did not touch vital organs, block the path of the lymph or blood. We never 304 page thought that we had wrecked nature. Deep down, we never really thought we could: it was too big and too old; its forces — the wind, the rain, the sun — were too strong, too elemental.

But, quite by accident, it turned out that the carbon dioxide and other gasses we were producing in our pursuit of a better life...could alter the power of the sun, could increase its heat. And that increase could change the patterns of moisture and dryness, breed storms in new places, breed deserts. Those things may or may not have yet begun to happen, but it is too late to altogether prevent them from happening. We have produced the carbon dioxide — we are ending nature.

We have not ended rainfall or sunlight; in fact, rainfall and sunlight may become more important forces in our lives. It is too early to tell exactly how much harder the wind will blow, how much hotter the sun will shine. That is for the future. But the meaning of the wind, the sun, the rain — of nature — has already changed. Yes, the wind still blows — but no longer from some other sphere, some inhuman place.

Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, 1989 [and now look at this in an AGW­cult context…]

If a pasture becomes a commons open to all, the right of each to use it may not be matched by a corresponding responsibility to protect it. Asking everyone to use it with discretion will hardly do, for the considerate herdsman who refrains from overloading the commons suffers more than a selfish one who says his needs are greater. If everyone would restrain himself, all would be well; but it takes only one less than everyone to ruin a system of voluntary restraint. In a crowded world of less than perfect human beings, mutual ruin is inevitable if there are no controls. This is the Tragedy of the Commons … using the word “tragedy” as the philosopher Whitehead used it: “The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.”

The lesson of the Tragedy of the Commons is that the “common interest” fundamentally differs from the “sum of the special interests.”

Garrett Hardin, Tragedy of the Commons, 1968

The human mind is a product of the Pleistocene age, shaped by wildness that has all but disappeared. If we complete the destruction of nature, we will have succeeded in cutting ourselves off from the source of sanity itself.

David Orr, environmental philosopher, in Adbusters, Sept./Oct. 2002

A ‘Machiavellian’ mass society valuing wealth­acquisition and typified by exploitative relations must, inevitably, be a violent society, using force to protect the ‘haves’ and the ‘hope­to­haves’ from the ‘have­nots’ and outsiders. Such a society will destroy itself because its greed will cause it to consume its own resources and even its own people. No self­restraints can effectively be imposed because the society’s very nature, its internal dynamic, is to consume. Its voracious 305 page appetite will cause it to literally eat itself. When sufficiently weakened, other similar social monsters will finish it off — if anything remains.

Jack D. Forbes

It rapidly became clear to me that the most imaginative way of looking at evolution, and the most inspiring way of teaching it, was to say that it’s all about the genes. It’s the genes that, for their own good, are manipulating the bodies they ride about in. The individual organism is a survival machine for its genes.

Richard Dawkins

Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it. It may seem an audacious proposal thus to put the microcosm against the macrocosm and to set man to subdue nature to his higher ends; but I venture to think that the great intellectual difference between the ancient times with which we have been occupied and our day, lies in the solid foundation we have acquired for the hope that such an enterprise may meet with a certain measure of success.

Thomas H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 1893

The human species may be seen as having evolved in the service of entropy, and it cannot be expected to outlast the dense accumulations of energy that have helped define its niche. Human beings like to believe they are in control of their destiny, but when the history of life on Earth is seen in perspective, the evolution of Homo sapiens is merely a transient episode that acts to redress the planet's energy balance.

Even if world population could be held constant, in balance with “renewable” resources, the creative impulse that has been responsible for human achievements during the period of growth would come to an end. And the spiraling collapse that is far more likely will leave, at best, a handful of survivors. These people might get by, for a while, by picking through the wreckage of civilization, but soon they would have to lead simpler lives, like the hunters and subsistence farmers of the past. They would not have the resources to build great public works or carry forward scientific inquiry. They could not let individuals remain unproductive as they wrote novels or composed symphonies. After a few generations, they might come to believe that the rubble amid which they live is the remains of cities built by gods.

David Price, Energy And Human Evolution, 1995

Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be... the past clarifies potential paths to the future. One often­discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the “crash” that many fear — a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of 306 page population. The alternative is the “soft landing” that many people hope for — a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy­conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology.

Joseph A. Tainter, Complexity, Problem Solving, And Sustainable Societies, 1996

In assembling complexity the bounty of increasing returns is won by multiple tries over time. As various parts reorganize to a new whole, the system escapes into a higher order.

Ilya Viscount Prigogine

The person who would challenge the logic or justice of any one aspect of the chain must eventually confront the logic and justice of the entire system

The Ecologist, Whose Common Future?, page 51

As long as corporate management considers public interests as merely incidental to private interests, we can hardly expect the final solution of the conservation problem from voluntary decisions by directors of corporations... As long as the maximization of profit remains the cornerstone of acquisitive society and capitalist economy, corporations will retain their interest in scarcity as a creator of economic value. Social welfare demands abundance, distributed justly and spread out over a longer time than even the most progressive and liberal corporation executive at present dares consider.

Erich W. Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries, 1951 edition, page 811

We need to publish a Catalog of Global Carpetbaggers, entrepreneurs eager to profit on misery. We should name names and illustrate the book with the shocking examples of what these people and their uncontrolled multinationals have done to the earth. We should describe these companies, who controls them and estimate whether they are solvent enough to put up a big environmental restoration bond.

David Brower, Beware of Joint­Venture Vultures, Earth Island Journal, Fall 1991, page 35

“The big corporations, our clients, are scared shitless of the environmental movement,” [public relations executive Frank] Mankiewicz confided. “They sense that there’s a majority out there and that the emotions are all on the other side — if they can be heard. They think the politicians are going to yield to the emotions. I think the corporations are wrong about that. I think the companies will have to give in only at insignificant levels. Because the companies are too strong, they’re the establishment. The environmentalists are going to have to be like the mob in the square in Romania before they prevail.” 307 page William Greider, Who Will Tell The People?, 1992, page 24

The smart [companies] are going green, the dumb ones are not, and the foolish ones are pretending.

David Kreutz, environmental consultant, quoted in Green Business: Hope or Hoax?, referring to the Toronto Globe and Mail

We have reached a point at which we must either consciously desire and choose and determine the future of the Earth or submit to such an involvement in our destructiveness that the Earth, and ourselves with it, must certainly be destroyed, and we have come to this at a time when it is hard, if not impossible, to foresee a future that is not terrifying.

The great, greedy, indifferent national and international economy is killing rural America, just as it is killing American cities... Experience has shown that there is no use in appealing to this economy for mercy toward the earth or toward any human community. All true patriots must find ways of opposing it.

Wendell Berry, Conservation and the Local Economy, Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community: Eight Essays, Pantheon, New York, 1993

We’re more likely to see other companies as collaborators rather than adversaries... We aren’t so much competing with each other as we are competing with the earth. And maybe that’s a healthy way to look at it.

George Kirkland, Chairman & managing director of Chevron Nigeria Limited, quoted in The Nation, 16 November 1998

Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast…a part­time crusader, a half­hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, bag the peaks. Run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe­deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.

Edward Abbey (1927­1989), at an Earth First rally at the Grand Canyon, 1987

308 page Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.

Buckminster Fuller

Why use the forests which were centuries in the making and the mines which required ages to lay down, if we can get the equivalent of forest and mineral products in the annual growth of the fields?

Henry Ford

Sustainability means not turning resources into junk faster than nature can turn junk into resources.

Steve Goldfinger

Have a good time saving the world, or you’re just going to depress yourself. People want to be part of something fun... put fun in the movement to conserve, preserve, and restore, and celebrate Earth, and people will run to sign up.

David Brower

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind, and tide. I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that…

Thomas Alva Edison

The stone age came to an end not for a lack of stones, and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil.

Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, former Saudi Arabia oil minister, quoted by Reuters

If the success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?

R. Buckminster Fuller

Failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.

B.F. Skinner 309 page The required criteria for success in the 21st century are ecological integrity, effective decision­ making, and social cohesion. These are progressively replacing current commitments to maximum economic growth, compulsive consumption, and international competition.

Robert Theobald, Reworking Success

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

Bible, II Chronicles 7:14

Farms have replaced wastelands, cultivated land has subdued the forests, cattle have put to flight the wild beast, barren lands have become fertile, rocks have become soil, swamps have been drained, and the number of cities exceeds the number of poor huts found in former times. … Everywhere there are people, communities — everywhere there is human life! To such a point that the world is full. The elements scarcely suffice us. Our needs press…

Pestilence, famine, wars, [earthquakes] are intended, indeed, as remedies, as prunings, against the growth of the human race. or

As our demands grow greater, our complaints against nature’s inadequacy are heard by all. The scourges of pestilence, famine, wars, and earthquakes have come to be regarded as a blessing to overcrowded nations, since they serve to prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race.

Tertullian (160 – 240 A.D.) Quoted in Superman Plays with Kryptonite Dice, Gies and Gies, 1994, page 6

Reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non­human or possibly supra­human terms. Another way of saying this is that reification is the apprehension of the products as if they something else than human products — such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world, and further, that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to consciousness. The reified world is, by definition, a dehumanized world. It is experienced by man as a strange facticity, an opus alienum over which he has no control rather than as the opus proprium of his own productive activity.

Berger & Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, page 89

The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialization, 310 page ‘Western civilization’ or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.

John Gray, Straw Dogs, page 7

There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are only consequences.

Robert Ingersoll

In an age of overshoot, the task facing mankind is to minimize the severity and inhumanity of the crash toward which we are headed. Perhaps with ecological understanding of the real causes of the crash we can remain human in circumstances that could otherwise tempt us to turn beastly. Clear knowledge may forestall misplaced resentment, thus enabling us to refrain from inflicting futile and unpardonable suffering upon each other.

Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, 1980

It has been often said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high­grade metallic ore gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high­level technology. This is a one­shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.

Fred Hoyle, Astronomer

No good can come from demanding absolute proof. The default position reveals where men of common sense, in a certain jurisdiction, have agreed to place the burden of proof. It is the denial of the default position that must bear the burden of proof.

Garrett Hardin, Living Within Limits, 1993, page 40

In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded.

Marcello Truzzi [Note Bene: that the burden of proof falls on a claimant is one of the basic principles of English Common Law]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Carl Sagan, paraphrasing Truzzi 311 page All species expand as much as resources allow and predators, parasites, and physical conditions permit. When a species is introduced into a new habitat with abundant resources that accumulated before its arrival, the population expands rapidly until all the resources are used up. …

People who believe that a stable population can live in balance with the productive capacity of the environment may see a slowdown in the growth of population and energy consumption as evidence of approaching equilibrium. But when one understands the process that has been responsible for population growth, it becomes clear that an end to growth is the beginning of collapse.

David Price, Energy and Human Evolution, at http://dieoff.org/page137.htm

If any substantial fraction of the more colossal segment of humanity did consequently give up part of their resource­devouring extensions out of humane concern for the less colossal brethren, there is no guarantee that this would avert die­off. It might only postpone it, permitting human numbers to continue increasing a bit longer, or less colossal peoples to become a bit more colossal, before we crash all the more resoundingly.

William Catton, Overshoot, page 174

The human species may be seen as having evolved in the service of entropy, and it cannot be expected to outlast the dense accumulations of energy that have helped define its niche. Human beings like to believe they are in control of their destiny, but when the history of life on Earth is seen in perspective, the evolution of Homo sapiens is merely a transient episode that acts to redress the planet’s energy balance.

David Price, Energy and Human Evolution, 1995

I do not believe that the general ignorance about the coming catastrophic end of the cheap­oil era is the product of a conspiracy, either on the part of business or government or news media. Mostly it is a matter of cultural inertia, aggravated by collective delusion, nursed in the growth medium of comfort and complacency. Author Erik Davis has referred to this as the "consensus trance."

William Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency, page 26

A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public.

Mark Twain

Everyone is entitled to his own set of opinions, but no­one is entitled to his own set of facts.

312 page U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (and various other attributions)

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.

Winston Churchill

You are not required to complete the task [of repairing the world]; neither are you at liberty to abstain from it.

The Pirkei Avot, 2:21

The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe. To prepare the ground, it was rolled and sifted in seas with infinite loving deliberation and forethought, lifted into the light, submerged and warmed over and over again, pressed and crumpled into folds and ridges, mountains and hills, subsoiled with heaving volcanic fires, ploughed and ground and sculptured into scenery and soil with glaciers and rivers — [e]very feature growing and changing from beauty to beauty, higher and higher. And in the fullness of time it was planted in groves, and belts, and broad, exuberant, mantling forests, with the largest, most varied, most fruitful, and most beautiful trees in the world. Bright seas made its border with wave embroidery and icebergs; gray deserts were outspread in the middle of it, mossy tundras on the north, savannas on the south, and blooming prairies and plains; while lakes and rivers shone through all the vast forests and openings, and happy birds and beasts gave delightful animation. Everywhere, everywhere over all the blessed continent, there were beauty, and melody, and kindly, wholesome, foodful abundance.

John Muir, The American Forests, The Atlantic Monthly, August 1897

As for pointing to our mental failures with scorn or dismay, we might as well profess disappoint­ ment with the mechanics of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. In other words, the degree of disillusionment we feel in response to any particular human behavior is the precise measure of our ignorance of its evolutionary and genetic origins.

Reg Morrison, The Spirit in the Gene

James Tobin, the American Nobel Prize winner in economics, has questioned very seriously whether it makes sense from the point of view of American society as a whole to divert so much of its young talent from the top universities into financial markets. This debate is not new. John Maynard Keynes considered the same question in the 1930s, and expressed the view that on the whole the rewards of those in the financial sector were justified. Many individuals attracted to these markets, Keynes argued, are of a domineering and even psychopathic nature. If their energies could not find an outlet in money making, they might turn instead to careers involving 313 page open and wanton cruelty. Far better to have them absorbed on Wall Street or in the City of London than in organised crime.

Paul Ormerod, The Death of Economics, John Wiley, 1997, pages 3­7

If you think the economy is more important than the environment, try holding your breath while you count your money.

Guy McPhereson

...a society driven mainly by selfish individualism has all the potential for sustainability of a collection of angry scorpions in a bottle.

David Ehrenfeld

A new story is emerging of an intimate Earth community. Only in recent times has such a vision become possible. We never knew enough. Now the time has come to lower our voices, to cease imposing our mechanistic patterns on the biological processes of the Earth, to resist the impulse to control, and to begin quite humbly to follow the guidance of the larger community on which all life depends. Our human destiny is integral with the destiny of the Earth.

Thomas Berry

In 1543 Copernicus announced to a startled Europe that the Earth was not stationary, but was sailing rapidly through space as it spun around the Sun. This was difficult news to take in all at once, but over time the Europeans reinvented their entire civilization in light of this strange new fact about the Universe. The fundamental institutions of the medieval world, including the monarchies, the church, the feudal economic system, and the medieval sense of self, melted away as a radically different civilization was constructed.

We live in a similar moment of breakdown and creativity. The cosmological discovery that shatters nearly everything upon which the modern age was built is the discovery that the Universe came into existence 13.7 billion years ago and is so biased toward complexification that life and intelligence are now seen to be a nearly inevitable construction of evolutionary dynamics. Our new challenge is to reinvent our civilization. The major institutions of the modern period, including that of agriculture and religion and education and economics, need to be re­imagined within an intelligent, self­organizing, living Universe, so that instead of degrading the Earth's life systems, humanity might learn to join the enveloping community of living beings in a mutually enhancing manner. This great work will surely draw upon the talents and energies of many millions of humans from every culture of our planet and throughout the rest of the 21st century.

Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Story of the Universe

314 page HEYOKA

I have no choice.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, when asked if he believed in free will.

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am the master of my fate and captain of my soul.

Ashleigh Brilliant

There is no such thing as free will. The mind is induced to wish this or that by some cause and that cause is determined by another cause, and so back to infinity.

Spinosa

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The fact that people have the sense that they choose freely does not mean that they choose freely. Our actions spring from the interface of our genetic heritage, all our personal, social, and cultural conditioning, and the environmental realities of the moment. And then we tell ourselves that we have chosen, and generate whatever reasons necessary to convince ourselves we are in control.

Jay Hanson

The truth shall set you free, but first it will piss you off!

Gloria Steinem

If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh or they will kill you.

Oscar Wilde

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.

Simone Weil

The awakened one moves about in the world like a dry brown leaf, blown by the winds of his own previous tendencies.

315 page Ashtavakra

Wise men are instructed by reason; Men of less understanding, by experience; The most ignorant, by necessity; The beasts by nature.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.

Robert Heinlein, Logic of Empire, 1941

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

“Hanlon’s Razor” after Robert J. Hanlon, 1980 Also attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte (“…by incompetence.”)

...misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

George Carlin

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limitations.

Albert Einstein (apocryphal)

The thing about smart people is that they seem like crazy people to dumb people.

Unattributed

A bird by the bush is worth two by the hand.

It’s an ill bread that bodes no will.

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make the water think.

Alexander Carpenter, American

316 page Remember that under the skin you fondle lie the bones waiting to reveal themselves.

Ikkyu, Japanese mad Zen priest

There is a skeleton in every woman.

Victor Hugo (1802­1885)

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

William Faulkner, American Writer

Inter faeces et urinam nascimur. I was born between shit and piss.

Saint Augustine

You gave your life to become the person you are right now. Was it worth it?

Richard Bach, One

Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life energy.

Nikola Tesla

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

Jesus Christ, Bible, ...

The Messiah will only come when he is no longer needed.

Franz Kafka

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

Francisco d’Anconia

Do I contradict myself? Well, then, I contradict myself. I am vast. I contain multitudes.

Walt Whitman

317 page The well­bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

Oscar Wilde

If you don’t understand how things are connected, the cause of problems is solutions.

Amory B. Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute

If you don’t want it printed, don’t let it happen.

Masthead motto, Aspen Daily News, Aspen, Colorado

If the eye could see the demons that people the universe, existence would be impossible.

Talmud, Berakhot, 6

Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious.

Albert Einstein

Do not expect too much of the end of the world.

Stanislaw J. Lec, Aforyzmy Fraszki, Krakow, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1977, “Mysli nieuczesane”

Superstition brings bad luck.

Raymond Smullyan, 5000 B. C., I.3.8

It’s not the things we don’t know that hurt us; it’s the things we know that just ain’t so.

Will Rogers

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973

You experience what you believe, unless you believe you won’t, in which case you don’t, which means you did.

Harry Palmer, ReSurfacing: Techniques for Exploring Consciousness

The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which 318 page needs illusions.

Karl Marx

I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires.

Anonymous graffito, Paris, 1968

If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it with my own eyes.

Attributed to Marshall McLuhan, Yogi Berra, and many others (with thanks to Lion Goodman)

Have you noticed that nature has recently begun to look like Corot’s landscapes?

Oscar Wilde

The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and evil has made the world ugly and evil.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft

In times of change, those who are ready to learn will inherit the world, while those who believe they know will be marvelously prepared to deal with a world that has ceased to exist.

Eric Hoffer

It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.

Thought, however unintelligible it may be, seems as much function of organ, as bile of liver. This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything. [N]or ought one to blame others.

Charles Darwin.

Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H. L. Mencken, American Gadfly

A Puritan exaggerates a virtue until it becomes a vice; there are as many kinds of Puritans as there are virtues, because any virtue can be overdrawn.

Professor Richard Schweder, University of Chicago Department of Psychology 319 page ‘Forgive us our virtues.’ That is what we should ask of our neighbors.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I discern a disturbing historical pattern — the crack and fall of civilizations owing to a morbid intensification of their own first principles. (Paraphrased)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770­1831), The Philosophy of History

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

Arthur Miller

The illusion of freedom [in America] will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

Frank Zappa

If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Abraham Lincoln, on a free society

The only limits are, as always, those of vision.

James Broughton

Whether you think you can or think you can’t — either way you’re right.

Henry Ford, American Industrialist

There is no such thing as luck, only highly favorable adjustments to multiple factors, that cause events to turn out in one’s favor.

Ben “Obi Wan” Kanobi, Star Wars

320 page In human endeavor, chance favors the prepared mind.

Louis Pasteur

What was your relationship to thought before you were convinced that there was a problem?

Andrew Cohen, Enfant Terrible Americain of the Ramana Maharshi lineage

Think things, not words.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., American Jurist

Heaven and Earth are not humane. They treat people like things. or

Heaven and earth are not humanistic — they regard myriad beings as straw dogs. Sages are not humanistic — they regard people as straw dogs.

Tao Te Ching, 5

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent.

J. H. Holmes (1879­1964)

There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are only consequences.

Robert Ingersoll

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 11 Nov 1850

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

George Bernard Shaw

Cynic is a word created by optimists to criticize realists.

Gregory Benford, In The Ocean of Night, 1972, page 248

Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

321 page No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.

Lily Tomlin

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

Sidney J. Harris

The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.

Matt Savinar, also attributed to William Gibson

I wasn’t trying to predict the future; I was trying to prevent it.

Ray Bradbury

Becoming a Scientist because you crave factual certainty and thirst for a meaningful vision of human life is like becoming an Archbishop so you can meet girls.

Unknown, through David del Torto

Oh, God! I could be bounded in a nut­shell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 263

It was pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don’t think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (which I guessed at). There’s a singular and a perpetual charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its novelty.... Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever — unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.

Thomas Aldrich

Finally, I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion.

Virginia Wolfe, Orlando, Preface

322 page I am seated in the smallest room in my house. Your article is before me. Soon it will be behind me.

Hector Berlioz’ reply to a published attack on one of his compositions

Don’t read your reviews, weigh them.

John Cage

The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation.

Hilton Kramer

A great work of art is never completed; it is merely abandoned.

Good artists borrow; great artists steal.

Pablo Picasso

There is no such thing as bad ink; there is only ink.

Unknown Publicist

Saint Saens knows everything; all he lacks is inexperience.

Hector Berlioz, on the know­it­all Camille Saint Saens

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Hector Berlioz (1803­1869)

You who scribble, yet hate all who write... and with faint praises one another damn.

William Wycherley, 1649­1716

When people don’t want to come, nothing will stop them.

Sol Hurok, American Impresario

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

If you ask me a question I don’t know, I’m not going to answer. 323 page Yogi Berra, American Athlete and Cultural Icon

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend; inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

Groucho Marx, 1970s (also attributed to Jim Brewer, 1954)

The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.

Andrew A. “Andy” Rooney

When people die there awaits them what they neither expect nor even imagine.

Heraclitus (ca. 500 B.C.), Fragment 27

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Oscar Wilde

An election is nothing more than an advance auction of stolen goods.

Ambrose Bierce

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone expects to live at the expense of everyone else.

Frederic Bastiat, The State, in Selected Essays on Political Economy, page 144

Socialism is a great idea until you run out of other people’s money.

Bumper sticker

Society is like a stew. If you don’t keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top.

Edward Abbey

In government, the scum rises to the top.

Friedrich Hayek, Nobel Laureate

In an unregulated world, the least­principled people rise to the top.

Brian Basham, Beware Corporate Psychopaths, The Independent, 29 December 2011 324 page It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. [On the contrary,] enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.

P.J. O’Rourke

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

Vladimir I. Lenin

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

Oscar Wilde

Few events occur at the right time, and many do not occur at all; it is the proper function of the historian to correct these faults.

Herodotus

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.

George Santayana

In telling a true story, you must not be too concerned about the actual, factual circumstances.

Edward Teller

The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.

Theodore Rubin

The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem.

Captain Jack Sparrow

What was your relationship to thought before you were convinced that there was a problem?

Andrew Cohen, Enfant Terrible Americain of the Ramana Maharshi lineage

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones 325 page out.

Dee Hock, personal communication

If you think there’s a solution, you’re part of the problem.

George Carlin

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Albert Camus

The celebrity is a person who is known for his well­knownness.

Daniel J. Boorstein

He who falls in love with himself will have no rivals.

Benjamin Franklin

Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused.

Unattributed

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.

Alfred North Whitehead

The future ain’t what it used to be.

Casey Stengel (Yogi Berra?)

The Future lies ahead!

Mort Saul, ca. 1960

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.

Niels Bohr 326 page I wasn’t trying to predict the future; I was trying to prevent it.

Ray Bradbury

The past is fiction, the future is a dream, and we are living on the edge of a razor.

Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

To predict the future, we need logic; but we also need faith and imagination, which can sometimes defy logic itself.

Arthur C. Clarke

The sage battles his own ego; the fool battles everyone else’s.

Pir Vilayat, Sufi

Any act is pure that does not shrink from its logical conclusions.

Francois Trouffault

Only fools rush in Where angels fear to tread But if there were no fools Who would lead the angels?

Sloan Bashinsky, American Original

Take your well­disciplined strengths and stretch them between two opposing poles. Because inside human beings is where God learns.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

327 page What makes you think you’re not already dead?

William S. Burroughs, apparently near the end of his life, when asked during a press conference about the possibility of an afterlife.

All our names for God come from our names for ourselves.

Wouldst thou be perfect, do not yelp about God.

Meister Johannes Eckhart, Christian mystic

Earl of Sandwich: “’Pon my honor, Wilkes, I don’t know whether you’ll die on the gallows or of the pox.” John Wilkes (English MP and Journalist, 1727­1797): “That must depend, my Lord, upon whether I first embrace your Lordship’s principles, or your Lordship’s mistresses.”

In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice... But in practice, there is.

Carter Brooks, Carter’s Reader

Occam’s razor n. [William of Ockham]: a scientific and philosophical rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily, which is interpreted as requiring the simplest of competing theorems be preferred to the more complex, or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities.

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, Merriam, 1981

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

Entities should not be multiplied beyond what is needed

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate

Multiples should not be used if not necessary

The more commonly used, and quite treacherous, interpretations are:

Given two equally predictive theories, choose the simpler, or

The simplest answer is usually the correct answer.

The most accurate interpretation is: 328 page The fittest explanation of any phenomenon is as complex as it needs to be, and no more.

William of Occam (c. 1280­1349), Quodlibeta, V, Q.i, circa 1324

No set of mutually inconsistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated.

Crabtree’s Bludgeon (one of several empirical refutations of Occam’s Razor)

For every complex question, there is a simple answer — and it’s wrong.

H.L. Mencken

No sooner do we make our product idiot­proof than someone comes up with a better idiot.

Unknown, through Danny Mack

Of the great things which are to be found among us, the Being of Nothingness is the greatest.

Leonardo Da Vinci

The secret of getting rich is not to work hard, but to get a lot of other people to work hard for you.

Michael Parenti

How I’m doing is none of my business.

Jack ‘Kamal’ Ruane, of the Ramana Maharshi lineage

The music I have written is as nothing compared with the music I have heard.

Ludwig von Beethoven

Creativity is a struggle between vitality and form.

Rollo May

The classic definition of chutzpah is when someone murders his parents and asks for leniency because he is an orphan. In the digital world chutzpah is when a computer journalist gets flamed for ill­informed reporting and claims he is the victim of demagoguery.

Let the digital age of accountable journalism take roots. Get off your lofty perch, all you reporters, 329 page and prepare to defend yourselves in fair argument. If you can’t take the heat, become a venture capitalist and reject business plans all day.

Guy Kawasaki, Macintosh Evangelist (in the late Eighties?)

I can’t understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I’m frightened of old ones.

John Cage, American Composer

The minute you start talking about what you’re going to do if you lose, you have lost.

George Shultz, U.S. Secretary of State for Ronald Reagan

Eagles may soar, but weasels aren’t sucked into jet engines.

Unattributed

You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.

Saint Francis of Assisi, Apocrypha

The truth is more important than the facts.

Frank Lloyd Wright

No experiment should be believed until it has been confirmed by theory.

Arthur S. Eddington

Those who say it cannot be done should not interfere with those of us who are doing it.

S. Hickman (also attributed as a Chinese proverb)

Sometimes I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Oscar Wilde

The safest place in any crisis is always the hard truths.

330 page Don Beck

War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.

Ambrose Bierce (1842­1914)

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you criticize him, you’re a mile away, plus you have his shoes.

Unattributed

Windows is a thirty­two­bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen­bit patch to an eight­bit operating system originally coded for a four­bit micro­processor written by a two­bit company that can’t stand one bit of competition.

Anonymous (late 1980s)

Start a large foolish project, like Noah! It makes no difference what people think of you.

Jalaludin Rumi

The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.

Maureen Dowd, New York Times columnist

It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.

Rollo May

Who is all­powerful should fear everything.

Pierre Corneille, Cinna, Act IV, Scene II, 1640

Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else’s is the wrong one.

Gore Vidal

Once you put one of his books down, you simply can’t pick it up again.

Mark Twain

From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some 331 page day I intend to read it.

Groucho Marx

History’s political and economic power structures have always fearfully abhorred ‘idle people’ as potential trouble­makers. Yet nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky.

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 ­1983), Critical Path

I created a vision of David in my mind and simply carved away everything that was not David.

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Never ask a man what computer he uses. If it’s a Mac, he’ll tell you. If it’s not, why embarrass him?

Tom Clancy

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

Timothy Leary

Things will get worse… before they get worse.

Lily Tomlin

When I get new information, I change my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?

John Maynard Keynes

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit atrocities [injustices].

Voltaire (apocryphal)

You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it.

Carl Gustav Jung (apocryphal)

Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

H.L. Mencken

332 page What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are.

Epictitus

The 1st law of thermodynamics says: you can’t win. The 2nd law of thermodynamics says: you can’t break even. The zeroeth law says: you can’t even get out of the game! Similarly, Capitalism is based on the false premise that you can win. Socialism is based on the false premise that you can break even. Mysticism is based on the false premise that you can get out of the game. . .

John Barrow

The necessity of rejecting and destroying some things that are beautiful is the deepest curse of existence.

Georges Santayana

Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

C.S. Lewis

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

Sir Francis Bacon

Dennis “Galen” Mitrzyk may have been right when he said that George Bernard Shaw may have been right when he said, “Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.”

Z.B.F. Alexander

It’s a truism that those who think of themselves as hammers treat all they encounter as nails; it is less apparent that those who think of themselves as nails treat all they encounter as hammers.

Z.B.F. Alexander

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to have him hold in higher esteem those who think alike rather than those who think differently.

333 page Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844­1900)

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Albert Einstein

It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, 1950

Government is a disease that masquerades as its own cure.

Robert Lefevre

5% of the people think. 10% of the people think they think. The rest would rather die than think.

Unattributed

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their life.

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow­witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

Count Leo Tolstoy (1828­1910)

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

Bertrand Russell

If you don’t read a newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you are misinformed. 334 page Mark Twain

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

George Orwell, 1944

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty­four, 1949

If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema you could bury him in a matchbox.

Christopher Hitchens, May 2007

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973

Libertarianism is about conferring liberty and concomitant responsibility where they most rightly should rest — on the individual. Liberalism is about granting the individual choice (at least socially) but spreading the economic risks (the consequences) over the entire group.

Unattributed

Government is the Entertainment Division of the military­industrial complex.

Frank Zappa

All human greatness has its source in the blood. Greatness is guided by instinct, and intuition is its great blessing. The participation of the intellect in works of true genius is always limited.

Dr. Joseph Goebbels

Intuition, not intellect, is the ‘open sesame’ of yourself.

Albert Einstein, quoted in Einstein and the Poet – In Search of the Cosmic Man by William Hermanns (Branden Press, 1983, page 16)

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

Albert Einstein (apocryphal) 335 page The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

G.K. Chesterton

Laissez­faire was planned; planning was not.

Karl Polanyi

Carry the battle to them. Don’t let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive and don’t ever apologize for anything.

Harry S. Truman

It’s never what people do that makes us angry; it’s what we tell ourselves about what they did.

Marshall Rosenberg

One man’s conspiracy is another man’s business plan.

Duct Tape Fatwa Blog

Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Winston Churchill

The self­righteousness of the self­flagellators can quickly lead to judgment of others.

Ma’anit

The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you.

Albert Camus, The Fall

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Steve Jobs

Design is content. Style is content.

336 page Z.B.F. Alexander

Form is Emptiness; Emptiness also is Form.

Buddhist Mantra

I have always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.

Lily Tomlin

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics, in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such, and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future; the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

Tom Robbins

The only thing new in this world is the history you don’t know.

Harry S. Truman (apocryphal)

What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable agreed upon.

Napoleon Bonaparte, Conversation with Emmanuel, comte de Las Cases (20 November 1816), Mémorial de Sainte Hélène, v. 4, page 251

From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict which each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.

F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1978

It takes a brave man to be a coward in the Soviet army.

Joseph Stalin

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the burden of being a man.

Hunter S. Thompson

337 page Irony: The capacity to hold two conflicting ideas in mind without buying into either. Paradox: Irony on steroids.

Unknown

The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack­Up, page 69

Truth is not the halfway point between two untruths.

Ludwig von Mises

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh. People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true. Truth does not do as much good in the world as the semblance of truth does evil.

Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 64

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

Professor Albert Bartlett, University of Colorado at Boulder

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.

Ezra Pound

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Richard Feynman

Nature bats last, and owns the stadium.

Unattributed

You can ignore reality but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

338 page Ayn Rand

There is no box.

Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins’ response when Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer for the New Yorker, asked about thinking outside the box.

You don’t have too many slugs. You have too few ducks.

Permaculture Saying

Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.

Bill Mollison, permaculture pioneer

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Oscar Wilde

The puppet masters no longer care if we see the strings.

Unattributed

Just look at us. Everything is backwards. Everything is upside­down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religion destroys spirituality.

Michael Ellne (!)

We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy our economy.

Chris Hedges (later…!)

The pupil is thereby ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on 339 page allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.

Aldous Huxley

Our upside­down welfare state is “socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor.” The great welfare scandal of the age concerns the dole we give rich people.

William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion, 1969, page 68

How we dare even prate about democracy is beyond me. Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale. It’s far worse than anything that occurred in the Roman Empire, until the Praetorian Guard started to sell the principate. We’re not a democracy, and we have absolutely nothing to give the world in the way of political ideas or political arrangements. God knows, the mention of justice is like a clove of garlic to Count Dracula.

Gore Vidal

Never murder a man who is committing suicide.

Woodrow Wilson (apocryphal)

Never interrupt your enemy while he is busy making mistakes.

Napoleon Bonaparte (apocryphal)

For every credibility gap there is a gullibility fill.

Michael Rivero, What Really Happens

Animal lovers and professional biologists should be able to agree on the ultimate goal of game management: to minimize the aggregate suffering of animals. They differ in their time horizons and in the focus of their immediate attention. Biologists insist that time has no stop and that we should seek to maximize the wellbeing of the herd over an indefinite period of time. To do that we must “read the landscape,” looking for signs of overexploitation of the environment by a population that has grown beyond the carrying capacity.

By contrast, the typical animal lover ignores the landscape while focusing on individual animals. To assert preemptive animal rights amounts to asserting the sanctity of animal life, meaning each and every individual life. Were an ecologist to use a similar rhetoric he would speak of the 340 page “sanctity of carrying capacity.” By this he would mean that we must consider the needs not only of the animals in front of us today but also of unborn descendants reaching into the indefinite future.

Time has no stop, the world is finite, biological reproduction is necessarily exponential: for these combined reasons the sanctity strategy as pursued by animal lovers in the long run saves fewer lives, and these at a more miserable level of existence, than does the capacity strategy pursued by ecologically knowledgeable biologists. …

There is nothing more dangerous than a shallow­thinking compassionate person.

Garrett Hardin

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

Frank Zappa

“No” is a complete sentence.

Unknown

Let your “yes” be “yes,” and your “no” be “no;” anything more than this comes from the evil one.

Jesus of Nazareth, Bible, Matthew 5:37

The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.

Ralph Nader

No trees were killed in the sending of this message, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

Part of an e­mail signature

Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc. We gladly feast on those who would subdue us.

The Addams Family credo 341 page Gestapo officer (stalking through Pablo Picasso’s studio, and chancing across a postcard of Guernica): “Did you do that?” Picasso: “No, you did.”

Apocryphal

When two great forces oppose each other, the victory will go to the one who knows how to yield.

Tao te Ching

Nothing is Unbiased. If you are Honest, you make your point of view clear. If you are dishonest, you pretend to be Objective.

Noam Chomsky

While the moderns insure themselves by not thinking at all about the consequences of their innovations for the social order, the premoderns…dwell endlessly and obsessively on those connections between nature and culture. To put it crudely: those who think the most about hybrids circumscribe them as much as possible, whereas those who choose to ignore them…develop them to the utmost.

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 1991

Not only can one not make a parody of a fundamentalist viewpoint that someone won’t mistake for the real thing, but the legitimate extreme viewpoints are often mistaken for parodies.

Poe’s Law

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.

Edward R. Murrow

People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956

I don’t care to belong to any club that would have me as a member.

Groucho Marx

342 page Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself with.

Marcus Aurelius, circa 175 A.D.

Habitat loss begins at home.

Fred Kaluza, 2010

Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.

Mark B. Cohen, Legislator

When did the PTB [Powers That Be] ever doing anything beneficial for the masses?

Laura Knight­Jadczyk, http://www.SOTT.net

The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.

Terence McKenna

The least corrupt governments in history are those who spend their first day in office cleaning their predecessors’ bloodstains out of the carpets.

Michael Rivero, http://www.whatreallyhappened.com

A gaffe: when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

Michael Kinsley

Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it.

André Gide

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

Stephen Roberts, Australian historian, died 1971

In whatever political or economic game you’re playing, if you don’t know exactly who the mark is, and why and how, then you’re the mark.

Various Late 20th Century Political Philosophers

343 page If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.

Andrew Lewis

When people have nothing left to lose, they lose it.

Gerald Celente

Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.

Christopher Isherwood

Life is intrinsically boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.

Edward Gorey

TRAVEL

For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. One can no longer cheat — hide behind the hours spent at the office or at the plant (those hours we protest so loudly, which protect us so well from the pain of being alone).

Albert Camus, French Writer

Whatever its origin, I know that in men’s minds, especially in superior minds, resides an innate longing to see new places, to keep changing one’s home. I don’t deny that this longing should be tempered and held in bounds by reason. Your own experience will lead you to agree with me that this taste for wandering about the world mingles pleasure with its pains, while those who sit forever on one spot experience a strange boredom in their repose. Which is the better course, in this as in man’s other problems? God alone knows. If one thinks that reward is not to be found in the spirit but in some particular place, if one calls immobility constancy, then the gouty must be extremely constant, and the dead are more constant still, and the mountains are the most constant of all.

Plutarch, AD 46? ­ AD 120?

...The mountains, being possessive, claimed ownership of them, and that if they did not save their energy, the mountains would never let them go.

Carlos Casteneda, The Eagle’s Gift, 82

344 page Great souls that go into the desert come out mystics... because the desert itself has no use for the formal side of man’s affairs. What need, then, of so much pawing over precedent and discoursing upon it, when the open country lies there, a sort of chemist’s cup for resolving obligations? Say whether, when all decoration is eaten away, there remains any bond, and what you shall do about it.

Mary Austin, Lost Borders

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, 5

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

John Berryman

I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

The early twilight of a Sunday evening, in Hamilton, Bermuda, is an alluring time. There is just enough of whispering, breeze, fragrance of flowers, and sense of repose to raise one's thoughts heavenward; and just enough amateur piano music to keep him reminded of the other place....

We never met a man, or woman, or child anywhere in this sunny island who seemed to be unprosperous, or discontented, or sorry about anything. This sort of monotony became very tiresome presently, and even something worse. The spectacle of an entire nation groveling in contentment is an infuriating thing.

Mark Twain, Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion, The Atlantic Monthly, October 1877­January 1878

Of what value are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

Aldo Leopold

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky 345 page be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

Vincent Van Gogh

An adventure is really just a sign of incompetence. Having an adventure shows that someone is incompetent, that something has gone wrong. Every thing that you add to an explorer’s heroism, you must subtract from his intelligence. An adventure is interesting enough in retrospect, especially to the person that didn’t have it; at the time it happens it usually constitutes an exceedingly disagreeable experience.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879­1962)

I may say that this is the greatest factor — the way in which the expedition is equipped — the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him who has everything in order — luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.

Roald Amundsen, The South Pole

The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson, The Standardization of Error, 1927

A season in the Arctic is a great test of character. One may know a man better after six months with him beyond the Arctic circle than after a lifetime of acquaintance in cities. There is something — I know not what to call it — in those frozen spaces, that brings a man face to face with himself and with his companions; if he is a man, the man comes out; and, if he is a cur, the cur shows as quickly.

Admiral Perry

The hospitality of manners in France is not complemented by real hospitality of thought.

Henri Fréderic Amiel

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely­eyed, let’s­ look­honestly­at­the­facts­and­find­some­way­to­deal­with­them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way — hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, 346 page of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late­date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster, in Gourmet Magazine, August 2004

LANGUAGE and SPEECH

A definition [distinction?] is the beginning of knowledge.

Demosthenes

Man makes tools, then tools remake man.

Marshall McLuhan

I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.

Albert Einstein (apocryphal)

Man is the tool­bearing animal; woman is the man­bearing animal.

Feminist trope, 1980s

One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language...

George Orwell, English Writer

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

Joseph Schumpeter, 1942

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature 347 page There arises from a bad and inapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.

Francis Bacon

Tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration.

Samuel Johnson

Language serves not only to express thoughts but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

Bertrand Russell

The lexicon of language, then, is a finite set of terms that my metaphor is able to stretch out over an infinite set of circumstances, even to creating new circumstances thereby. (page 52)

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. (page 55)

But what is it that we are making a metaphor of? We have seen that the usual function of metaphor is a wish to designate a particular aspect of a thing or to describe something for which words are not available. (page 56)

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976

A good metaphor is the sign of true genius.

Aristotle (apocryphal)

Applied to the world as representative of all the world, facts become superstitions. A superstition is after all only a metaphier grown wild to serve a need to know. Like the entrails of animals or the flights of birds, such scientific superstitions become the preserved ritualized places where we may read out the past and future of man, and hear the answers that can authorize our actions.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1990, page 443

Every intellectual searches for a new ideology,... but ideology is to the mind what excrement is to the body: the exhausted remains of once living ideas.

William Irwin Thompson, Gaia and the Politics of Life, 1986(?), page 209 348 page It is important that our generation not debase the language of spirituality as our fathers have debased the language of politics.

Robert Bly, American Poet, personal communication, 1984

When an idea is wanting, a word can always be found to take its place.

Goethe

Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.

John Andrew Holmes

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Rudyard Kipling (1856­1936)

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn’t matter whether a good writer wants to be useful, or whether a bad writer wants to do harm... If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

Ezra Pound

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

Charles Darwin

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.

W. Somerset Maugham

A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.

349 page Kenneth Tynan

Action is with the scholar subordinate but it is also essential. Without it he is not yet a man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

A gentleman should be cautious in speech but quick in action.

Confucius, Chinese Totem

Fashion your talk the Chinese way, which is to always leave an element of doubt, query, enquiry for further parley. For it blocks conversation to monopolize all its issues with arrogant certainty.

Han Suyin, Chinese­American Novelist

Finxerunt animi, raro et perpuaca loquentis. (He is disinclined to action; less to speech.)

Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65­8 B.C.)

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

Robert Benchley

All unuttered truths turn poisonous.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844­1900)

Words wreak havoc when they find a name for what had up to then been lived namelessly.

Jean Paul Sartre

If you don’t say anything, you won’t be called on to repeat it.

Calvin Coolidge

Woman at party: I bet I can make you say more than three words. Calvin Coolidge: You lose.

Apocryphal

I guess I am not naturally energetic. I like to sit around and talk.

350 page Calvin Coolidge

Only for you, children of doctrine and learning, have we written this work. Examine this book, ponder the meaning we have dispersed in various places and gathered again; what we have concealed in one place we have disclosed in another, that it may be understood by your wisdom.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia, 3, 65

Words are like leaves, and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.

Alexander Pope (1688­1744)

It is always easier to develop a negative argument than to advance a constructive one.

John Steinbeck

In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny, and if either could be made to take the other’s views in addition to its own, little more would be needed to make its doctrine correct.

John Stewart Mill (1806­1873), 1840

The real story is not in the noise but in the silence.

Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist

Think things, not words.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., American Jurist

If you would learn to write, ‘tis in the street you must learn it... The people, not the college, is the writer’s home.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude

He wrapped himself in quotations — as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.

Rudyard Kipling, Many Inventions

I have gathered a posie of other men’s flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.

351 page John Bartlett, gatherer of Familiar Quotations, 9th edition, 1901

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

Aldous Huxley

Energy is recognized as the key to all activity on earth. Natural science is the study of the sources and control of natural energy, and social science, theoretically expressed as economics, is the study of the sources and control of social energy. Both are bookkeeping systems. Mathematics is the primary energy science. And the bookkeeper can be king if the public can be kept ignorant of the methodology of the bookkeeping. All science is merely a means to an end. The means is knowledge. The end is control. [But note that in this case it is not merely control of the masses by the elite, but the control of nature (including control of humans who are categorized as outside our family/tribe/nation by humans who are within it).]

Jim Keith

What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.

Vilhajalmur Stefansson, Discovery, 1964

The principal function of modern government is to keep people apart. or

Keeping citizens apart has become the first maxim of modern politics.

Jean­Jacques Rousseau (1712­1778)

Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest accumulation of depotentiated social units.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875­1961), The Undiscovered Self, 1957

A principle familiar to propagandists is that the doctrines to be instilled in the target audience should not be articulated: that would only expose them to reflection, inquiry, and, very likely, ridicule. The proper procedure is to drill them home by constantly presupposing them, so that they become the very condition for discourse.

Noam Chomsky, Letters from Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda, 1994

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is 352 page an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. … There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes. Not, what is still more important, the extent to which our thoughts and habits are modified by authorities.

Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928, pages 9, 35

The second oldest trick in the spooks’ book (the oldest being the false­flag attack), is ‘poisoning the well.’ If you’re a spook outfit and you’ve pulled off a bit of skullduggery and don’t want any untidy bits of evidence or loose ends tripping you up, one thing you do is plant obviously doctored ‘evidence’ where it will certainly be found by the skeptical who suspect your story is bullshit. Then when a few enthusiastic doubters point to that as ‘proof',’ you simply refer to the dodgy provenance of such ‘evidence,’ and thus destroy the credibility of those who doubt your official cover story. Literally all corporate­ and state­sponsored dirty operations for high stakes do this.

Anonymous blog­comment, online

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Disinformation, in order to be effective, must be 90% accurate.

Peter Dale Scott

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

Thomas Pynchon, Jr., Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973

Confusion is caused by package­words. You call a man a Manichaean or a Bolshevik, or something or other, and never find out what he is driving at. The technique of infamy is to invent two lies, then get people arguing heatedly over which one of them is true.

Ezra Pound, personal communication to Bridson, N.D. 17, 174­175

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.

353 page Noam Chomsky

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence. or

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it ... The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. Our minds are molded, our tastes are formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. ... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928

Only a large­scale popular movement toward decentralization and self­help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all­ powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present­day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors, and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

Aldous Huxley (1894­1963), Brave New World, Foreword to 1946 edition

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.

They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a 354 page measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted. …

Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world’s most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors. …

Thanks to compulsory education and the rotary press, the propagandist has been able, for many years past, to convey his messages to virtually every adult in every civilized country. (page 54)

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958

If you allow a political catchword to go on and grow, you will awaken some day to find it standing over you, the arbiter of your destiny, against which you are powerless, as men are powerless against delusions.

William Graham Sumner

In a way, the world­view of the party imposed itself most successfully on the people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding, they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just like a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty­four, 1949

You don’t communicate with anyone purely on the rational facts or ethics of an issue... It is only when the other party is concerned or feels threatened that he will listen — in the arena of action, a threat or a crisis becomes almost a precondition to communication... No one can negotiate without the power to compel negotiation... To attempt to operate on a good­will basis rather than on a power basis would be to attempt something that the world has not yet experienced.

Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. 355 page It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.

Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933­1945

If it’s popular, it’s propaganda.

Jay Hanson, personal communication, September 2012

Wonderful is the effect of impudent & persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves.

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to William S. Smith, written from Paris on 13 November 1787

That is of course rather painful for those involved. One should not as a rule reveal one’s secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick­ headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

Joseph Goebbels, Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik, in Die Zeit ohne Beispeil, 12 January 1941

Through clever and constant application of propaganda people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1923

But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice.

All this was inspired by the principle — which is quite true in itself — that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to 356 page large­scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.

From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, where as in reality they are a race? And what a race! One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for all time with a statement which is profoundly and exactly true. Schopenhauer called the Jew “The Great Master of Lies.” Those who do not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it, will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth to prevail.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Volume 1 Chapter 10, 1925

I am thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the ‘remaking’ of the Reich as they call it.

If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Volume 2 Chapter 1

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil… [To the true believer] every difficulty and failure within the movement is the work of the devil, and every success is a triumph over his evil plotting… This enemy — the indispensable devil of every mass movement — is omnipresent. He plots both outside and inside the ranks of the faithful.

The missionary zeal seems rather an expression of some deep misgiving, some pressing feeling of insufficiency at the center. Proselytizing is more a passionate search for something not yet found than a desire to bestow upon the world something we already have. It is a search for a final and irrefutable demonstration that our absolute truth is indeed the one and only truth. The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others.

So tenaciously should we cling to the world revealed by the Gospel, that were I to see all the Angels of Heaven coming down to me to tell me something different, not only would I not be tempted to doubt a single syllable, but I would shut my eyes and stop my ears, for they would not deserve to be either seen or heard.

Martin Luther, Table Talk, Number 1687. 357 page It is the true believer’s ability to “shut his eyes and stop his ears” to the facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He cannot be frightened by danger nor disheartened by obstacle nor baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence…[For the true believer,] to rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs… One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes. Children, savages, and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.

All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves. To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats — we know it not… The inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism.

Eric Hoffer (1902 ­ 1983), The True Believer, 1951

The cruelest lies are often told in silence.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, 1881

Anyone who wants to rule men first tries to humiliate them, to trick them out of their rights and their capacity for resistance, until they are as powerless before him as animals. He uses them like animals and, even if he does not tell them so, in himself he always knows quite clearly that they mean just as little to him; when he speaks to his intimates he will call them sheep or cattle. His ultimate aim is to incorporate them into himself and to suck the substance out of them. What remains of them afterwards does not matter to him. The worse he has treated them, the more he despises them. When they are no more use at all, he disposes of them as he does excrement, simply seeing to it that they do not poison the air of his house.

Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power,

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

Steve Biko

Nobody can put you psychologically into prison; you are already there.

358 page J. Krishnamurti

Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

The average citizen is the world’s most efficient censor. His own mind is the greatest barrier between him and the facts. His own ‘logic proof compartments,’ his own absolutism are the obstacles which prevent him from seeing in terms of experience and thought rather than in terms of group reaction.

Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 1923

If those in charge of our society — politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television — can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.

Howard Zinn

Those who have put out the people’s eyes, reproach them of their blindness.

John Milton

I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind­forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney­sweepers cry Every black’ning Church appalls, And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new­born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

359 page William Blake, London, in Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1794

Free speech is what is left over when a community has determined in advance what it does not want to hear.

Stanley Fish, Chairman, Duke University English Department

We write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fiber of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

Virginia Wolfe, Orlando, 5

Put little or nothing into writing, deal face to face where a man’s eye upon the countenance of him with whom he speaketh may give him a direction how far to go.

Sir Francis Bacon, Of Negotiating

His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.

The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty­four, 1949

The problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.

George Bernard Shaw

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. 360 page George Orwell

Motion pictures are of course a different medium of expression than the public speech, the radio, the stage, the novel, or the magazine. But the First Amendment draws no distinction between the various methods of communicating ideas.

William O. Douglas, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1953

Let the people decide through the marketplace mechanism what they wish to see and hear. Why is there this national obsession to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes when we don’t do the same for Time magazine?

Mark Fowler, FCC Chairman

In the market, language grew. Became bolder, more sophisticated. Leaped and sparked from mind to mind. Incited by curiosity and rapt attention, it took astounding risks that none had ever dared to contemplate, built whole civilizations from the ground up.

The Cluetrain Manifesto, 2000

I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

Tom Stoppard, The Right Thing, 1982

Three­fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.

Gary Snyder

When Leon the tyrant of Phlius asked Pythagoras who he was, he said, “A Philosopher,” and he compared life to the public festivals, where some went to compete for a prize and others went with things to sell, but the best as observers; for similarly, in life, some grow up with servile natures, greedy for fame and gain, but philosophers seek the truth.

Diogenes Laertius

[Phaedrus] liked that word “philosophology.” It was just right. It had a nice dull, cumbersome, superfluous appearance that exactly fitted its subject matter, and he'd been using it for some time now. Philosophology is to philosophy as musicology is to music, or as art history and art appreciation are to art, or as literary criticism is to creative writing. It’s a derivative, secondary 361 page field, a sometimes parasitic growth that likes to think it controls its host by analyzing and intellectualizing its host’s behavior.

Literature people are sometimes puzzled by the hatred many creative writers have for them. Art historians can’t understand the venom either. He supposed that the same was true with musicologists but he didn’t know enough about them. But pholosophologists don’t have this problem at all because the philosophers who would normally condemn them are a null­class. They don’t exist. Philosophologists, calling themselves philosophers, are just about all there are.

You can imagine the ridiculousness of an art historian taking his students to museums, having them write a thesis on some historical or technical aspect of what they see there, and after a few years of this giving them degrees saying that they are accomplished artists. They’ve never held a brush or a mallet or a chisel in their hands. All they know is art history.

Yet, ridiculous as it sounds, this is exactly what happens in the philosophology that calls itself philosophy. Students aren’t expected to philosophize. Their instructors would hardly know what to say if they did. They’d probably compare the student’s writing to Mill or Kant or somebody like that, find the student’s work grossly inferior, and tell him to abandon it. As a student Phaedrus had been warned that he would “come a cropper” if he got too attached to any philosophical ideas of his own.

Literature, musicology, art history, and philosophology thrive in academic institutions because they are easy to teach. You just Xerox something some philosopher has said and make the students discuss it, make them memorize it, and then flunk them at the end of the quarter if they forget it. Actual painting, music composition and creative writing are almost impossible to teach and so they barely get in the academic door. True philosophy doesn’t get in at all. Philosophologists often have an interest in creating philosophy but, as philosophologists, they subordinate it, much as a literary scholar might subordinate his own interest in creative writing. Unless they are exceptional they don’t consider the creation of philosophy their real line of work.

As an author, Phaedrus had been putting off the philosophology, partly because he didn’t like it, and partly to avoid putting a philosophological cart before the philosophical horse. Philosophologists not only start by putting the cart first; they usually forget the horse entirely. They say first you should read what all the great philosophers of history have said and then you should decide what you want to say. The catch here is that by the time you’ve read what all the great philosophers of history have said you’ll be at least two hundred years old. A second catch is that these great philosophers are very persuasive people and if you read them innocently you may be carried away by what they say and never see what they missed.

Phsdrus, in contrast, sometimes forgot the cart but was fascinated by the horse. He thought the best way to examine the contents of various philosophological carts is first to figure out what you believe and then to see what great philosophers agree with you. There will always be a few somewhere. These will be much more interesting to read since you can cheer what they say and 362 page boo their enemies, and when you see how their enemies attack them you can kibitz a little and take a real interest in whether they were right or wrong.

With this technique you can approach someone like William James in a much different way than an ordinary philosophologist would. Since you’ve already done your creative thinking before you read James, you don’t just go along with him. You get all kinds of fresh new ideas by contrasting what he’s saying with what you already believe. You’re not limited by any dead­ends of his thought and can often see ways of going around him. This was occurring in what Phaedrus had read so far. He was getting a definite impression that James’ philosophy was incomplete and that the Metaphysics of Quality might actually improve on it. A philosophologist would normally be indignant at the impertinence of someone thinking he could improve on the great Harvard philosopher, but James himself, to judge from what Phaedrus had read so far, would have been very enthusiastic about the effort. He was, after all, a philosopher.

Robert A. Pirsig, LILA: An Inquiry Into Morals, 1991, page 322ff

The idea that people’s beliefs, merely by being deeply held, merit respect is grotesque. A constitutional society upholds freedom of speech and thought: it has no interest in its citizens’ feelings. If it sought to protect sensibilities, there would be no limit to the abridgements of freedom that the principle would justify.

Oliver Kamm, in The Times Online, 28 September 2009

Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There is a queer disposition in the human mind to think that symbols and words and logical deductions are truer than actual experiences, and these great controversies were due to the struggle of the human intelligence against that disposition. On the one side were the Realists, who were so called because they believed, in effect, that names were more real than facts, and on the other side were the Nominalists, who from the first were pervaded by a suspicion about names and words generally; who thought there might be some sort of catch in verbal processes, and who gradually worked their way towards verification by experiment which is the fundamental thing about experimental science — experimental science which has given our human world all these immense powers and possibilities that tempt and threaten it to­day. These controversies of the schoolmen were of the utmost importance to mankind. The modern world could not begin to come into existence until the human mind had broken away from the narrow­minded verbalist way of thinking which the Realists followed.

H.G. (?) Wells

Nominalizations: One of the ways that people become immobilized is to turn an ongoing process 363 page into an event. Events are things which occur at one point in time and are finished. Once they occur, their outcomes are fixed and nothing can be done to change them. This way of representing their experience is impoverishing in the sense that subjects lose control of ongoing processes by representing them as events. The psychologist can challenge the distorted portions of the subject’s mental model by examining the subject’s Surface Structure; that is, by checking each of the non­ verbs in a sentence and asking yourself whether you can think of a verb or adjective which is closely associated with it in appearance/sound and meaning. For example, as the subject begins to discuss some ongoing process in his life...he may represent this process in his Surface Structure by the phrase my decision as in: I regret my decision. The task of the psychologist is to help the subject see that what he has represented in his model as a closed, finished event is an ongoing process which may be influenced by him.

Richard Bandler and John Grinder, Founders of Neuro­Linguistic Programming

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn’t understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your [sic] own language.

Jacques Derrida

The computational theory of mind has quietly entrenched itself in neuroscience, the study of the physiology of the brain and nervous system. No corner of the field is untouched by the idea that information processing is the fundamental activity of the brain. Information processing is what makes neuroscientists more interested in neurons than in glial cells, even though the glia take up more room in the brain. The axon (the long output fiber) of a neuron is designed, down to the molecule, to propagate information with high fidelity across long separations, and when its electrical signal is transduced to a chemical one at the synapse (the junction between neurons), the physical format of the information changes while the information itself remains the same. And as we shall see, the tree of dendrites (input fibers) on each neuron appears to perform the basic logical and statistical operations underlying computation. Information­theoretic terms such as “signals,” “codes,” “representations,” “transformations,” and “processing” suffuse the language of neuroscience. (page 83)

The computational theory fits so well into our understanding of the world that, in trying to overthrow it, Penrose had to reject most of contemporary neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and physics! (page 98)

People surely do use some sort of logic. All languages have logical terms like not, and, same, equivalent, and opposite. Children use and, not, or, and if appropriately before they turn three, not only in English but in half a dozen other languages that have been studied. Logical inferences are ubiquitous in human thought, particularly when we understand language. … Logic is indispensable in inferring true things about the world from piecemeal facts acquired from other people via language or from one’s own generalizations. 364 page Steven Pinker, How The Mind Works, 1997

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Albert Einstein

PROHIBITION

The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to “create” rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, 1982

The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.

Albert Einstein, My First Impression of the U.S.A., 1921

The usual road to slavery is that first they take away your guns, then they take away your property, then last of all they tell you to shut up and say you are enjoying it.

James A. Donald

The Constitution, in addition to delegating certain enumerated powers to Congress, places whole areas outside the reach of Congress’ regulatory authority. The First Amendment, for example, is fittingly celebrated for preventing Congress from “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion or “abridging the freedom of speech.” The Second Amendment similarly appears to contain an express limitation on the government’s authority.... This Court has not had recent occasion to consider the nature of the substantive right safeguarded by the Second Amendment. If, however, the Second Amendment is read to confer a personal right to “keep and bear arms,” a colorable argument exists that the Federal Government’s regulatory scheme, at least as it pertains to the purely intrastate sale or possession of firearms, runs afoul of that Amendment’s protections.

Justice Clarence Thomas, Printz v. United States, Concurrence, 1997

The chief foundations of all states...are good laws and good arms. And as there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms...where there are good arms there must be good laws... 365 page Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513

No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave.

James Burgh, Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses, 1775

A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.

George Washington

Both the oligarch and Tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of arms.

Aristotle

False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it...The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment, 1764

The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government…Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

Thomas Jefferson, quoting (plagiarizing?) Cesare Beccaria in Commonplace Book, 1774­1776

Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.

Abraham Lincoln (apocryphal)

366 page Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the ‘20s and ‘30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.

Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was.

U.S. District Judge James C. Paine, addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami, November 1991

We won’t dispassionately investigate or rationally debate which drugs do what damage and whether or how much of that damage is the result of criminalization. We’d rather work ourselves into a screaming fit of puritanism and then go home and take a pill.

P.J. O’Rourke

I am convinced that we can do to guns what we’ve done to drugs: create a multi­billion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no control.

George L. Roman

Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.

Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize­winning economist

Decriminalization would take the profit out of drugs and greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the drug­ related violence that is currently plaguing our streets.

Kurt L. Schmoke, Baltimore Mayor

Although I am a strong political conservative, I now believe that the costs of our fruitless struggle against illegal drugs are not worth the modest benefits likely to be achieved.

Professor Ernest van den Haag, contributing editor, National Review

Every dollar spent to punish a drug user or seller is a dollar that cannot be spent collecting restitution from a robber. Every hour spent investigating a drug user or seller is an hour that could have been used to find a missing child. Every trial held to prosecute a drug user or seller is court time that could be used to prosecute a rapist in a case that might otherwise have been plea­ bargained.

Randy E. Barnett, Curing the Drug­Law Addiction 367 page Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA — ordinary citizens don’t need guns, as their having guns doesn’t serve the State.

Heinrich Himmler

This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!

Adolf Hitler, Berlin Daily {Berliner Tagblatt], 15 April 1935

The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so. Indeed I would go so far as to say that the underdog is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let’s not have any native militia or police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order.

Adolf Hitler, April 11, 1942, in Hitler’s Table­Talk at the Führer’s Headquarters 1941–1942, Dr. Henry Picker, ed. (Athenaeum Verlag, Bonn, 1951)

People who object to weapons aren’t abolishing violence, they’re begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically ‘right.’ Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work.

L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach

The Conventions of a number of the States having, at the Time of their Adopting the Constitution, expressed a Desire, in Order to prevent Misconstruction or Abuse of its Powers, that further declaratory and restrictive Clauses should be added: And as exceeding the Ground of public Confidence in the Government will best insure the beneficent Ends of its Institution,...

Articles in Addition to, and Amendment of, the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the Fifth Article of the original Constitution.

Preamble to the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution (emphasis added)

Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H.L. Mencken, American Gadfly

368 page Claiming that guns cause crime has all the probity of claiming that pencils cause mis­spellings.

Banning assault weapons to fight crime is as stupid as banning condoms to prevent rape.

Unattributed

Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others: The Constitution of this Republic should make a special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom.

Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence

They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?

Paul Harvey, 31 August 1994

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?

Joseph Stalin

If those in charge of our society — politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television — can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.

Howard Zinn

The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half­century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.

Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, Second Session (February 1982)

The right of self­defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.

Henry St. George Tucker, in Blackstone’s 1768 Commentaries on the Laws of England 369 page The government which steps out of the ranks of the ordinary articles of consumption to select and lay under disproportionate burdens a particular one because it is a comfort, pleasing to the taste, or necessary to the health and will therefore be bought, is in that particular a tyranny.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Samuel Smith, 1823.

You know, I’ve long found it interesting that Liberals keep telling me that the government is corrupt, the police are oppressive and brutal, and the military is just there to keep the Status Quo — and in the next breath, proclaim that only members of those three groups should be allowed to own guns.

Andrew Northbrook

Certainly, one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.

Hubert Humphrey, Know Your Lawmakers, Guns, February 1960, page 4

Society does not control crime, ever, by forcing the law­abiding to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of criminals. Society controls crime by forcing the criminals to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of the law­abiding.

Jeff Snyder, author American Handgunner, Second Amendment Foundation Officer

Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000; ‘legal’ drugs: 38,000, illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana, 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war?

William A. Turnbow

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power.

P.J. O’Rourke

Every able­bodied freeman, between the ages of sixteen and fifty, is enrolled in the militia. …We have no general officers always existing. These are appointed occasionally, when an invasion or 370 page insurrection happens, and their commission determines with the occasion. The Governor is head of the military, as well as civil power. The law requires every militia­man to provide himself with the arms usual in the regular service. But this injunction was always indifferently complied with, and the arms they had, have been so frequently called for to arm the regulars, that in the lower parts of the country they are entirely disarmed. In the middle country a fourth or fifth part of them may have such firelocks as they had provided to destroy the noxious animals which infest their farms; and on the western side of the Blue Ridge they are generally armed with rifles. The pay of our militia, as well as of our regulars, is that of the continental regulars. The condition of our regulars, of whom we have none but continentals, and part of a battalion of state troops, is so constantly on the change, that a state of it at this day would not be its state a month hence. It is much the same with the condition of the other continental troops, which is well enough known.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query IX, 1781, page 126f

LIBERTY and RESTRAINT OF THE STATE

There is no greater tyranny than which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.

Montesquieu

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

M.K. Ghandi

As long as men can speak in liberty, you can bet they won’t act.

Charles Jared Ingersoll, letter to Alexis De Toqueville, circa 1830

The fact is that the average man’s love of liberty is nine­tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice, and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage, and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.

H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, 12 February 1923

It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, 371 page servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.

John Philpot Curran, Speech On the Right of Election, 1790

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self­evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. …

The unanimous Declaration of Independence of the thirteen united States of America

It has been thought that government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed; but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.

Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, 1791

The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing. Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have … a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers.

John Adams, August 1765 372 page A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. …

The preservation of a free government requires, not merely that the metes and bounds which separate each department of power be invariably maintained, but more especially that neither of them be suffered to overleap the great barrier which defends the rights of the people. The rulers who are guilty of such encroachment exceed the commission from which they derive their authority, and are tyrants. The people who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them and are slaves…

James Madison

...if a city, which from its origin has enjoyed liberty but has of itself become corrupt, has difficulties in devising good laws for the maintenance of liberty, it is not to be wondered­at if a city that had its origins in servitude finds it not only difficult, but actually impossible, ever to organize a government that will secure its liberty and tranquility.

Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses, 1, XLIX

The true test of a free society is not whether people are free to engage in what the state defines as “responsible” conduct. After all, even the Chinese and North Korean people are “free” by that standard. The real test of a free society is whether an individual is free to engage in irresponsible behavior, so long as it does not interfere, in a direct and forceful way, with the ability of others to do the same.

Jacob G. Hornberger

One should as a rule, respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.

Bertrand Russell

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.

Thomas Jefferson

Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn 373 page around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1819

All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body. The concentrating these in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. One hundred and seventy­three despots would surely be as oppressive as one. Let those who doubt it turn their eyes on the republic of Venice. As little will it avail us that they are chosen by ourselves. An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others. For this reason that convention, which passed the ordinance of government, laid its foundation on this basis, that the legislative, executive and judiciary departments should be separate and distinct, so that no person should exercise the powers of more than one of them at the same time. But no barrier was provided between these several powers. The judiciary and executive members were left dependant on the legislative, for their subsistence in office, and some of them for their continuance in it. … And this will probably be the case for some time to come. But it will not be a very long time. Mankind soon learn to make interested uses of every right and power which they possess, or may assume. The public money and public liberty, intended to have been deposited with three branches of magistracy, but found inadvertently to be in the hands of one only, will soon be discovered to be sources of wealth and dominion to those who hold them; distinguished too by this tempting circumstance, that they are the instrument, as well as the object of acquisition. With money, we will get men, said Caesar, and with men we will get money. Nor should our assembly be deluded by the integrity of their own purposes, and conclude that these unlimited powers will never be abused, because themselves are not disposed to abuse them. They should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when a corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price. Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic, and will be alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and claws after he shall have entered.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIII, 1781, page 162 ff

While the people have property, arms in their hands, and only a spark of noble spirit, the most corrupt Congress must be mad to form any project of tyranny.

Rev. Nicholas Collin, Fayetteville Gazette (N.C.), 12 October 1789

374 page A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Taylor, 4 June 1798

Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence of natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws and in the possibility this gives us of systematically making them work toward definite ends… Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature which is founded on the knowledge of natural necessity.

Friedrich Engels, Anti­Dühring

From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict which each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.

Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1978

(T)he use of ‘liberty’ to describe the physical ‘ability to do what I want,’ the power to satisfy our wishes, or the extent of the choice of alternatives open to us... has been deliberately fostered as part of the socialist argument... Once this identification of freedom with power is admitted, there is no limit to the sophisms by which the attractions of the word ‘liberty’ can be used to support measures which destroy individual liberty, no end to the tricks by which people can be exhorted in the name of liberty to give up their liberty. It has been with the help of this equivocation that the notion of collective power over circumstances has been substituted for that of individual liberty and that in totalitarian states liberty has been suppressed in the name of liberty.

Friedrich August von Hayek, Freedom and Coercion, in David Miller (ed), Liberty (1991) pages 80, 85­86

American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force — without a secret police force. Now, more than ever, each of us is forced to make a conscious choice whether to support the system of minority comfort and privilege with all its security apparatus and repression, or whether to struggle for real equality of opportunity and fair distribution of benefits for all of society, in the domestic as well as the international order. It’s harder now not to realize that there are two sides, harder not to understand each, and harder not to recognize that like it or not we contribute day in 375 page and day out either to the one side or to the other.

Philip Agee, CIA Diary, 1975, page 597

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

H. L. Mencken

Con people into paying enough in taxes, and into tolerating the inflationary erosion of what is left to them by the use of paper money, and you will compel both parents in most families into the workforce, and the children, therefore, into your schools. Now, not only are the adults distracted, overworked, and on the edge of dependency, but you have control of the next generation, which you can indoctrinate to suit your purposes. Your mastery will soon be all but unbreakable.

Peter Hendrickson, 2007

I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.

Thomas Jefferson

If the public debt should once more be swelled to a formidable size, we shall be committed to the English career of debt, corruption, and rottenness, closing with revolution.

Thomas Jefferson

When peaceful revolution becomes impossible, violent revolution becomes inevitable.

Oliver Tambo, quoted by J.F. and R.F. Kennedy

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. 376 page Abraham Lincoln, 1861

I think state power and authority would love violence. Violence they are geared up to crush, but non­violence they have a much harder time dealing with.

Noam Chomsky, in an interview broadcast on the BBC

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

Franz Kafka (1833­1924)

The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints.

Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, Simon & Schuster, 1968, page 72

Government is a disease that masquerades as its own cure.

Robert Lefevre

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industries.

Thomas Jefferson

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action, according to our will, within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.

Thomas Jefferson

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

John F. Kennedy, in a speech honoring Nobel Prize winners at the White House, 29 April 1962

We are now forming a republican form of government. Real liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy (or some other form of dictatorship).

Alexander Hamilton

377 page In all cases where a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger.

James Madison

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

Carl Gustav Jung, German Psychologist

Unbridled passions produce the same effects, whether in a king, nobility, or a mob. The experience of all mankind has proved the prevalence of a disposition to use power wantonly. It is therefore as necessary to defend an individual against the majority (in a democracy) as against the king in a monarchy.

John Adams

If in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the Constitutional power be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way in which the Constitution designates. But let there by no change by usurpation, for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. …

Let me now warn you in the most solemn manner. Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. The Nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.

George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

George Washington, speech of 7 January 1790, reported in the Boston Independent Chronicle, 14 January 1790

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.” That is a lie!

Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography

378 page A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

Barry Goldwater, Republican U.S. Senator from Arizona

I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority, the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by the majorities (and the smallest minority is the individual).

Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

Our great national treasure is our confidence that we do not have a lawless government in this country, because of the constraints implied both by the Constitution and by the transcendent principles of justice and human rights on which that Constitution is based. This confidence is the source of our strength and unit — and if anything destroys that confidence, it inflicts a wound on this nation from which it cannot hope to recover.

Alan Keyes, U.S. Presidential Candidate, 2000

The short memories of American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.

Will Rogers

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

Thomas Jefferson (1743­1826)

The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshhold of the ruined tenament.

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

William Pitt, to the British House of Commons, 18 November 1783

You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man’s age­old dream — the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have 379 page embarked on this downward path.

Ronald Reagan, stumping for Barry Goldwater in 1964

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

Edmund Burke (1729–1797)

We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world — no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men. …

A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes.

Woodrow Wilson (Democrat), 28th President of the United States of America, signer the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and the Income Tax Act of 1914.

Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

Woodrow Wilson, speech in New York, 9 September 1912

The government I live under has been my enemy all of my active life. When it has not been engaged in silencing me, it has been engaged in robbing me. So far as I can recall I have never had any contact with it that was not an outrage on my dignity and an attack upon my security.

H.L. Mencken

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they never use.

Sören Kierkegaard

A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in the water.

Fisher Ames (1758­1808)

380 page Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty.

John F. Kennedy

In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man and brave, hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

Mark Twain

If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may be even a worse fate. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

Winston Churchill, on the eve of Britain’s entry into World War II

[T]here is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered; and I believe, further, that this [the Constitution] is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.

Benjamin Franklin

Teach your children to be brave. This century of ours has been marked most conspicuously by cowardice of the people everywhere. It was by our cowardice that we were betrayed into the hands of corrupt men who promised to make life “safe” for us and devoid of hazard, and robbed the adventurousness by which the spirits of men are strengthened. It was by our poltroonery that we lost our liberties. It was by our fears that we almost died. A brave people never become slaves.

Taylor Caldwell, The Devil’s Advocate, 1952, pages 332 ff

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness Positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Thomas Paine, opening paragraph of Common Sense, 1776

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government. 381 page Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

...the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism is loyalty to the nation all the time, loyalty to the government when it deserves it.

Mark Twain (1835­1910), in North American Review, 1905

‘Patriotism’ is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re­ousting of a long line of successive ‘owners’ who each in turn, as ‘patriots,’ with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of ‘robbers’ who came to steal it and did — and became swelling­heart patriots in their turn.

Mark Twain, Notebook

Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth having.

Juvenal

In the general course of human nature, a power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper No. 79

A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.

Thomas Jefferson

[The] rights [of the people] to the exercise and fruits of their own industry can never be protected against the selfishness of rulers not subject to their control at short periods.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1816.

The government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.

George Bernard Shaw

The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. Property must be sacred or liberty cannot exist 382 page John Adams

The income tax in effect makes us vassals to the government — the politicians decide how much income we can keep. No mere “reform” of this slave tax, such as flattening the rate, can correct its fundamental denial of control over our own money. Only the abolition of the income tax itself will restore the basic American principle that our income is both our own money and our own private business — not the government’s.

Alan Keyes, U.S. Presidential Candidate, 2000

If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people in England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty­four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers.

Thomas Jefferson

If Patrick Henry thought taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation.

Old Farmer's Almanac

No government ought to exist for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people or to allow such a principle in its policy.

Edmund Burke

The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. But how is … legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay … If such a law is not abolished immediately it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.

When plunder has become a way of life for a group of people living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it.

Frederic Bastiat, The Law, 1848 383 page ...Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling on the helpless had taught [the country], by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people’s liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers­on; the suffrage had become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket.

Mark Twain, Outlines of History (suppressed), in Mark Twain’s Fables of Man, UC Press, 1972

It is also in the interests of a tyrant to keep his people poor, so that they may not be able to afford the cost of protecting themselves by arms and be so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for rebellion.

Aristotle, Politics (J. Sinclair translation, 1962, page 226)

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

Voltaire (apocryphal)

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his own enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Thomas Paine

The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves. ...whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against Force and Violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society, and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty.

John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government

An unbroken horse erects his mane, paws the ground and starts back impetuously at the sight of the bridle; while one which is properly trained suffers patiently even whip and spur: so savage man will not bend his neck to the yoke to which civilised man submits without a murmur, but prefers the most turbulent state of liberty to the most peaceful slavery. We cannot therefore, from 384 page the servility of nations already enslaved, judge of the natural disposition of mankind for or against slavery; we should go by the prodigious efforts of every free people to save itself from oppression. I know that the former are for ever holding forth in praise of the tranquillity they enjoy in their chains, and that they call a state of wretched servitude a state of peace: miserrimam servitutem pacem appellant. But when I observe the latter sacrificing pleasure, peace, wealth, power and life itself to the preservation of that one treasure, which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see free­born animals dash their brains out against the bars of their cage, from an innate impatience of captivity; when I behold numbers of naked savages, that despise European pleasures, braving hunger, fire, the sword and death, to preserve nothing but their independence, I feel that it is not for slaves to argue about liberty.

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712­1778), On The Origin And Foundation Of The Inequality Of Mankind, 1758

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose — and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, to­day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, “I see no probability of the British invading us” but he will say to you, “Be silent; I see it, if you don't.”

Abraham Lincoln (apocryphal)

The greatest threat to our world and its peace comes from those who want war, who prepare for it, and who, by holding out vague promises of future peace or by instilling fear of foreign aggression, try to make us accomplices to their plans.

Hermann Hesse (1877­1962)

I do not believe that man will be “better” in the future; I do not believe that man is ever better or worse; he is always the same. But at certain times the demonic erupts into mankind not only secretly, among criminals and psychopaths, but openly and on a large scale; it takes on a political life and sweeps whole nations off their feet.

Hermann Hesse (1877­1962)

Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

James Madison

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. 385 page George Bernard Shaw, Fabian Socialist (1856–1950)

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine­tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice, and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage, and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.

H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, 12 February 1923

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.

John Philpot Curran (1750–1817), speech in Dublin, 10 July 1790

I think the terror most people are concerned with is the I.R.S.

Malcolm Forbes, when asked if he was afraid of terrorism

They who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Richard Jackson, An Historical review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania, published by Benjamin Franklin, 1759

On the day when you again allow abominable men to confiscate your freedom, your money, your lives, your private property, your manhood and your sacred honor, in the name of ‘security’ or ‘national emergency’ you will die, and never again shall you be free. If plotters again destroy your Republic, they will do it by your greedy and ignorant assent, by your disregard of your neighbors’ rights, by your apathy and your stupidity. We were brought to the brink of universal death and darkness because we had become that most contemptible of people — an angerless one. Keep alive and vivid all your righteous anger against traitors, against those who would abrogate your Constitution, against those who would lead you to wars with false slogans and cunning appeals to your patriotism.

Taylor Caldwell, The Devil’s Advocate, 1952, pages 332­338

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.

386 page Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

Patrick Henry

The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American’s freedom and before I leave office, I must inform the citizen of this plight.

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in a speech made to Columbia University on Nov. 12, 1963, ten days before his assassination. (apocryphal)

The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control.

John F. Kennedy, to the American Newspaper Publishers Association, 27 April 1961

The World is ruled by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.

Benjamin Disraili

The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.

Patrick Henry

No free man shall ever be debared the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Thomas Jefferson, Proposed Virginia Constitution, June 1776 (1 Thomas Jefferson Papers, page 334, C.J. Boyd, Editor)

Knowledge is the fountain both of love and the principles of human liberty.

387 page Daniel Webster (1782­1852)

If we do not maintain Justice, Justice will not maintain us.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626).

The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.

André Breton (1896–1966)

We are as great as our belief in human liberty — no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.

Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

Edmund Burke (1729–1797)

Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, when the rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.

Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.

John Locke (1632–1704)

When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained that wise men look for.

John Milton (1608–1674)

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion. 388 page Thomas Jefferson

The power to tax involves the power to destroy.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall, 1819

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. ...Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ...Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Frederick Douglass, 1849

Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that, in the administration of the criminal law, the end justifies the means — to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal — would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this Court should resolutely set its face.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States, 1928

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil­minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856­1941), Olmstead, 1928

A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: and a People who mean to be their own Governours, must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives.

James Madison, letter to W.T. Barry, 4 August 1822

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow 389 page weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861

It is fundamental that the great powers of Congress to conduct war and to regulate the Nation’s foreign relations are subject to the constitutional requirements of due process. The imperative necessity for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that there is the greatest temptation to dispense with fundamental constitutional guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit governmental action.

Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, Kennedy v. Mendoza­Martinez, 1963

Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, 1788

To ignore the pivotal role played by particular individuals who are in positions of power is to do violence to historical accuracy. A recognition that the course of economic events can be influenced by individuals who have the imagination and the power to take advantage of prevailing conditions does not constitute acceptance of a ‘conspiracy’ theory of history.

John Blair, former chief economist for the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Anti­Trust and Monopoly, cited by A.V. Krebs

In paranoid thinking a person believes he has detected a conspiracy — that is, a hidden (and malevolent) pattern in the behavior of friends, associates or governments — where in fact no such pattern exists. If there is such a conspiracy, the subject may be profoundly anxious, but his thinking is not necessarily paranoid. A famous case involves James Forrestal, the first U.S. Secretary of Defense. At the end of World War II, Forrestal was convinced that Israeli secret agents were following him everywhere. His physicians, equally convinced of his idee fixe, diagnosed him as paranoid and confined him to an upper storey of Walter Reed Army Hospital, from which he plunged to his death, partly because of inadequate supervision by hospital personnel, overly deferential to one of his exalted rank. Later it was discovered that Forrestal was indeed being followed by Israeli agents who were worried that he might reach a secret understanding with representatives of Arab nations. Forrestal had other problems, but having his valid perception 390 page labeled paranoid did not help his condition.

In times of rapid social change there are bound to be conspiracies, both by those in favor of change and by those defending the status quo, the latter more than the former in recent American political history. Detecting conspiracies when there are no conspiracies is a symptom of paranoia; detecting them when they exist is a sign of mental health. An acquaintance of mine says, “In America today, if you're not a little paranoid you’re out of your mind.” The remark however, has global applicability.

Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden, page 190

Conspiracy in the Commons

Conspiracy has always been something you allege of your opposition, not something you yourself take part in. Since 911, it has been made out to be an even more dirty word by the mass media, it has been made to conjure images of terrorism and armed men in a cave plotting to overthrow governments. Yet the use of conspiracy by nation states has been extensively documented by any number of historians, and shown to have led to wars, insurrections and land and resource acquisitions across national boundaries for millennia (see, for example, conspiracies to claim Middle East oil reserves (Engdahl, 2004)). Large corporations during the 21st century now command financial, legal, communications, information, manpower and other physical resources exceeding that of all but the largest states; it is thus inconceivable that they should not formally conspire to further their goal of greater profits. Conspiracy in the tobacco industry is now well documented, with a large public research base on the complicity of the larger cigarette companies misleading the public and responsible for many deaths and wide­ranging health problems. It is unlikely that the tobacco industry breeds a certain amoral kind of corporate person and that such behavior is not abnormal in the corporate world.

Bob Lloyd, The Commons Revisited: The Tragedy Continues, 2007 http://www.warsocialism.com/The_Commons_revisited_The_tragedy_continues.pdf

A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public.

It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.

Mark Twain

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes don’t decide an election, the people who count the votes do. or

It is enough that the people know there was an election. Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything. 391 page Joseph Stalin

[§ 1­1 Definitions In 1967 the Supreme Court of Florida adopted Rule 1.040 of the Rules of Civil Procedure. It established one form of action in civil litigation and designated it as “civil action.” … It means a judicial proceeding for the determination of a controversy. A cause of action is the right to institute a judicial proceeding. One Florida decision said there is a remedy for every wrong, but this is not historically or legally correct. At common law there was no wrong if no remedy existed. This is because the common law grew from the original writ system.

Trawick’s FLORIDA PRACTICE AND PROCEDURE]

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

Thomas Paine, The Crisis, 23 December 1776

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest — his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow­citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances — what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.

392 page After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a net­work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described, might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom; and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people. Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: as they cannot destroy either one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all­powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite; they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading­strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain. By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1832), book 2, translated by Henry Reeve

As long as men can speak in liberty, you can bet they won’t act.

Charles Jared Ingersoll, to Alexis De Toqueville, circa 1830

When studying the fundamental characteristics of a crowd we stated that it is guided almost exclusively by unconscious motives. Its acts are far more under the influence of the spinal cord than of the brain. In this respect a crowd is closely akin to quite primitive beings. The acts performed may be perfect so far as their execution is concerned, but as they are not directed by the brain, the individual conducts himself according as the exciting causes to which he is submitted may happen to decide. A crowd is at the mercy of all external exciting causes, and reflects their incessant variations. It is the slave to the impulses which it receives. The isolated individual may be submitted to the same exciting causes as the man in a crowd, but as his brain shows him the in advisability of yielding to them, he refrains from yielding. This truth may be physiologically expressed by saying that the isolated individual possesses the capacity of dominating his reflex actions, while a crowd is devoid of this capacity. 393 page Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd, Chapter Two, pages 31­32

The idea of a supine Congress, the best that corporate money can buy,… puts me in mind of my favorite Emperor, Tiberius, who was a very brilliant man, and a patriot in his way. When he became Emperor, the Senate passed a bill, assuring him that any legislation that he sent them would be automatically accepted, and become law. He sent back word and he said, “You’re crazy. Suppose the Emperor is mad, suppose he’s ill, suppose there’s a palace coup and somebody else is sending things in his name? How can you be so certain that what you’re passing is really his, or should be passed?” They sent it back: “Anything your Imperial Majesty sends us is law for us.” And Tiberius said, “How eager they are to be slaves.”

Gore Vidal, interviewed by Doug Henwood, 6 May 2002

The sacred rights of property are to be guarded at every point. I call them sacred, because, if they are unprotected, all other rights become worthless or visionary. What is personal liberty, if it does not draw after it the right to enjoy the fruits of our own industry? What is political liberty, if it imparts only perpetual poverty to us and all our posterity? What is the privilege of a vote, if the majority of the hour may sweep away the earnings of our whole lives, to gratify the rapacity of the indolent, the cunning, or the profligate, who are borne into power upon the tide of a temporary popularity?

Judge Joseph Story, 1852

[Government] has always been and should always continue to be, of property, by property, and for property.

Oliver Cromwell

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

Theodore Roosevelt

Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about...and kept us so busy with continuous changes and crises and so fascinated...by the machinations of the national enemies, without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little all around us...Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, regretted, that...unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these little measures...must someday lead to, one no more saw it developing than a farmer in his field sees corn growing... Each act...is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such shock 394 page comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to go out of your way to make trouble… And it is not just fear...that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty... And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it... But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty... The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed... You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father...could never have imagined.

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free; The Germans, 1938­45, 1955

“What no one seemed to notice,” said a colleague of mine, a philologist, “was the ever­widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people.” Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

… To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

395 page Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free; The Germans, 1938­45, 1955

There has never been a just one, never an honorable one — on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful — as usual — will shout for the war. The pulpit will — warily and cautiously — object... at first. The great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, “It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.”

Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded, but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti­war audiences will thin out and lose popularity.

Before long, you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men...

Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience­soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self­ deception.

Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, 1910

The last two years of the decade while Europe enjoyed a rich fat afternoon, were the quietest. Nineteen­ten was peaceful and prosperous; with the second round of Moroccan crises and Balkan wars still to come. A new book, The Great Illusion by Norman Angell, had just been published, which proved that war was impossible. By impressive examples and incontrovertible argument Angell showed that in the present financial and economic interdependence of nations, the victor would suffer equally with the vanquished; therefore war had become unprofitable; therefore no nation would be so foolish as to start one. Already translated into eleven languages, The Great Illusion had become a cult. At the universities, in Manchester, Glasgow, and other industrial cities, more than forty study groups of true believers had formed, devoted to propagating its dogma. Angell's most earnest disciple was a man of great influence on military policy, the King's friend and adviser, Viscount Esher, chairman of the War Committee assigned to remaking the British Army after the shock of its performance in the Boor War. Lord Esher delivered lectures on the lesson of The Great Illusion at Cambridge and the Sorbonne wherein he showed how “new economic factors clearly prove the insanity of aggressive wars.” A twentieth century war would be on such a scale, he said, that its inevitable consequences of “commercial disaster, financial ruin and individual suffering” would be “so pregnant with restraining influences” as to make war unthinkable. He told an audience of officers at the United Service Club, with the Chief of General Staff, Sir John French, in the chair, that because of the interlacing of nations War “becomes every 396 page day more difficult and improbable.”

Germany, Lord Esher felt sure, “is as receptive as Great Britain to the doctrine of Norman Angell.” How receptive were the Kaiser and the Crown Prince to whom he gave, or caused to be given, copies of The Great Illusion is not reported. There is no evidence that he gave one to General Von Bernhardi, who was engaged in 1910 in writing a book called Germany and the Next War, published in the following year, which was to be as influential as Angell’s but from the opposite point of view. Three of its chapter titles, “The Right to Make War,” “The Duty to Make War,” and “World Power or Downfall” sum up its thesis.

Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August, pages 24­45

The government of the Western nations, whether monarchical or republican, had passed into the invisible hands of a plutocracy, international in power and grasp. It was, I venture to suggest, this semi­occult power which... pushed the mass of the American people into the cauldron of World War I.

Major General J.F.C. Fuller, British military historian, 1941

The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.

Patrick Henry

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

H.L. Mencken

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated: but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

C.S. Lewis

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

James Madison, Federalist Papers, 47 397 page All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the Second... Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy... It is admitted that you cannot have a good executive upon a democratic plan.

Alexander Hamilton, quoted in The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (Max Farrand, editor, Yale, 1966, page 288)

The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.

James Madison, Federalist Papers, 57 (1787)

Be not intimidated, therefore, by any terrors, from publishing with the utmost freedom whatever can be warranted by the laws of your country; nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberty by pretenses of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.

John Adams

The biggest government conspiracy of all is the claim that there are no government conspiracies.

Michael Rivero, What Really Happened, June 2003

When party rules, the people do not rule, but merely such a portion of the people as can manage to get control of party.

James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat (Penguin Books, 1969, page 227)

In common with the possessors of wealth and power of every age, [the Founders] considered the maintenance of their privileges to be an integral part of any political organization established in the name of liberty.

The Revolutionary leaders, therefore, were presented with two basic problems at the outset of the Revolution ­­ the protection of rights against the arbitrary use of power, and the maintenance of their own superior position in the new state governments. The obvious solution was to establish 398 page constitutions which would include as many of the safeguards as possible utilized in colonial government. A revival of any semblance of the prerogative power was of course out of the question, but property qualifications for voting and officeholding and the principle of bicameralism had not been discredited by identification with British tyranny. These defenses against mobs and despots had been sanctioned by colonial experience and had become an integral part of the provincial governments; prudence dictated that they be included in the new state governments.

A political science devoted in part to frustrating majority will might at first glance seem inconsistent with the political philosophy of the Revolutionary leaders. From a modern point of view, property qualifications seem incompatible with the doctrine of government by consent; the popular sovereignty emblazoned upon the Declaration of Independence appears in some measure to be qualified by the checks and balances of the first state constitutions. The men of ‘76 did not feel any conflict between their guiding principles and their political practice, however, because their principles contained many conservative assumptions which are often overlooked today. The rights they proclaimed were what they believed to be the traditional rights of Englishmen, not new and unprecedented privileges. The vocabulary of natural rights used in the Declaration of Independence did not indicate a sudden change to a more radical philosophy but was rather, as Carl Becker has indicated, an attempt to rephrase English rights in such a way that they would appeal to contemporary European intellectuals. The assertion of equality was not intended as a protest against the social distinctions, political privilege, and unequal distribution of wealth in the colonies but was rather a repudiation of hereditary status and the privilege derived from it in Britain and on the Continent.

Elisha P. Douglas, Rebels and Democrats, 1955, pages 6 & 7

The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. ... In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle­aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty­four, 1949

The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of society. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. But in matters of vital importance — meaning, in effect, war and police espionage — the empirical approach is still 399 page encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter.

George Orwell

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.

Edward Dowling

The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.

James Madison, Federalist Paper Number 57 (1787)

The true distinction [between ancient regimes and the proposed experiment in government] lies in the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity.

James Madison

Popular revolt against a ruthless, experienced modern dictatorship, which enjoys a monopoly over weapons and communications, ...is simply not a possibility in the modern age.

George F. Kennan

400 page In the arrangements of nature, freedom is relegated to an operational position that is secondary in importance to survival. In a competitive world of limited resources, total freedom of individual action is intolerable.

Garrett Hardin, The Ostrich Factor, page 140

Justice without force is impotent, force without justice is tyranny. Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.

Blaise Pascal

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

George Orwell

Let him say what the government is, if it be not a tyranny, which the men of our choice have conferred on our President, and the President of our choice has assented to, and accepted over the friendly strangers to whom the mild spirit of our country and its laws have pledged hospitality and protection: that the men of our choice have more respected the bare suspicions of the President, than the solid right of innocence, the claims of justification, the sacred force of truth, and the forms and substance of law and justice. In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson, 8th Kentucky Resolution (Oct. 1798), protesting the Alien and Sedition Acts, and particularly the efforts to criminalize journalists undertaken by Adams pursuant to those acts.

It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, in America Communicators Association vs Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 442 (1950)

People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self­sufficient and self­confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief of the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command, and shoulder all responsibility.

Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law­driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, 401 page commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Pierre Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century

Taxes are not raised to carry on wars; wars are raised to carry on taxes.

Thomas Paine (apocryphal)

If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist.

Joseph Sobran, Editor of the National Review, 1995

The fastest way to bring down a dictatorship is to force it to act like one where everybody can see it.

Michael Rivero, What Really Happened (.com)

Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly and wickedness of the government may engage itself? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden, which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest right of personal liberty? Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life, itself, whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it? ... A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men.

Daniel Webster (1782­­1852), US Senator, speech in the House of Representatives, 14 January 1814

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind — not the fiend or the 402 page sadist.

As long as everybody wants to have more, there must be formations of classes, there must be class war, and in global terms, there must be international war. Greed and peace preclude each other.

For the first time in history the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change of the human heart.

Erich Fromm

America is today the leader of a world­wide anti­revolutionary movement in the defense of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number.

Arnold Toynbee, 1961

Americans think freedom means no restraint. So I’m free to start a big company and rule ten thousand wage laborers, and if they don’t like it they’re free to go on strike, and I’m free to hire thugs to crack their heads, and they’re free to quit, and I’m free to buy politicians to cut off support for the unemployed, so now they’re free to either starve and die, or accept the job on my terms and use their freedom of speech to impotently complain.

Ran Prieur, at http://ranprieur.com/essays/beyondciv.html

I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.

Albert Einstein, 1947

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good­bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more — we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward. 403 page Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

The power of money in elections, the increased concentration and conservative bias of the media, the resurgent strength and aggressiveness of capital and finance in a globalizing economy, and the weakening of labor, provide the structural background... for the abandonment of the rudiments of social democracy [in America].

Edward S. Herman, Z Magazine, November 1999, page 44

The propaganda system allows the U.S. leadership to commit crimes without limit and with no suggestion of misbehavior or criminality; in fact, major war criminals like Henry Kissinger appear regularly on TV to comment on the crimes of the derivative butchers. The loyal U.S. allies neither contest this vision of criminality nor seriously impede the global rogue’s behavior.

Because of its power and global interests U.S. leaders have committed crimes as a matter of course and structural necessity. A strict application of international law would ... have given every U.S. president of the past 50 years [the] Nuremberg treatment. [cf. General Curtis E. LeMay…]

Edward S. Herman, Z Magazine, December 1999, page 38

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them — declares so many things to be a crime it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws.

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.

President John F. Kennedy, The President and the Press, at the Waldorf­Astoria Hotel on 27 April 1961, before the American Newspaper Publishers Association.

404 page This is the basic credo of liberation: “I no longer care if the power centers of our society — the distant, fortified castles of our financial feudal system—are changed by my actions, for I am liberated by the act of resistance. I am no longer complicit in perpetuating fraudulent feudalism and the pathology of concentrated power. I no longer covet signifiers of membership in the Upper Caste that serves the plutocracy. I am liberated from self­destructive consumerist­State financialization and the delusion that debt servitude and obedience to sociopathological Elites serve my self­interests.”

As an example, nothing is more apolitical than food, according to the Status Quo. Yet this is entirely backward; nothing is more political than food, for it either sustains us and our freedom or it indentures us to disease and dependence on the Savior State’s immensely profitable sickcare system, i.e. the abomination known as “healthcare” that profits from chronic disease, not health. From the Status Quo perspective, the citizen who bicycles to work is either a “health nut” or some outlier who perversely refuses the obvious convenience and comfort of the auto. From the point of view of one who has experienced an inner revolution of understanding, then the simple machinery of the bicycle has freed the citizen from dependence on the oil complex and its enforcer, the State, and also from the sickcare system and its enforcer, the State.

In the consumerist mindset, riding a bicycle to work is an apolitical “personal choice” that is meaningless on the larger stage. To the citizen with a revolutionary understanding, every bicycle ride is an overtly political act of resistance against the concentrations of capital that maintain their power over the State via dependence on oil, auto­centricity, and sickcare.

To the unaware citizen burdened with multiple chronic diseases brought on by a corporate­ supplied diet of packaged food and fast food and a sedentary life based on the worship of “convenience,” then buying frozen pizza and fast­food are apolitical, “personal choice” actions. To the citizen with a revolutionary understanding, then these are the actions of the indentured, and the refusal to consume packaged “food” that no caring consumer would feed their dog lest it sicken and die is a deeply and overtly political act of resistance.

There are no apolitical “personal choice” acts; there are only profoundly political acts of resistance or complicity.

Charles Hugh Smith, Resistance, Revolution, Liberation; A Model for Positive Change, April 2012, pages 205­6

THE GOLDEN RULE

[Closely connecting to the above section on liberty…

Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.

405 page William Allen White]

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. New International Version (NIV)

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for that is the law and the prophets. King James Version

Christianity. Bible, Matthew 7:12

Do to others as you would have them do to you. New International Version (NIV)

And as ye would that men should to you, do ye also to them likewise. King James Version

Christianity. Bible, Luke 6:31

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” Jesus said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”

Christianity. Bible, Matthew 22:36­40

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Judaism & Christianity. Bible, Leviticus 19:18

A certain heathen came to Shammai and said to him, “Make me a proselyte, on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” Thereupon he repulsed him with the rod which was in his hand. When he went to Hillel, he said to him, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah; all the rest of it is commentary; go and learn.”

Judaism. Talmud, Shabbat 31a

Not one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.

Islam. Forty Hadith of an­Nawawi, 13

A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated.

Jainism. Sutrakritanga 1.11.33

Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, and you will find that this is 406 page the shortest way to benevolence.

Confucianism. Mencius VII.A.4

One should not behave towards others in a way which is disagreeable to oneself. This is the essence of morality. All other activities are due to selfish desire.

Hinduism. Mahabharata, Anusasana Parva 113.8

Tsekung asked, “Is there one word that can serve as a principle of conduct for life?" Confucius replied, “It is the word shu — reciprocity: Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you.

Confucianism. Analects 15.23

Comparing oneself to others in such terms as “Just as I am so are they, just as they are so am I,” he should neither kill nor cause others to kill.

Buddhism. Sutta Nipata 705

One going to take a pointed stick to pinch a baby bird should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts.

African Traditional Religion. Yoruba Proverb (Nigeria)

One who you think should be hit is none else but you. One who you think should be governed is none else but you. One who you think should be tortured is none else but you. One who you think should be enslaved is none else but you. One who you think should be killed is none else but you. A sage is ingenuous and leads his life after comprehending the parity of the killed and the killer. Therefore, neither does he cause violence to others nor does he make others do so.

Jainism. Acarangasutra 5.101­2

The Ariyan disciple thus reflects, “Here am I, fond of my life, not wanting to die, fond of pleasure and averse from pain. Suppose someone should rob me of my life... it would not be a thing pleasing and delightful to me. If I, in my turn, should rob of his life one fond of his life, not wanting to die, one fond of pleasure and averse from pain, it would not be a thing pleasing or delightful to him. For a state that is not pleasant or delightful to me must also be to him also; and a state that is not pleasing or delightful to me, how could I inflict that upon another?”

As a result of such reflection he himself abstains from taking the life of creatures and he encourages others so to abstain, and speaks in praise of so abstaining.

407 page Buddhism. Samyutta Nikaya v.353

And if thine eyes be turned towards justice, choose thou for thy neighbour that which thou choosest for thyself.

Baha’i. Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, 30

Whatever is disagreeable to yourself do not do unto others.

Zoroastrianism. Shayast­na­Shayast 13:29

Do not do unto others what angers you if done to you by others.

Isocrates (436­338 B.C.)

An it harm none, do what thou wilt.

Wiccan Rede (also a fundamental tenet of the English Common Law)

Refraining from doing what we blame in others.

Thales, in Diogenes’ Laertius, Volume I, page 39

A creation is ethical in direct proportion to its value to those whom it most affects.

Harry Palmer, Avatar

All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, on justice, 4th Century B.C.

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

George Bernard Shaw

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.

Noam Chomsky

408 page IT’S LIKE…

And finally, New Rule: If you don’t think your daughter getting cancer is worse than your daughter having sex, you’re doing it wrong. Last year, modern medicine came up with a way to greatly reduce cervical cancer in young women. It’s a vaccine that can virtually wipe out the sexually­transmitted disease called HPV, which leads to the cancer.

But not everyone is pleased with this vaccine. There are Christian values groups and churches nationwide who are fighting it. Briget Maher — no relation — and none planned — formerly of the Family Research Council — says giving girls the vaccine is bad because “the girls may see it as a license to engage in pre­marital sex.”

Hey, Mrs. Maher, let me tell you something. Your daughter is already on the Internet exchanging bondage fantasies with a German boy she met on MySpace. Forget HPV. She’s on to S&M. And Mrs. Maher, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you there’s only one foolproof method to make a woman abstinent: marry her.

So, let’s review here. HPV is a new STD that the CDC wants teens vaccinated for PDQ. And that’s not sitting well with the Harper Valley PTA. They think if a teenage girl feels a little prick, she’s going to want to feel a whole lot more.

But, HPV shots don’t cause promiscuity. Tequila shots do. And MTV. And having moron parents you want to escape from. Hey, when you’re 15 years old, breathing encourages sexual activity.

But, let’s be frank. These values groups aren’t just against the HPV shot. They’re against family planning and condoms and morning­after pills. They want to make sure sex is as dangerous as possible, so that kids know if they sleep around and get an STD, that’s God teaching them a lesson. And that lesson is: “You should never have tried out for ‘American Idol’ in the first place!”

Now, I know our kids are dumb. I just read it in a New Rule. But, will they really have sex with anything that moves just because they know there’s a vaccine? People don’t get the vaccine for typhoid and say, “Great, now I can drink the sewer water in Bombay!” It’s like being against a cure for blindness because it’ll encourage masturbation!

It’s like being for the salmonella poisoning in peanut butter because it will discourage weirdos from spreading it on their ass and calling the dog!

If this is the nonsense you’re teaching your kids, they’re already screwed.

Bill Maher, Real Time, 3 March 2007

In fact, telling primates (human or otherwise) that their reasoning architectures evolved in large

409 page part to solve problems of dominance is a little like telling fish that their gills evolved in large part to solve the problem of oxygen intake from water.

Denise Dellarosa Cummins

The social intelligence hypothesis posits that the large brains distinctive cognitive abilities of primates (in particular, anthropoid primates) evolved via a spiraling arms race in which social competitors developed increasing ‘Machiavellian’ strategies.

Machiavellian Intelligence II, Andrew Whiten & Richard W. Byrne, Eds., 199, page 240

Whenever a state or individual cited “insufficient funds” as an excuse for neglecting this important thing or that, it was indicative of the extent to which reality had been distorted by the abstract lens of wealth. During periods of so­called economic depression, for example, societies suffered for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation almost invariably disclosed that there were plenty of goods available. Plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What was missing was not materials but an abstract unit of measurement called “money.” It was akin to a starving woman with a sweet tooth lamenting that she couldn’t bake a cake because she didn’t have any ounces. She had butter, flour, eggs, milk, and sugar; she just didn’t have any ounces, any pinches, any pints. The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.

Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All, 1990, page 408

F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The rich are different from you and me.” Earnest Hemmingway: “Yes, they have more money.” Fitzgerald: “No, the rich are different.”

(An apocryphal conversation)

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores

Thinking mankind will run out of “money” is like thinking we'll run out of inches or feet.

Various, including Jay Hanson (see Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs, above)

Becoming a Scientist because you crave factual certainty and thirst for a meaningful vision of human life is like becoming an Archbishop so you can meet girls.

Anonymous, through David Del Torto

410 page Claiming that guns cause crime has all the probity of claiming that pencils cause mis­spellings.

Banning assault weapons to fight crime is as stupid as banning condoms to prevent rape.

Asking "How are we going to find enough food to feed our growing population?" is like asking "How are we going to find enough fuel to feed this growing fire?"

Building more prisons as an answer to crime is like digging more graves to cure a disease.

Unattributed

Teaching people to live more sustainability is like telling teenage girls to dress uglier.

Jay Hanson, personal communication, July 2011

Deflecting criticism of Israel by screaming “anti­Semitism” makes as much sense as deflecting criticism of the Nazis by screaming “anti­Germanism!”

Michael Rivero

The serotonin theory of depression is comparable to the Masturbatory Theory of Insanity.

Dr. David Healy MD, 2005

The classic definition of chutzpah is when someone murders his parents and asks for leniency because he is an orphan. In the digital world chutzpah is when a computer journalist gets flamed for ill­informed reporting and claims he is the victim of demagoguery.

Let the digital age of accountable journalism take roots. Get off your lofty perch, all you reporters, and prepare to defend yourselves in fair argument. If you can’t take the heat, become a venture capitalist and reject business plans all day.

Guy Kawasaki, Macintosh Evangelist

And finally, New Rule: Traitors don’t get to question my patriotism. What could be less patriotic than constantly screwing things up for America? You know, it’s literally hard to keep up with the sheer volume of scandals in the Bush Administration. Which is why I like to download the latest scandal right onto my iPod. That way, I can catch up on this week’s giant fuck­up on my drive in to work.

You know, not to generalize, but the 29% of people who still support President Bush are the ones who love to pronounce themselves more patriotic than the rest of us. But just saying you’re patriotic is like saying you have a big cock. If you have to say it, chances are it’s not true. 411 page And, indeed, the party that flatters itself that they protect America better is the party that has exhausted the military, left the ports wide open and purposefully outed a CIA agent, Valerie Plame.

That’s not treason anymore? Outing a spy? Did I mention it was one of our spies? And how despicable that Bush’s lackeys attempted to diminish this crime by belittling her service, like she was just some chick who hung around the CIA. “An intern, really. Groupie, if you want to be mean about it.”

No. Big lie. Valerie Plame was the CIA’s operational officer in charge of counter­proliferation. Which means she tracked loose nukes. So, when Bush said, as he once did, that his absolute, number­one priority was preventing terrorists from getting loose nukes, okay, that’s what she worked on. That’s what she devoted her life to, staying undercover for 20 years, maintaining two identities every goddamn day. This is extraordinary service to your country.

Valerie Plame was the kind of real­life secret agent George Bush dreams of being when he’s not too busy pretending to be a cowboy or a fighter pilot.

CIA agents are troops. This was a military assassination of one of our own, done through the press, ordered by Karl Rove. He said, of Valerie Plame, quote, “She fair game.” And then Cheney shot her.

George Bush likes to claim that he doesn’t question his critics’ patriotism, just their judgment. Well, let me be the first of your critics, Mr. President, to question your judgment and your patriotism. Because, let’s not forget why they did it to her. Because Valerie Plame was married to this guy, Joe Wilson, who the Bush people hated because he busted them on one of their bullshit reasons for invading Iraq.

He was sent to the African country of Niger to see if Niger was selling nuclear fuel to Iraq. They weren’t. It was bullshit, and he said so. In fact, his report was called, “Niger, Please!”

Valerie Plame’s husband told the truth about their lie, so they were willing to jeopardize an entire network of spies to ruin her life. Wow, even the mob doesn’t go after your family.

Mark Twain said, “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.” And I say Valerie Plame is a patriot because she spent her life serving her country. Scooter Libby is not, because he spent his life serving Dick Cheney.

Valerie Plame kept her secrets. The Bush Administration leaked like the plumbing at Walter Reed.

Bill Maher, Real Time, 23 March 2007

412 page New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn’t make it a smart country. A few weeks ago I was asked by Wolf Blitzer if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn’t put anything past this stupid country. It was amazing — in the minute or so between my calling America stupid and the end of the Cialis commercial, CNN was flooded with furious emails and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! It’s how they get the blood circulating when the Cialis wears off. Worst of all, Bill O’Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which A) proves my point, and B) is really funny coming from a doody­face like him.

Now, the hate mail all seemed to have a running theme: that I may live in a stupid country, but they lived in the greatest country on earth, and that perhaps I should move to another country, like Somalia. Well, the joke’s on them because I happen to have a summer home in Somalia... and no I can’t show you an original copy of my birth certificate because Woody Harrelson spilled bong water on it.

And before I go about demonstrating how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness dragging down our country, let me just say that ignorance has life and death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, 69% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Four years later, 34% still did. Or take the health care debate we’re presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and “listen to their constituents.” An urge they should resist because their constituents don’t know anything. At a recent town­hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to “keep your government hands off my Medicare,” which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.

I’m the bad guy for saying it’s a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two­thirds of Americans don’t know what’s in Roe v. Wade. Two­thirds don’t know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket.

Not here. Nearly half of Americans don’t know that states have two senators and more than half can’t name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only 30% got their wife’s name right on the first try.

Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they’re not stupid. They’re interplanetary mavericks. A third of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen, and a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence because it contains the words “Bush” and “knowledge.”

People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government 413 page spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes 24% of our federal budget. It’s actually less than 1%. And don’t even ask about cabinet members: seven in ten think Napolitano is a kind of three­flavored ice cream. And last election, a full one­third of voters forgot why they were in the booth, handed out their pants, and asked, “Do you have these in a relaxed­fit?”

And I haven’t even brought up America's religious beliefs. But here's one fun fact you can take away: did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That's right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which one came first.

And these are the idiots we want to weigh in on the minutia of health care policy? Please, this country is like a college chick after two Long Island Iced Teas: we can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget town halls, and replace them with study halls. There's a lot of populist anger directed towards Washington, but you know who concerned citizens should be most angry at? Their fellow citizens. “Inside the beltway” thinking may be wrong, but at least it’s thinking, which is more than you can say for what’s going on outside the beltway.

And if you want to call me an elitist for this, I say thank you. Yes, I want decisions made by an elite group of people who know what they’re talking about. That means Obama budget director Peter Orszag, not Sarah Palin.

Which is the way our founding fathers wanted it. James Madison wrote that “pure democracy” doesn’t work because “there is nothing to check... an obnoxious individual.” Then, in the margins, he doodled a picture of Joe the Plumber.

Until we admit there are things we don’t know, we can’t even start asking the questions to find out. Until we admit that America can make a mistake, we can’t stop the next one. A smart guy named Chesterton once said: “My country, right or wrong is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying... It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’” To which most Americans would respond: “Are you calling my mother a drunk?”

Bill Maher, Real Time, 7 August 2009

The thing about smart people is that they seem like crazy people to dumb people.

Unattributed

“My country, right or wrong:” Which is your choice?

Z.B.F.A.

Call me skeptical. But if you look carefully at the economic data that shows improvement, and 414 page correct for the impact of government outlays, it is difficult to find anything but continued deterioration in private demand and investment. What we do see is a government that has run what is now a trillion dollar deficit year­to­date, representing some 7% of GDP. That sort of tab will undoubtedly buy some amount of Cool­Aid, but it has been something of a disappointment to watch how eagerly investors have guzzled it down. It is not at all clear that short­term, deficit­ financed improvement necessarily implies sustained growth in the context of a deleveraging cycle. This is like somebody borrowing money from their Uncle and then celebrating that their income has gone up.

John P. Hussman, Post­Crash Dynamics, 10 August 2009 http://www.hussman.net/wmc/wmc090810.htm

Believing in Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is like observing an automobile moving down the highway and noticing that there are gases coming out of the tailpipe, taking measure­ ments of their volume, pressure, and temperature, and then building a model that purports to demonstrate this is what is moving the vehicle down the highway.

Unattributed

POLITY LISTS

The Truths of Tyranny 1. Any law the electorate sees as being open to being perverted from its original intent will be perverted in a manner that is worse than the manner of perversion foreseen at the time. 2. Any law that is so difficult to pass it requires the citizens be assured it will not be a stepping stone to worse laws will in fact be a stepping stone to worse laws. 3. Any law that requires the citizens be assured the law does not mean what the citizens fear, means exactly what the citizens fear. 4. Any law passed in a good cause will be interpreted to apply to causes against the wishes of the people. 5. Any law enacted to help any one group will be applied to harm people not in that group. 6. Everything the government says will never happen will happen. 7. What the government says it could not foresee, the government has planned for. 8. When there is a budget shortfall to cover non­essential government services the citizens will be given the choice between higher taxes or the loss of essential government services. 9. Should the citizens mount a successful effort to stop a piece of legislation the same legislation will be passed under a different name. 10. All deprivations of freedom and choice will be increased rather than reversed. 415 page 11. Any government that has to build safeguards into a law so that it will not be abused is providing guidelines for abusing the law without violating it. 12. Any act or statute of government is subject to alteration or to complete disregard by government (including courts & judges) by its using the ever­present “notwithstanding clause” of any Roman civil­style legal system when it is deemed desirable to maintain the status quo — however unlawful the status quo activity may be. (added by DetaxCanada blogger)

A government is a tyranny • when it sets itself above the will and judgment of the people and refuses to comply with the wishes of the people. • when it lies to the people to get what it wants. • when the traditional rights of the people are treated as obstacles to the objectives of government. • when it creates animosities among the people. • when it blames the people for not stopping it from acting against the wishes of the people. • when it manipulates public opinion such that the people vote against their own personal, social, and economic best interests. (added by Alexander)s

Matt Giwer, circa 1994, expanded 2009

The Ten Truths of Tyranny 1. The larger government grows, the more corrupt it becomes. 2. The easier a law is to pass, the harder it is to rescind. 3. Any law that claims to protect rights that already exist will actually diminish those rights. 4. All new laws passed "for the common good" are actually for the empowerment and enrichment of politicians. 5. Laws enacted to help one group always harm everyone else. 6. All good things the government says happened thanks to regulation of commerce happened for other reasons. 7. Any development in science or industry that the government claims to have planned was going to happen anyway. 8. When politicians call industries or executives greedy, it means the politicians want a bigger piece of the action. 9. Citizens who oppose new legislation are always portrayed as villains. 10. Governments do not grant freedoms; they only take them away.

Ida Brodsky, 2009

I give you the two primary rules of American political life in the 21st century: 1. The amount of political bullshit you are subjected to is directly proportional to the flagrant

416 page insanity and abject corruption which needs to be concealed. 2. The amount of political bullshit you are subjected to is inversely proportional to the importance of the election result. [3. If you don’t know who the mark is in whatever game you’re playing, then you’re the mark. (added by Alexander)]

Dave Cohen, Decline of the Empire, 2012

IS AMERICA CRAZY? TEN REASONS IT MIGHT BE

“Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it.”

That was my colleague Adam Gopnik commenting the other day on America’s attitude toward gun laws. Having read some of the comments on my own post about President Obama’s failure to pursue more restrictions on the sale of firearms, I can only agree with Adam. When Bill Moyers, Keith Olbermann, Mayor Bloomberg, and Rupert Murdoch are all in favor of something — in this case, tougher gun laws — and there’s still no chance of it being enacted, you can rest assured that forces other than reason and partisan politics are involved.

My only quibble with Adam is his use of the singular form: “a belief.” Are firearms the only subject on which Americans are, let us say, a little batty? I’m not so sure. Having lived here for almost thirty years, and having been a U.S. citizen for the past five, I am greatly attached to this country and admire many aspects of it enormously. But the dogged persistence of certain American shibboleths has always struck me as somewhat curious.

What are these shared convictions? I could go on all day, but here, for argument’s sake, are ten. Not all Americans subscribe to them, of course. In some instances, the true believers may amount to a small but vocal minority. Still, the popular sentiment underlying these statements is so strong that politicians defy it at their peril. 1. Gun laws and gun deaths are unconnected. 2. Private enterprise is good; public enterprise is bad. 3. God created America and gave it a special purpose. 4. Our health­care system is the best there is. 5. The Founding Fathers were saintly figures who established liberty and democracy for everyone. 6. America is the greatest country in the world. 7. Tax rates are too high. 8. America is a peace­loving nation: the reason it gets involved in so many wars is that foreigners keep attacking us. 9. Cheap energy, gasoline especially, is our birthright. 10. Everybody else wishes they were American. 417 page Some of these statements may be true. But truth or falsehood isn’t the point here: it is whether or not certain beliefs are amenable to reason. I don’t think these are, which is what puts them in the category of irrationality, flakiness, nonsense, nuttiness, absurdity, craziness….

Call it what you want, the upshot is the same: a failure to look reality in the eye and deal with it on a sensible, empirical basis. Which, if you think about it, pretty much defines Washington politics over the past twenty or thirty years.

John Cassidy, New Yorker Magazine Blog, 24 July 2012

You’ve heard some of these before. For example, #3, #6, #9 and #10 are long­standing American delusions. But I believe we can do better than this. My list may disappoint; remember, we are talking about the Magic Kingdom here. No such list can capture the crazy Spirit of the Age, the American Zeitgeist. 11. Americans, including naturalized citizen John Cassidy, think they live in a democracy. This delusion represents the triumph of form over substance, as do all things American. It is sufficient that we appear to live in a democracy. See my post Democracies Always Fail. 12. Americans think they all have an equal opportunity to get rich, i.e. they think they can become slave­owners, and not have to live as lowly slaves toiling away on this vast plantation called the United States. 13. Americans think the TV ”reality” show Survivor (and its endless spin­offs) are a true reflection of how life works. And for them, it is! Their sacred right to defraud or otherwise fuck other Americans over is viewed as a central cultural virtue. That’s why we have far more lawyers per­capita than any other country. See #12. 14. Americans think their economic fortunes ebb & flow with ups & downs in the rigged stock market. They also think it is acceptable when economists and media types refer to them as “consumers.” 15. Americans think all problems can be solved by “free” markets and dazzling technology (iPhones, Twitter, or “fracking”/horizontal drilling). 16. Some Americans (“progressives”) think you can preserve the environment and have endless economic growth too. 17. Some Americans (“conservatives”) think we'll never run out of anything — crude oil, fish, lemurs, rare earth elements, phosphorus, you name it. Well, OK, they don’t care about the lemurs. They, too, believe in endless growth. 18. Americans think “news” on TV is news. 19. Americans think their opinions about scientific matters they know nothing about count for something, e.g. global warming, and see #11. 20. And last, but certainly not least — Americans are generally too ignorant or stupid to realize just how ignorant or stupid they truly are. And we add this meta­observation about American entitlement —

418 page • Americans think Lunch is, and has always been, Free (for example, read anything Paul Krugman has ever written). So, are Americans crazy? You betcha! Does a bear shit in the woods? Is a fish the last one to figure out that the water it swims in is polluted?… The only way you are going to preserve whatever is left of your sanity is to understand just how crazy America has become.

David Cohen, Decline of the Empire blog, 29 July 2012

Principles used in the Creation of Visa, a Trillion­Dollar Organization • It must be equitably owned by all participants. No member should have intrinsic preferential position. All advantage must result from individual ability and initiative. • Power and function must be distributive to the maximum degree. No function should be performed by any part of the whole that could reasonably be done by any more peripheral part, and no power vested in any part that might reasonably be exercised by any lesser part. • Governance must be distributive. No individual, institution, and no combination of either or both should be able to dominate deliberations or control decisions. • It must be infinitely malleable yet extremely durable. It should be capable of constant, self­ generated, modification of form or function without sacrificing its essential nature or embodied principle. • It must embrace diversity and change. It must attract people and institutions comfortable with such conditions and provide an environment in which they could flourish.

Dee Hock, founding CEO of Visa

How to promote your invention on the web in a few easy steps This text describes the pattern I have observed in several cases of scientific hoaxes. The Web has become enormous and people are literally drowning in information. In this chaotic bombardment, sometimes it is hard to separate scams from real science. So, discerning a suspicious pattern may help you to judge. I am not explicitly naming any specific scam here, mainly to avoid giving scammers a resonance they don’t deserve. However, if you follow subjects such as free energy, cold fusion, miracle cures, instant­riches financial schemes, and the like, you’ll have no problems in linking this text to real life examples. Step 1. Identify a suitable scientific field. You know that science can do a lot of things but, so far, it has not been able to cure cancer, produce free energy, predict earthquakes, make everyone rich, and things like that. It is here that frustration is building up with the public and it is here that you'll find your chance. You must plan your invention as something that will solve one (or even more than one!) of these great problems. Step 2. Prepare your invention in such a way that it will look as close as possible to the way the public perceives science. If it is a device, it will have wires and pipes attached. If it is a cure of something, it will be operated by people wearing a white lab coats. If it is software or a financial scheme, it will be embedded in a slick web site. You don't need to be a scientist or an engineer to 419 page do that, but if you look like one, it will help a lot. Also, buying a title from a diploma factory may turn out to be a wise investment. Step 3. Go public on the web, and do that with a bang. That's a step which will cost you some money because you’ll have to hire PR professionals to promote your site, your press releases, as well as your person. But it is money well spent. The PR firm will advise you on how to promote your invention on the web using SEO (search engine optimization). They will tell you how to create fake “spontaneous” web sites discussing your invention. They will also tell you that you shouldn’t shy away from the most farfetched claims you can think of: cancer cures, rejuvenation, space travel, energy at zero cost; these are just examples. The more outlandish your claims will be, the more likely it is that they will spread. Step 4. Find your testimonials. Journalists are your primary objective. They are always desperately seeking for news to publish and it takes very little to get them to play to your tune: best of all is to invite them to a demonstration, paying their expenses and offering them dinner. Some of them will remain skeptical, but they will speak of your invention and that’s what counts. You may even be able to co­opt university professors and other professionals as testimonials to promote your invention. Many of them are strapped for cash and desperately in search of notoriety. Then, of course, if your invention has something to do with medicine, you’ll line up patients extolling the merits of your miracle cure. Here, you'll find that the “placebo effect” works wonders in your favor and it will be easy to find people who will genuinely believe to have been cured by you and who will declare that in public at no cost for you. Finally, if you hint that your invention has been sponsored by the CIA, the FBI or whatever shady agency you can tell of, that will help and it doesn’t need to have any factual basis: it is a question of secrecy, you know? Step 5. Manage the reaction. Now a good number of serious professionals in the field you have chosen, will feel that it is their duty to demonstrate that your invention cannot work and they will endeavor to explain why. They are playing in your hands: journalists and bloggers love controversy and the debate will make the interest in your invention skyrocket. At this point, you'll use the criticism you received as proof that you are the victim of a conspiracy from the powers that be who are attempting to deny to humankind the benefits of your invention. You’ll react to all criticism you receive assuming that it is generated by personal hate against you and by the vilest of venal motives and that, of course, justifies your reaction against them. Threats of lawsuits turn out to be very effective in intimidating your critics. But it is cheaper and more effective to use personal insult and threats. Have no fear! What can you lose? Do you really think that university professors will sue you because you said that they are incompetent idiots? Step 6. Create your group of faithful followers. At this point, your action should have generated so much interest that a group of people sufficiently deluded and desperate will have been turned into true believers. Some of them will be so faithful that they will create web sites, mailing lists, discussion forums and more. They will be doing for free the job you have been paying professionals to do, so far and that will include the work of insulting and denigrating your critics. Isn’t that great? Step 7. Proceed to reap the monetary benefits of your invention. At this stage, many of your critics will have been intimidated or simply will have lost interest in the whole story. Now you look like the winner of the debate and you can sell your patent, or maybe you'll sell licenses or maybe you'll 420 page have plenty of patients for your miracle cure; whatever. You only have to avoid making any verifiable claim about your invention (you may hint it is because of the need of secrecy) and make sure that it doesn’t actually harm people. If you are careful enough, that will make it extremely unlikely that anyone will sue you to get their money back, later on. Besides, nobody wants to let the whole world know that they have been conned by you. Step 8. Repeat. Despite the great brouhaha generated by your action of promotion, you’ll discover that, if you let some years pass, the public will have completely forgotten about you and your invention. So, you can restart with a different invention or with the same one, just with minor modifications. Go back to step 1.

Ugo Bardi, Cassandra’s Legacy blog, August 2012

UNPLACED

Precisely what we believe is immaterial; what matters is the kind of behavior it generates. This is why humanity is characterized by such astonishing diversity in its belief systems. As far as our genes are concerned, we can believe that the universe is driven by an overweight fairy on a green­ cheese bicycle provided that such belief effectively coerces us into adopting genetically advantageous behavior in all matters of evolutionary consequence, such as feeding, mating, nurturing, bonding, and protecting family, tribe, and territory.

Reg Morrison, Lynn Margulis, The Spirit in the Gene: Humanity's Proud Illusion and the Laws of Nature, 1999, page 186

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs; this announces itself everywhere... For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

Frederick Nietzsche, 1888

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

Joseph Schumpeter, 1942

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

Stephen Roberts, Australian historian, died 1971

421 page …I put for the generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1660, Chapter 11

Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it. They will use whatever means are convenient to that end and will seek to justify them by the most plausible arguments they are able to devise.

Reinhold Neibuhr

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.

Edward Gibbon

The future is rational only in hindsight.

MGTaylor axiom

I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Bill Cosby

Even a proverb is no proverb to you until your life has illustrated it.

Keats

If you want to know where the power lies... ask whom you can’t criticize.

Unattributed

You will never get ahead trying to get even.

Arabian Proverb (apocryphal)

Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life.

William Blake (apocryphal)

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come. 422 page Voltaire

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo, Histoire d'un Crime, 1852

Everything passes. What remains of former times, what remains of life, is the spiritual.

Paul Klee

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

William James

I speak Pollis the beloved son of Asopitos, having not died a coward, but fighting in the line of battle.

Burial Relief, in Megaran Script, ca. 480 B.C.E., during the war against the invading Persian army, and therefore possibly not originally located in Megara. The portrayal is of a Hoplite clad only in crested helmet with nose­piece and temple­flaps, sword in one hand, round shield and spear in the other (emphasis added).

If you are a god, you will not hurt those who have never injured you. If you are a man, advance — and you will find men equal to yourself.

Response by the defenders of Sparta to the Commander of the besieging Roman army

When your belly’s empty and the hunger’s so real And you’re too proud to beg and too dumb to steal…

Sting, It’s Probably me, in Ten Summoners Tales, 1995

Dem belly full, but me hungry A hungry man is a hungry man. Ah belly full, but we hungry A hungry mob is a hungry mob.

Bob Marley, Natty Dread, 1974

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body more than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; 423 page yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Bible, Matthew 6:25­34

Have you noticed that nature has recently begun to look like Corot’s landscapes?

Oscar Wilde

Whether you think you can or think you can’t — either way you’re right.

Henry Ford, American Industrialist

Sometimes there is only one side of a story.

Edward R. Murrow, CBS News

We must become the change we wish to see in the world.

Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

If you are here unfaithfully with us, you’re causing terrible damage.

Jalaludin Rumi

Gamble everything for Love, if you’re a true human being. If not, leave this gathering.

Half­heartedness doesn’t reach into majesty. You set out to find God, 424 page but then you keep stopping for long periods at meanspirited roadhouses.

Don’t wait any longer.

Dive in the Ocean, leave & let the Sea be you. Silent, absent, walking an empty road, all praise.

Jalaludin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it... Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

There is, deep down within all of us, an instinct. It’s a kind of drum­major instinct — a desire to be first... We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade... Don’t give it up... Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be first in love. I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be first in generosity. That’s what I want you to do... I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity...say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness... I just want to leave a committed life behind.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), Middlemarch

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.

Attributed to President Jimmy Carter; inscription on Voyager 2 Spacecraft

El Sueño de la razón produce monstruos. (The dream of reason produces monsters) 425 page Goya, Caprichos

We are unconcerned but not indifferent.

Inscription on Man Ray’s gravestone

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Inscription for a Gravestone

I am not dead, I have only become inhuman: That is to say, Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities, But not as a man Undresses to creep into bed, but like an athlete Stripping for the race. The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurer Of certain fictions Called good and evil; that made me contract with pain And expand with pleasure; Fussily adjusted like a little electroscope: That's gone, it is true; (I never miss it; if the universe does, How easily replaced!) But all the rest is heightened, widened, set free. I admired the beauty While I was human, now I am part of the beauty. I wander in the air, 426 page Being mostly gas and water and flow in the ocean; Touch you and Asia At the same moment; have a hand in the sunrises And the glow of this grass. I left the light precipitate of ashes to earth For a love­token.

Robinson Jeffers

I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.

Mother Teresa

We’re the first generation to have lost the certainty that there will be a future.

Joanna Macy

Pray not that God is on our side, but that we are on God’s side.

Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Speech

Writers don’t give prescriptions. They give headaches!

Chinua Achebe, the poet Ikem in Anthills of the Savannah

There is no one more foolish than the foolish believer, except for the foolish unbeliever.

Naguib Mahfouz, Nobel­Prize­winning Egyptian novelist

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief in denying them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

People sometimes say to me: “Be careful! You will have twenty years of guerilla warfare on your hands!” I am delighted at the prospect… Germany will remain in a state of perpetual alertness.

Adolf Hitler, 29 August 1942

Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself.

Antoine De Saint­Exupery

427 page Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.

A.J. Liebling

Information is the currency of democracy.

Thomas Jefferson

Do not undertake a program unless the goal is manifestly important and the achievement nearly impossible.

Edwin Land, of Polaroid Corporation

The challenges we identify are either dauntingly impossible or frustratingly easy.

Anonymous

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

Michelangelo (apocryphal)

In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.

Suzuki Roshi

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

Niels Bohr

Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.

Richard Feynman

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

F.P. Jones

If we were able to learn from past errors the world would look very different and humanity would probably be in a completely different situation than it is.

Michael Haneke, Austrian Filmmaker, The Canberra Times, 8 May 2010 428 page Different isn’t always better. But better is always different.

Marshall Thurber

It’s not enough to get to the future first; one must also get there for less.

Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahadad, Competing for the Future

Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.

Anonymous

Pity is to disdain as fear is to hate.

Your ignorance and fear are your only justification to call me a crackpot; and calling me a crackpot is poor shelter from all you don’t know.

It’s not enough to have dancing electrons; you gotta have dancing protons as well.

Z.B.F. Alexander

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods ‘till wrong looks like right in their eyes.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749­1832)

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security.

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933­1945, 1955, page 166

There is something about this quest for absolute security that is self­defeating. It is an exercise which, like every form of perfectionism, undermines and destroys its own basic purpose. The French have their wonderful proverb: Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien — the absolute best is the enemy of the good. Nothing truer has ever been said. A foreign policy aimed at the achievement of total security is the one thing I can think of that is entirely capable of bringing this country to a point where it will have no security at all. And a ruthless, reckless insistence on attempting to stamp out everything that could conceivably constitute a reflection of improper foreign 429 page influence in our national life, regardless of the actual damage it is doing to the cost of eliminating it, in terms of other American values, is the one thing I can think of that should reduce us all to a point where the very independence we are seeking to defend would be meaningless, for we would be doing things to ourselves as vicious and tyrannical as any that might be brought to us from outside.

This sort of extremism seems to me to hold particular danger for a democracy, because it creates a curious area between what is held to be possible and what is really possible — an area within which government can always be plausibly shown to have been most dangerously delinquent in the performance of its tasks. And this area, where government is always deficient, provides the ideal field of opportunity for every sort of demagoguery and mischief­making. It constitutes a terrible breach in the dike of our national morale, through which forces of doubt and suspicion never cease to find entry. The heart of our problem, here, lies in our assessment of the relative importance of the various dangers among which we move; and until many of our people can be brought to understand the what we have to do is not to secure a total absence of danger but to balance peril against peril and to find the tolerable degree of each, we shall not wholly emerge from these confusions.

George F. Kennan, The Illusion of Security, 1954

Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power. (page xiii)

It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book. (page xiv)

How America “manages” Eurasia is critical. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three­fourths of the world’s known energy resources. (page 31)

Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well­being. The economic self­denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization. (page 35)

The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the 430 page Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea. … The world’s energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the U.S. Department of energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea. (page 125)

In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last. (page 209)

China's growing economic presence in the region and its political stake in the area’s independence are also congruent with America's interests. (page 149)

America is now the only global superpower, and Eurasia is the globe’s central arena. Hence, what happens to the distribution of power on the Eurasian continent will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy and to America’s historical legacy. … Without sustained and directed American involvement, before long the forces of global disorder could come to dominate the world scene. And the possibility of such a fragmentation is inherent in the geopolitical tensions not only of today’s Eurasia but of the world more generally. (page 194)

With warning signs on the horizon across Europe and Asia, any successful American policy must focus on Eurasia as a whole and be guided by a geostrategic design. (page 197)

Zbigniew Brzezinksi, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, 1998

The puppet­masters no longer care if we see the strings.

James Howard Kunstler, A Snake Eating Its own Tail blog post, 22 June 2009

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV, And you think you’re so clever and classless and free, But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

John Lennon

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

Steve Biko 431 page Nobody can put you psychologically into prison; you are already there.

J. Krishnamurti

The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self­administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.

Attributed to Dresden James

In the old days we brought the slaves to the work, but now we're bringing the work to the slave.

Canadian Parliamentarian Eugene Whelan, regarding NAFTA and Globalization

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.

C.S. Lewis

Every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general popular acceptance. In short, the bulk of the people themselves, for whatever reason, acquiesce in their own subjection.

The central problem of political theory: why in the world do people consent to their own enslavement? The mystery of civil obedience: why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of government, which always constitutes a small minority of the society.

I should like merely to understand how it happens, that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him…who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him.

Etienne de la Boetie, The Politics of Obedience, 1550

There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old system and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new one.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513

432 page Human reason so delights in constructions, that it has several times built up a tower, and then razed it to examine the nature of the foundation. It is never too late to become wise; but if the change comes too late, there is always more difficulty in starting a reform.

The question whether a science be possible, presupposes a doubt as to its actuality. But such a doubt offends the men whose whole possessions consist of this supposed jewel; hence he who raises the doubt must expect opposition from all sides.

Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, Introduction, 1783

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Buckminster Fuller

Man is the missing link between apes and human beings.

Konrad Lorenz, Nobel Laureate

I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of the great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man? What is the ape to men? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And just so shall man be to the Superman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, 1883­1892

I do not charge the judges with willful and ill­intentioned error; but honest error must be arrested where its toleration leads to public ruin. As for the safety of society, we commit honest maniacs to Bedlam; so judges should be withdrawn from their bench whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution. It may, indeed, injure them in fame or in fortune; but it saves the republic, which is the first and supreme law.

Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, 1821

The Competitive Exclusion Principle: If fertility varies in a population that is offered options in fertility, then as the generations succeed one another, the pronatalist elements in the population will, in time, displace the ones who conscientiously limit their fertility.

Garrett Hardin, The Ostrich Factor

Don’t speak to me of shortage. My world is vast 433 page And has more than enough — for no more than enough. There is a shortage of nothing, save will and wisdom; But there is a longage of people.

Garrett Hardin

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double­edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? This is what I have done. And I am Caesar.

Attributed to Gaius Julius Caesar [however, it is modern — post­2001; some dramatist? some propagandist?]

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

T.E. Lawrence

Energy may be like the Eastern magicians, of whom we read that they had the power for changing themselves into a variety of forms, but were nevertheless very careful not to disappear altogether… It is necessary to penetrate the various disguises that our magician assumes before we can pretend to explain the principles that actuate him in his transformations.

Balfour Stewart, The Conservation of Energy, 6th Edition, 1883

We see that whereas (to our present knowledge, at least) matter is always the same, though it may be masked in various combinations, energy is constantly changing the form in which it presents itself. The one is like the eternal, unchangeable Fate or Necessitas of the ancients; the other is Proteus himself in the variety and rapidity of its transformations.

Balfour Stewart & P.G. Tait, The Unseen Universe

There may be nothing new under the sun, but permutation of the old within complex systems can do wonders.

Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 1977

We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life’s continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be 434 page suited to it, but here we are.

Stephen Jay Gould, Natural History, 1984

Those whose conceits are seated in popular opinions, need only but to prove or dispute; but those whose conceits are beyond popular opinions, have a double labor: the one to make themselves conceived, and the other to prove and demonstrate. So that it is of necessity with them to have recourse to similitudes and translations [metaphors] to express themselves.

Francis Bacon

The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.

Carl Jung

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.

Albert Einstein

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

Karl von Clausewitz

You can get more with a smile, a kind word, and a gun than with a smile and a kind word.

Al Capone

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

Herbert Spencer

The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account.

Walter Lippman

The Republican form of government is the highest form of government: but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature, a type nowhere at present existing.

Herbert Spencer 435 page The biggest part of reporting the truth is the news agenda itself. What we choose to put on the air, what we think is a page one story, what our priorities are. I would not be fooled by the old myth that reporting is about objectivity. Deciding what is news is the most subjective of acts and it is probably the most important thing that we do.

Carl Bernstein

We fall short of presenting all, or even a goodly part, of the news each day that a citizen would need to intelligently exercise his franchise in this democracy. So as he depends more and more on us, presumably the depth of knowledge of the average man is diminished. This clearly can lead to a disaster in democracy.

Walter Cronkite

There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.

There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty­four hours my occupation would be gone.

The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?

We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

John Swinton, former Chief of Staff of The New York Times, circa 1880, as guest of honor at a banquet of his peers, in response to a toast in honor of the independent press. (apocryphal)

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good... Ideology — that is what gives devildoing its long­sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.

436 page Alexander Solzhenitsyn

That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of nations, is as shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country, make it their study to sow discord, and cultivate prejudices between nations, it becomes the more unpardonable.

Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, circa 1792

Now I understood for the first time that all these problems are caused by a race asleep and thrashing about in its panicked nightmares. There will be wars and holocausts and genocides as long as God is portrayed and thought of as a tight­minded legislator, a feudal lord, an offended King, a hypersensitive Artisan — even if church managers condescendingly tack onto that ridiculous list the not­very­convincing footnote that He is also loving. As long as people dream that they are insecure and needy in some sort of eternal jeopardy, there will be atrocities. But as the human race grows up spiritually, and as individuals gain a personal experience of the God they have been worshipping in fear, they will recognize that much of their theology and philosophy is built on nightmares. That will be the day of peace. I suddenly found myself unwilling to sit it out in the mountains of Utah. I wanted to play an active role in the process of the world’s awakening.

George Fowler, Dance of a Fallen Monk

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

The United States’ Declaration of Independence from England

It is only in folk tales, children’s stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.

Noam Chomsky

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.

Margaret Wheatley, Turning to One Another

Whole dimensions of what it means to be a human being and treated as one are not incorporated into the economic calculus of capitalism.

437 page Peter Drucker, Managing in the Next Society

We’ve forgotten that only forgeries of the real thing are up for sale. The real thing must be earned by investing ourselves in loving relationships, being good friends and neighbors, living by ethical principles, and developing and engaging our abilities in ways that contribute to the life of the community.

David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

The estrangement of an individual from his own experiencing is the basis for everything we term evil.

Carl (“Mister”) Rogers [also see M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil]

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”

“There is one difference,” I pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”

“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

Herman Goering, in an 18 April 1946 conversation with Gustave M. Gilbert, in Nuremberg Diary, 1947, page 278f

Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government. 438 page Henry Kissinger speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992 Bilderburgers meeting. Unbeknownst to Kissinger, his speech was taped by a Swiss delegate to the meeting.

What mankind needs is a teacher who knows what he’s talking about.

Albert Camus

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self­evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788­1860)

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (apocryphal)

All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, on justice, 4th Century B.C.

Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable (Some US politicians and military analysts come to mind). For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told — and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity... Other animals fight for territory or food, but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their ‘beliefs’... The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to our extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self­destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self­ congratulatory delusion.

Michael Crichton, The Lost World

The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be common, nor the common heroic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it.

439 page Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861

The nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change things which are, and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

Marcus Aurelius

In civilizations with long nows, says Brian Eno, “you feel a very strong but flexible structure . . . built to absorb shocks and in fact incorporate them.” One can imagine how such a process evolves: All civilizations suffer shocks, yet only those that absorb the shocks survive. This still does not explain the mechanism, however. In recent years a few scientists (such as R.V. O’Neill and C.S. Holling) have been probing a similar issue in ecological systems: How do they manage change, and how do they absorb and incorporate shocks? The answer appears to lie in the relationship between components in a system that have different change rates and different scales of size. Instead of breaking under stress like something brittle these systems yield as if they were malleable. Some parts respond quickly to the shock, allowing slower parts to ignore the shock and maintain their steady duties of system continuity. The combination of fast and slow components makes the system resilient, along with the way the differently paced parts affect each other. Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power. All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure; it is what makes them adaptable and robust.

Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, 1999, pages 34f

If this only involved a clash of opposites we wouldn’t be so confused. We’d just take sides and have at it. In fact, it involves so many sets of fundamental opposites whirling around each other in so many furious swirls, at so many purposes and cross­purposes, with so many conscious and unconscious intentions, at such speed, with such force, that words like “political” and “psychological” and “economic” and “religious” and “scientific” and “artistic” grow every day more pitifully inadequate, more obviously limited, and we grope staggering toward a worldview that could include all the words without being classified and confined by any of them.

Michael Ventura, Shadow Dancing in the USA, 1985

Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to know that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

John Adams

440 page If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our Country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.

Samuel Adams, 1780

You see, when a nation threatens another nation the people of the latter forget their factionalism, their local antagonisms, their political differences, their suspicions of each other, their religious hostilities, and band together as one unit. Leaders know that, and that is why so many of them whip up wars during periods of national crisis, or when the people become discontented and angry. The leaders stigmatize the enemy with every vice they can think of, every evil and human depravity. They stimulate their people’s natural fear of all other men by channeling it into a defined fear of just certain men, or nations. Attacking another nation, then, acts as a sort of catharsis, temporarily, on men’s fear of their immediate neighbors. This is the explanation of all wars, all racial and religious hatreds, all massacres, and all attempts at genocide.

Taylor Caldwell, The Devil’s Advocate, 1952, page 299

Genocide is as human as art and prayer.

John Gray

Status­seeking is as human as reciprocal altruism.

Z.B.F.A.

If self­deception increases political power, then it is impossible for a ruler to understand human nature.

(Henry? William?) James

As for pointing to our mental failures with scorn or dismay, we might as well profess disappoint­ ment with the mechanics of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. In other words, the degree of disillusionment we feel in response to any particular human behavior is the precise measure of our ignorance of its evolutionary and genetic origins.

Reg Morrison, The Spirit in the Gene

Anti­Semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, Anti­Semitism: Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States, 12 January 1931

441 page Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster, for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. or

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146 (1886)

Developmental psychologists are starting to report something that wouldn’t exactly be described as music to the ears of Toys R Us shareholders. They report that limiting the number of toys or games to a very small number is much better for our children, while more choice may actually damage their development. Having too many toys (too many choices) can make a child more timid and unsure, so that they play in short bursts with different toys and become unable to stick to, say, one or two for any length of time. And they don’t enjoy their playing as much, spending less time playing in total than those children with fewer toy. It also means that their imagination is not brought into play either. The sheer number of choices overwhelms and overstimulates children, so they find it hard to concentrate on one thing long enough to learn from it. Instead they simply shut down.

Aric Sigman, The Spoilt Generation, 2009, page 134

... [T]he only way to fully comprehend U.S. policies toward the third world is to posit ... “the threat of a good example.” Insurgencies in the third world do not challenge U.S. military security or even, ultimately, investments by U.S. corporations.... What they represent is the possibility that emerging nations may demonstrate by example that the United States may not be the last word in democracy, freedom, and opportunity. That threat is much greater if weighed from the perspective of those who see it in their interest to preserve unchanged the present U.S. economic and political order.

Frances Moore Lappé, Rachel Shuman, and Kevin Danaher, Betraying the National Interest (?)

When old institutions and habits break down or consume themselves, new experimental shoots begin to appear, and people explore and test and share new and better ways to survive together.

We live in the declining years of what is still the biggest economy in the world, where a looter elite has fastened itself upon the decaying carcass of the empire.

The U.S., which has a long history of violent plutocratic rule unknown to the textbook­fed, will stand out as the best­armed Third World country, its population ill­fed, ill­housed, ill­educated, ill­ cared for in health, and increasingly poverty­stricken: even Social Security may be whittled down, impoverishing tens of millions of the elderly.

442 page As empires decline, their leaders become increasingly incompetent — petulant, ignorant, gifted only with PR skills of posturing and spinning, and prone to the appointment of loyal idiots to important government positions. Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.

No futurist can foresee the possibilities. As empires decay, their civilian leaderships become increasingly crazed, corrupt, and incompetent, and often the military (which is after all a parasite of the whole nation, and has no independent financial base like the looter class) takes over. Another possible scenario is that if the theocratic red center of the country prevails in Washington, the relatively progressive and prosperous coastal areas will secede in self­defense.

So I look to a long­term process of ‘succession,’ as the biological concept has it, where ‘disturbances’ kill off an ecosystem, but little by little new plants colonize the devastated area, prepare the soil for larger and more complex plants (and the other beings who depend on them), and finally the process achieves a flourishing, resilient, complex state — not necessarily what was there before, but durable and richly productive. In a similar way, experiments under way now, all over the world, are exploring how sustainability can in fact be achieved locally. Technically, socially, economically — since it is quite true, as ecologists know, that everything is connected to everything else, and you can never just do one thing by itself.

That is the way empires crumble: they are taken over by looter elites, who sooner or later cause collapse. But then new games become possible, and with luck Ecotopia might be among them.

All things ‘go’ somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms. So as the decades pass, we should try not always to futilely fight these transformations. As the Japanese know, there is much unnoticed beauty in wabi­sabi — the old, the worn, the tumble­down, those things beginning their transformation into something else. We can embrace this process of devolution: embellish it when strength avails, learn to love it.

There is beauty in weathered and unpainted wood, in orchards overgrown, even in abandoned cars being incorporated into the earth. Let us learn, like the Forest Service sometimes does, to put unwise or unneeded roads ‘to bed,’ help a little in the healing of the natural contours, the re­ vegetation by native plants. Let us embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth.

Ernest “Chick” Callenbach (1929­2012), author of Ecotopia in 1975; excerpts from Epistle to the Ecotopians, a document discovered on his computer after his death

Every political order, no matter how grand, is doomed to decay and degenerate. … Modernity’s inception and its decline are like those of any other set of political and cultural ideals. In its early inception, modernity contained something good and beguiling. It was a revolution against the authority of the Church, its taboos, repressions, inquisitions, and witch burning. It was a new dawn of the human spirit — celebrating life, knowledge, individuality, freedom, and human rights. It bequeathed to man a sunny disposition on the world, and on himself….The new spirit 443 page fueled scientific discovery, inventiveness, trade, commerce, and an artistic explosion of great splendor. But as with every new spirit, modernity has gone foul….Modernity lost the freshness and innocence of its early promise because its goals became inflated, impossible, and even pernicious. Instead of being the symbol of freedom, independence, justice, and human rights, it has become the sign of conquest, colonialism, exploitation, and the destruction of the earth.

Shadia Drury, Alexandre Kojeve: The Roots of Postmodern Politics, 1994

QUOTABLE

Ken Wilbur, A Brief History of Everything

Daniel Quinn, Ishmael and The Story of B

Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers

EliasCanetti, Crowds and power kybernetes — Greek for helmsman

Julian Jaynes (Breakdown...) on language, and Landmark Forum on language

Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, HarperCollins, 2000

444 page