:I forget which book this is from:
Neuroscience has begun to correct the computational model by showing how our rational, linguistic mind depends on the ancient limbic brain, where emotions hold sway and social skills dominate. In fact, the cognitive mind works only when emotions preferentially tilt our deliberations. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio worked with patients who had damage in the communication system between the cognitive and emotional brain. The subjects could compute all the informational aspects of a decision in detail, but they couldn't actually commit to anything. Without clear limbic values (that is, feelings), Damasio's patients couldn't decide their own social calendars, prioritise jobs at work, or even make decisions in their own best interest. Our rational mind is truly embodied, and without this emotional embodiment we have no preferences. In order for our minds to go beyond syntax to semantics, we need feelings.
Marx did not get it quite right. Religion is not the opiate of the masses; it only mops up what actual opiates cannot fix.
Digging and Filling Holes in the Psyche
The individual psychology of what happens to at-risk populations during a major economic transition seems quite clear. An Oliver Wendell Holmes quote supplies the diagnosis: "The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size."
Parkinson's Law supplies the prognosis: "work expands to occupy the resources available."
Parkinson's Law is usually applied to explain the creation of make-work in bureaucratic organizations, and is normally regarded as a pathology. But it is only a pathology when social constraints restrict the expression of a healthy underlying drive: to do meaningful things with available potential. When meaningful things cannot be found, meaningless and arbitrary things become acceptable.
In times of peace, we are born to purpose, into middle-class scripts. In times of chaotic change, finding purpose becomes the purpose.
Ken Jennings (the guy on Jeopardy), who owes his capacity for knowledge, at least in part, to some degree of insularity and isolation, questions the point of an organization like Mensa. "This is probably going to get me in trouble — these are my people I'm talking about — but I've always found the idea of Mensa to be so repellent." As he works up steam, his voice gets quicker and more demonstrative; it's hard to tell whether his talking is trying to keep pace with his brain, or his brain is keeping pace with his talking. "Average people are so dumb that you have to go to a special club to determine how smart you are? First of all, that's a terrible way to look at your fellow human beings; second of all, it seems a little bit self-congratulatory. What do they do? It's not like they're out building low-income housing or anything
Yeah man, what's the point? Funny how he says "These are my people." No, no they aren't. If they were, you wouldn't be saying that. Or you're disloyal. Which is it, Kenny?
An absurdist does not deny all meaning as a nihilist does. An absurdist merely believes a human can never determine meaning, and therefore all attempts to prove the opposite are a waste of time. This differs strongly with the belief of a nihilist; a nihilist thinks they know with complete certainty that nothing matters. However, both nihilists and absurdists believe trying to find meaning will always be fruitless.
So which is worse - trying to create meaning without being able to determine it, or saying "screw it" 'casue you know there's no meaning?
The societies in which the majority of the human race live are largely based around meaning, thus a nihilist or absurdist, in rejecting meaning, may feel displaced or isolated. Furthermore, other people may not want to associate with someone who so radically denies the foundation of their belief system. However, an absurdist may better integrate with religious or significance-believing people, as they do not necessarily think these types of individuals are mistaken as a nihilist does. An absurdist merely believes there is a possibility these people are wasting their time but does not insist upon it with complete certainty.
Yeah, I'd say that's me.. rejecting meaning and feeling displaced. There's really no point to anything if you think about it. Gotta make a purpose, but that's only for sound of mind, right? Right?
But he still haunts me, making me fearful of the genes I carry and the man I may become.
My father has shaped my life in absentia. Because I knew he did drugs, I didn't. Because I had no good male role model, I searched for them elsewhere, reporting out stories about men's behavior—as though journalistic research could fill in for the father who wasn't there. Recently, that search has taken on greater urgency. Late last week I became a father for the first time; we had a boy. While most dads look forward to passing along the family heritage, I'm keen to effectively replant the family tree—to recast what it means to be a man in the Dokoupil clan. To do that, I knew I needed to go see my father—something I had done only once before in the past 20 years.
Happiness Hypothesis
Your behavior is governed by opposing motivational systems: an approach system, which triggers positive emotions and makes you want to move toward certain things; and a withdrawal system, which triggers negative emotions and makes you want to pull back or avoid other things… The withdrawal system can quickly shoot up to full power, overtaking the slower (and generally weaker) approach system.
There is a two-way street between emotions and conscious thoughts: Thoughts can cause emotions, but emotions can also cause thoughts, primarily by raising mental filters that as subsequent information processing.
Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.
Robin Dunbar has demonstrated that within a given group of vertebrate species the logarithm of the brain size is almost perfectly proportional to the logarithm of the social group size.
Human beings out to live in groups of around 150 people… studies … suggest that 100 to 150 is the "natural" group size within which people can know just about everyone directly, by name and face, and know how each person is related to everybody else. (This is talked about in Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. He discusses the GorTex corporation which lays good stake to the claim, though the "fake study" of people knowing other people with given names is rather a joke and should not really be discussed seriously to lay more stakes in the 150 people. Also, this whole idea of 150 people debunks Walden II, right? OUCH!)
Dunbar notes that people do in fact use language primarily to talk about other people – to find out who is doing what to whom, who is coupling with whom, who is fighting with whom. (I can see the validity in this though I wonder if it differs between the genders.) And Dunbar points out that in our ultrasocial species, success is largely a matter of playing the social game well.
People do occasionally tell stories about the good deeds of others, but such stories are only one tenth as common as stories about transgressions. (Negativity Bias hard at work, here, folks.) When people pass along high-quality ("juicy") gossip, they feel more powerful, they have a better shared sense of what is right and what's wrong, and they feel more closely connected to their gossip partners.
Most species reciprocate, but only humans gossip.
Dan Batson, University of Kansas. Performed a study in which people could either choose to give another participant a raffle ticket that could win a valuable prize. The person could either choose with his/her mind or use a coin. Either way, participants kept the raffle ticket 90% of the time.
We take a position, look for evidence that supports it, and if we find some evidence – enough so that our position "makes sense" – we stop thinking. …if someone else brings up reasons and evidence on the other side, people can be induced to change their minds; they just don't make an effort to do such thinking for themselves. (Isn't this book, and all books, using this principle? Just as the author pointed out at the beginning of the book, any one person can only read a tiny fraction of all of the books in existence. There could be more books than what this author read that could refute what he's saying in some parts of the book that the author doesn't know about, and there are obviously other ideas from other books that the author didn't read or else he'd be using more social psychological terms.)
Evidence shows that people who hold pervasive positive illusions about themselves, their abilities, and their future prospects are mentally healthier, happier, and better liked than people who lack such illusions. But such biases can make people feel that they deserve more than they do, thereby setting the stage for endless disputes with other people who feel equally over-entitled.
People really are open to information that will predict the behavior of others, but they refuse to adjust their self-assessments.
Naïve realism – each of us thinks we see the world directly as it is really is. We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us. (He explains, though he doesn't know it, that in-group, out-group thinking is based on this. And he says that this is the biggest obstacle to world peace. Isn't this basically saying that everyone is different and sees things with a different, unique perspective, and ultimately the world is composed of, oh no who woulda guessed, humans?) If they don't agree, it follows either that they have not yet been exposed to the relevant facts (which ones? The ones relevant to our "perspective"? seems most likely with the rest of the sentence) or else they are blinded by their interests and ideologies.
… I realized that that most [villains] share three properties: They are invisible…; their evil spreads by contagion, making it vital to protect impressionable young people from infection; and the villaisn can be defeated only if we all pull together as a team. (Can anybody say Scapegoat? Come on, all, let's say it together, SCAPEGOATS!)
Religions have generally chosen one of three resolutions of [the problem of evil] paradox. One is straight dualism: there exists a good force and an evil force, they are equal and opposite, and they fight eternally. Human beings are part of the battleground. We were created part good, part evil, and we must choose which side we will be on. (This can't be true with the theory that people think they are making the right decisions as in the raffle ticket study above.) A second resolution is straight monoism: There is one God; he created the world as it needs to be, and evil is an illusion. (Buddhism) The third approach , taken by Christianity, blends monism and dualism in a way that ultimately reconciles the goodness and power of God with the existence of Satan.
Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means. If you are fighting for good or for God, what matters if the outcome, not the path.
"Last time I checked, there weren't any W's and L's in my paycheck." - Former Celtic Curtis Rowe
"They can do whatever they want. I'll still be eating steak every night."
-- Von Hayes on Philly fans booing him
"Children are like TV sets. When they start acting weird, whack them across the head with a big rubber basketball shoe."
-- Hunter S. Thompson
"Show me a good and gracious loser, and I'll show you a failure."
-- Knute Rockne
"Wish I didn't know now what I didn't now then."
-- Bob Seger
"The only time I want to talk to a woman when I'm naked is if I'm on top of her or she's on top of me."
-- Former Tigers pitcher Jack Morris on female sportswriters
"When I was in elementary school, we had the kid who threw chairs, the kid who stuttered, and the kid who went to the bathroom on himself ... but we never had the kid who came in one day and started shooting everyone."
-- Bill Simmons
"I have two things in this world -- my word and my balls -- and I don't break neither one of them for nobody."
-- Tony Montana
"They can talk about me like they want to, but, um, I got my money ... so matter what you all say, Mike black, but Mike rich!"
--Michael Irvin
"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all."
--Paul Simon (you could replace high school with college)
"Just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it."
--George Costanza
"They hate me because they ain't me!"
-Busta Rhymes (Could say this about Crosby, they hate 'em 'cause they dont' have 'im)
"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."
--Lloyd Dobler (I watched this movie a few weeks ago, it's a decent argument for the Generation X
Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.
In the novel, Fight Club, Tyler Durden says, "It's only after we've lost everything that we are free to do anything," and, "Self-improvement is masturbation. Now self-destruction is the answer."
It's only after we've lost everything that we are free to do anything
Every evening I died, and every evening I was born again, resurrected.
Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.
"Self-improvement is masturbation. Now self-destruction is the answer."
You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Narrator: I had it all. I had a stereo that was very decent, a wardrobe that was getting very respectable. I was close to being complete.
Tyler Durden: Shit man, now it's all gone.
"You raise your kids to think people are good, because the alternative is too terrible to bear," she says. "You don't want to live in a world like that, where there is evil lurking behind every smile. You don't want to believe in that. And then your children find out on their own."
Slaughter-house five - Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, 'I think you guys are going to
have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to
go on living.'
Rosewater was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the conversation,
asked him what he was reading this time.
So Rosewater told him. It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was
about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian by the way.
The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could,
why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble
was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the
Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the
low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.
The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who
didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe.
Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought,
and Rosewater read out loud again:
Oh, boy-they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
And that thought had a brother: 'There are right people to lynch.' Who? People not well
connected. So it goes.
Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills
for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human
beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
So it goes.
This has always been the sticking point for philosophers and scientists alike. After all, there is no spot in the brain that is not densely interconnected with—and driven by—other brain parts. And that suggests that no part is independent and therefore "free." In modern science, it is difficult to find the gap into which to slip free will—the uncaused causer—because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.
Free will may exist (it may simply be beyond our current science), but one thing seems clear: if free will does exist, it has little room in which to operate. It can at best be a small factor riding on top of vast neural networks shaped by genes and environment. In fact, free will may end up being so small that we eventually think about bad decision-making in the same way we think about any physical process, such as diabetes or lung disease.
Acts cannot be understood separately from the biology of the actors—and this recognition has legal implications.
For reasons that are obscure to me, those qualities we cherish in our artists we condemn in our politicians. In our artists we look for the many-colored voice, the multiple sensibility. The apogee of this is, of course, Shakespeare: even more than for his wordplay we cherish him for his lack of allegiance. Our Shakespeare sees always both sides of a thing, he is black and white, male and female—he is everyman. The giant lacunae in his biography are merely a convenience; if any new facts of religious or political affiliation were ever to arise we would dismiss them in our hearts anyway. Was he, for example, a man of Rome or not? He has appeared, to generations of readers, not of one religion but of both, in truth, beyond both. Born into the middle of Britain's fierce Catholic–Protestant culture war, how could the bloody absurdity of those years not impress upon him a strong sense of cultural contingency?
It was a war of ideas that began for Will—as it began for Barack—in the dreams of his father. For we know that John Shakespeare, a civic officer in Protestant times, oversaw the repainting of medieval frescoes and the destruction of the rood loft and altar in Stratford's own fine Guild Chapel, but we also know that in the rafters of the Shakespeare home John hid a secret Catholic "Spiritual Testament," a signed profession of allegiance to the old faith. A strange experience, to watch one's own father thus divided, professing one thing in public while practicing another in private. John Shakespeare was a kind of equivocator: it's what you do when you're in a corner, when you can't be a Catholic and a loyal Englishman at the same time. When you can't be both black and white. Sometimes in a country ripped apart by dogma, those who wish to keep their heads—in both senses—must learn to split themselves in two.
And this we still know, here, at a four-hundred-year distance. No one can hope to be president of these United States without professing a committed and straightforward belief in two things: the existence of God and the principle of American exceptionalism. But how many of them equivocated, and who, in their shoes, would not equivocate, too?
Fortunately, Shakespeare was an artist and so had an outlet his father didn't have—the many-voiced theater. Shakespeare's art, the very medium of it, allowed him to do what civic officers and politicians can't seem to: speak simultaneous truths. (Is it not, for example, experientially true that one can both believe and not believe in God?) In his plays he is woman, man, black, white, believer, heretic, Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim. He grew up in an atmosphere of equivocation, but he lived in freedom. And he offers us freedom: to pin him down to a single identity would be an obvious diminishment, both for Shakespeare and for us. Generations of critics have insisted on this irreducible multiplicity, though they have each expressed it different ways, through the glass of their times. Here is Keats's famous attempt, in 1817, to give this quality a name:
At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
And here is Stephen Greenblatt doing the same, in 2004:
There are many forms of heroism in Shakespeare, but ideological heroism—the fierce, self-immolating embrace of an idea or institution—is not one of them.
For Keats, Shakespeare's many voices are quasi-mystical as suited the Romantic thrust of Keats's age. For Greenblatt, Shakespeare's negative capability is sociopolitical at root. Will had seen too many wild-eyed martyrs, too many executed terrorists, too many wars on the Catholic terror. He had watched men rage absurdly at rood screens and write treatises in praise of tables. He had seen men disemboweled while still alive, their entrails burned before their eyes, and all for the preference of a Latin Mass over a common prayer or vice versa. He understood what fierce, singular certainty creates and what it destroys. In response, he made himself a diffuse, uncertain thing, a mass of contradictory, irresolvable voices that speak truth plurally. Through the glass of 2009, "negative capability" looks like the perfect antidote to "ideological heroism."
From our politicians, though, we still look for ideological heroism, despite everything. We consider pragmatists to be weak. We call men of balance naive fools.
Even the best of all possible lives consists of a mixture of pleasure and pain. Had the pleasure been forgone—that is, had the life never been created—no one would have been the worse for it. But the world is worse off because of the suffering brought needlessly into it.
"One of the implications of my argument is that a life filled with good and containing only the most minute quantity of bad—a life of utter bliss adulterated only by the pain of a single pin-prick—is worse than no life at all," Benatar writes.
"Those with reproduction-enhancing beliefs are more likely to breed and pass on whatever attributes incline one to such beliefs," Benatar notes.
Sophocles' "Oedipus at Colonus" in which the chorus observes:
Never to have been born is best,
But once you've entered this world,
Return as quickly as possible to the place you came from.
Caplan recommends what he calls the "take the average" rule:
Suppose you're thirty. Selfishly speaking, you conclude that the most pleasant number of children to have during your thirties is one. During your forties, your optimal number of kids will rise to two—you'll have more free time as your kids assert their independence. By the time you're in your fifties, all your kids will be busy with their own lives. At this stage, wouldn't it be nice to have four kids who periodically drop by? Finally, once you pass sixty and prepare to retire, you'll have ample free time to spend with your grandchildren. Five kids would be a good insurance policy against grandchildlessness.
Caplan does the math and concludes that in this case "the best number of kids is three."
Happiness Hypothesis Quotes
Your behavior is governed by opposing motivational systems: an approach system, which triggers positive emotions and makes you want to move toward certain things; and a withdrawal system, which triggers negative emotions and makes you want to pull back or avoid other things… The withdrawal system can quickly shoot up to full power, overtaking the slower (and generally weaker) approach system.
There is a two-way street between emotions and conscious thoughts: Thoughts can cause emotions, but emotions can also cause thoughts, primarily by raising mental filters that as subsequent information processing.
Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.
Robin Dunbar has demonstrated that within a given group of vertebrate species the logarithm of the brain size is almost perfectly proportional to the logarithm of the social group size.
Human beings out to live in groups of around 150 people… studies … suggest that 100 to 150 is the "natural" group size within which people can know just about everyone directly, by name and face, and know how each person is related to everybody else. (This is talked about in Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. He discusses the GorTex corporation which lays good stake to the claim, though the "fake study" of people knowing other people with given names is rather a joke and should not really be discussed seriously to lay more stakes in the 150 people. Also, this whole idea of 150 people debunks Walden II, right? OUCH!)
Dunbar notes that people do in fact use language primarily to talk about other people – to find out who is doing what to whom, who is coupling with whom, who is fighting with whom. (I can see the validity in this though I wonder if it differs between the genders.) And Dunbar points out that in our ultrasocial species, success is largely a matter of playing the social game well.
People do occasionally tell stories about the good deeds of others, but such stories are only one tenth as common as stories about transgressions. (Negativity Bias hard at work, here, folks.) When people pass along high-quality ("juicy") gossip, they feel more powerful, they have a better shared sense of what is right and what's wrong, and they feel more closely connected to their gossip partners.
Most species reciprocate, but only humans gossip.
Dan Batson, University of Kansas. Performed a study in which people could either choose to give another participant a raffle ticket that could win a valuable prize. The person could either choose with his/her mind or use a coin. Either way, participants kept the raffle ticket 90% of the time.
We take a position, look for evidence that supports it, and if we find some evidence – enough so that our position "makes sense" – we stop thinking. …if someone else brings up reasons and evidence on the other side, people can be induced to change their minds; they just don't make an effort to do such thinking for themselves. (Isn't this book, and all books, using this principle? Just as the author pointed out at the beginning of the book, any one person can only read a tiny fraction of all of the books in existence. There could be more books than what this author read that could refute what he's saying in some parts of the book that the author doesn't know about, and there are obviously other ideas from other books that the author didn't read or else he'd be using more social psychological terms.)
Evidence shows that people who hold pervasive positive illusions about themselves, their abilities, and their future prospects are mentally healthier, happier, and better liked than people who lack such illusions. But such biases can make people feel that they deserve more than they do, thereby setting the stage for endless disputes with other people who feel equally over-entitled.
People really are open to information that will predict the behavior of others, but they refuse to adjust their self-assessments.
Naïve realism – each of us thinks we see the world directly as it is really is. We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us. (He explains, though he doesn't know it, that in-group, out-group thinking is based on this. And he says that this is the biggest obstacle to world peace. Isn't this basically saying that everyone is different and sees things with a different, unique perspective, and ultimately the world is composed of, oh no who woulda guessed, humans?) If they don't agree, it follows either that they have not yet been exposed to the relevant facts (which ones? The ones relevant to our "perspective"? seems most likely with the rest of the sentence) or else they are blinded by their interests and ideologies.
… I realized that that most [villains] share three properties: They are invisible…; their evil spreads by contagion, making it vital to protect impressionable young people from infection; and the villains can be defeated only if we all pull together as a team. (Can anybody say Scapegoat? Come on, all, let's say it together, SCAPEGOATS!)
Religions have generally chosen one of three resolutions of [the problem of evil] paradox. One is straight dualism: there exists a good force and an evil force, they are equal and opposite, and they fight eternally. Human beings are part of the battleground. We were created part good, part evil, and we must choose which side we will be on. (This can't be true with the theory that people think they are making the right decisions as in the raffle ticket study above.) A second resolution is straight monoism: There is one God; he created the world as it needs to be, and evil is an illusion. (Buddhism) The third approach , taken by Christianity, blends monism and dualism in a way that ultimately reconciles the goodness and power of God with the existence of Satan.
Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means. If you are fighting for good or for God, what matters is the outcome, not the path.
if the clothing you wear makes you feel the way you want to feel, liberated and alive, then fucking wear it. The opposite, to repress yourself as I did for the first fifty-five years of my life, is the worst price of all to pay. The United States is a country that has raged against enlightenment since 1776; puritanism, the guiding lantern, has cast its withering judgment on anything outside the narrow societal mainstream. Think it's easy to be different in America? Try something as benign as wearing stretch leather leggings or knee-high boots if you are a man.
Fountainhead:
He explained that the decadence of architecture had come when private property replaced the communal spirit of the Middle Ages, and that the
selfishness of individual owners—who built for no purpose save to satisfy their own bad taste, "all claim to an indivual taste is bad taste"—had ruined the planned effect
of cities. He demonstrated that there was no such thing as free will, since men's creative impulses were determined, as all else, by the economic structure of
the epoch in which they lived. He express admiration for all the great historical styles, but admonished against their wanton mixture. He dismissed modern
architecture, stating that: "So far, it has respresented nothing but the whim of isolated individuals, has borned no relation to any great, spontaneous mass movement, and
as such is of no consequence." He predicted a better world to come, where all men would be brothers and their buildings would become harmonious and all alike, in the
great tradition of Greece, "the Mother of Democracy." When he wrote this, he managed to convey-with no tangible break in the detached calm of his style—that the
words now seen in ordered print had been blurred in manuscript by a hand unsteady with emotion. He called upon architects to abandon their selfish quest for indivual
glory and dedicate themselves to the embodiment of the mood of their people. "Architects are servants, not leaders. They are not to assert their little egos, but to express
th soul of their country and the rhythm of their time. They are not to follow the delusions of their personal fancy, but to seek the common denominator which will bring
their work close to the heart of the masses. Architects—ah, my friends, theirs is not to reason why. Theirs is not to command, but to be commanded."
Ishmael:
"You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the
world in order to live."
"Yes, that's the way it seems."
"So. You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake,
isn't it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world."
"Yes, that's so. I've just never thought of it that way."
"And you yourself are a captive in a personal way, are you not?"
"How so?"
Ishmael smiled, revealing a great mass of ivory–colored teeth. I hadn't known he could, until then.
I said: "I have an impression of being a captive, but I can't explain why I have this impression."
"A few years ago—you must have been a child at the time, so you may not remember it—many
young people of this country had the same impression. They made an ingenuous and disorganized
effort to escape from captivity but ultimately failed, because they were unable to find the bars of the
cage. If you can't discover what's keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and
ineffectual."
"Yes, that's the sense I have of it."
Ishmael nodded.
"But again, how does this relate to saving the world?"
"The world is not going to survive for very much longer as humanity's captive. Does that need
explication?"
"No. At least not to me."
"I think there are many among you who would be glad to release the world from captivity."
"I agree."
"What prevents them from doing this?"
"I don't know."
"This is what prevents them: They're unable to find the bars of the cage."
"Once when I was in college," I told him at last, "I wrote a paper for a philosophy class. I don't
remember exactly what the assignment was—something to do with epistemology. Here's what I
said in the paper, roughly: Guess what? The Nazis didn't lose the war after all. They won it and
nourished. They took over the world and wiped out every last Jew, every last Gypsy, black, East
Indian, and American Indian. Then, when they were finished with that, they wiped out the Russians
and the Poles and the Bohemians and the Moravians and the Bulgarians and the Serbians and the
Croatians—all the Slavs. Then they started in on the Polynesians and the Koreans and the Chinese
and the Japanese—all the peoples of Asia. This took a long, long time, but when it was all over,
everyone in the world was one hundred percent Aryan, and they were all very, very happy.
"Naturally the textbooks used in the schools no longer mentioned any race but the Aryan or any
language but German or any religion but Hitlerism or any political system but National Socialism.
There would have been no point. After a few generations of that, no one could have put anything
different into the textbooks even if they'd wanted to, because they didn't know anything different.
"But one day two young students were conversing at the University of New Heidelberg in Tokyo.
Both were handsome in the usual Aryan way, but one of them looked vaguely worried and unhappy.
That was Kurt. His friend said, 'What's wrong, Kurt? Why are you always moping around like
this?' Kurt said, 'I'll tell you, Hans. There is something that's troubling me—and troubling me
deeply.' His friend asked what it was. 'It's this,' Kurt said. 'I can't shake the crazy feeling that there
is some small thing that we're being lied to about.'
"And that's how the paper ended."
Ishmael nodded thoughtfully. "And what did your teacher think of that?"
"He wanted to know if I had the same crazy feeling as Kurt. When I said I did, he wanted to know
what I thought we were being lied to about. I said, 'How could I know? I'm no better off than Kurt.'
Of course, he didn't
"What [Hitler] had to tell them was a story."
"A story."
"A story in which the Aryan race and the people of Germany in particular had been deprived of
their rightful place in the world, bound, spat upon, raped, and ground into the dirt under the heels of
mongrel races, Communists, and Jews. A story in which, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, the
Aryan race would burst its bonds, wreak vengeance on its oppressors, purify mankind of its
defilements, and assume its rightful place as the master of all races."
"True."
"It may seem incredible to you now that any people could have been captivated by such nonsense,
but after nearly two decades of degradation and suffering following World War I, it had an almost
overwhelming appeal to the people of Germany, and it was reinforced not only through the ordinary
means of propaganda but by an intensive program of education of the young and reeducation of the
old."
"True."
"As I say, there were many in Germany who recognized this story as rank mythology. They were
nevertheless held captive by it simply because the vast majority around them thought it sounded
wonderful and were willing to give their lives to make it a reality. Do you see what I mean?"
"I think so. Even if you weren't personally captivated by the story, you were a captive all the same,
because the people around you
"Mother Culture teaches you that this is as it should be. Except for a few thousand savages scattered
here and there, all the peoples of the earth are now enacting this story. This is the story man was
born to enact, and to depart from it is to resign from the human race itself, is to venture into
oblivion. Your place is here, participating in this story, putting your shoulder to the wheel, and as a
reward, being fed. There is no 'something else.' To step out of this story is to fall off the edge of the
world. There's no way out of it except through death."
What have people been told that keeps them from becoming excited, that keeps them relatively
calm when they view the catastrophic damage they're inflicting on this planet?"
"I don't know."
VTN 26
"They've been told an explaining story. They've been given an explanation of how things came to
be this way, and this stills their alarm. This explanation covers everything, including the
deterioration of the ozone layer, the pollution of the oceans, the destruction of the rain forests, and
even human extinction—and it satisfies them. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it
pacifies them. They put their shoulders to the wheel during the day, stupefy themselves with drugs
or television at night, and try not to think too searchingly about the world they're leaving their
children to cope with."
"Right."
"You yourself were given the same explanation of how things came to be this way as everyone
else—but it apparently doesn't satisfy you. You've heard it from infancy but have never managed to
swallow it. You have the feeling something's been left out, glossed over. You have the feeling
you've been lied to about something, and if you can, you'd like to know what it is—and that's what
you're doing here in this room."
"Of course. Everyone in your culture knows this. The pinnacle was reached in man. Man is the
climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation."
"Yes."
"When man finally appeared, creation came to an end, because its objective had been reached.
There was nothing left to create."
VTN 34
"That seems to be the unspoken assumption."
"It's certainly not always unspoken. The religions of your culture aren't reticent about it. Man is the
end product of creation. Man is the creature for whom all the rest was made: this world, this solar
system, this galaxy, the universe itself."
"Only one thing can save us. We have to increase our mastery of the world. All this damage has
come about through our conquest of the world, but we have to go on conquering it until our rule is
absolute. Then, when we're in complete control, everything will be fine.
Steward's aggressive growth has made local doctors like me nervous. But many health systems, for-profit and not-for-profit, share its goal: large-scale, production-line medicine. The way medical care is organized is changing—because the way we pay for it is changing.
Historically, doctors have been paid for services, not results. In the eighteenth century B.C., Hammurabi's code instructed that a surgeon be paid ten shekels of silver every time he performed a procedure for a patrician—opening an abscess or treating a cataract with his bronze lancet. It also instructed that if the patient should die or lose an eye, the surgeon's hands be cut off. Apparently, the Mesopotamian surgeons' lobby got this results clause dropped. Since then, we've generally been paid for what we do, whatever happens. The consequence is the system we have, with plenty of individual transactions—procedures, tests, specialist consultations—and uncertain attention to how the patient ultimately fares.
Health-care reforms—public and private—have sought to reshape that system. This year, my employer's new contracts with Medicare, BlueCross BlueShield, and others link financial reward to clinical performance. The more the hospital exceeds its cost-reduction and quality-improvement targets, the more money it can keep. If it misses the targets, it will lose tens of millions of dollars. This is a radical shift. Until now, hospitals and medical groups have mainly had a landlord-tenant relationship with doctors. They offered us space and facilities, but what we tenants did behind closed doors was our business. Now it's their business, too.
Chain production requires control, and they'd figured out how to achieve it on a mass scale.
In medicine, good ideas still take an appallingly long time to trickle down. Recently, the American Academy of Neurology and the American Headache Society released new guidelines for migraine-headache-treatment. They recommended treating severe migraine sufferers—who have more than six attacks a month—with preventive medications and listed several drugs that markedly reduce the occurrence of attacks. The authors noted, however, that previous guidelines going back more than a decade had recommended such remedies, and doctors were still not providing them to more than two-thirds of patients. One study examined how long it took several major discoveries, such as the finding that the use of beta-blockers after a heart attack improves survival, to reach even half of Americans. The answer was, on average, more than fifteen years.
In medicine, we hardly ever think about how to implement what we've learned. We learn what we want to, when we want to.
Although fewer than one in four thousand Americans are in intensive care at any given time, they account for four per cent of national health-care costs.
The fundamental question in medicine is: Who is in charge?
Essentially, we're moving from a Jeffersonian ideal of small guilds and independent craftsmen to a Hamiltonian recognition of the advantages that size and centralized control can bring.
Yet it seems strange to pin our hopes on chains. We have no guarantee that Big Medicine will serve the social good. Whatever the industry, an increase in size and control creates the conditions for monopoly, which could do the opposite of what we want: suppress innovation and drive up costs over time. In the past, certainly, health-care systems that pursued size and market power were better at raising prices than at lowering them.
About the SATS (or any standardized test, really) : But now I'm here, and my head doesn't function the way it used to. All thanks to a test that measured … what, exactly? Nothing important, I've discovered. Nothing sustaining. Just "aptitude."
That's why we're here: we all showed aptitude. Aptitude for showing aptitude, mainly. That's what they wanted, so that's what we delivered. A talent for nothing, but a knack for everything.
"When have you ever seen someone who had no doubts who was also correct about anything?"
-Orson Scott Card
"When people give you their stated reason for doing something always assume they are giving you a reason that sounds good, but not the real reason."
-James Altucher
"The best definition of intelligence is the ability, as circumstances change, to alter one's behavior appropriately to serve one's own best interests. Stupidity, then, is the opposite trait."
-Michael Ghiglieri
"Respect the gods and buddhas, but do not rely on them."
-Miyamoto Musashi
"When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save some money…but thats a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. And the minute that you understand that you can poke life…you can change it and mold it, thats maybe the most important thing. To shake off this erroneous notion that life is there, and you're just going to live it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it and make your mark upon it. I think thats very important and however you learn that–once you learn it–you'll want to change life and make it better, because its kinda messed up in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again."
-Steve Jobs
"Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults."
-Ben Franklin
"To get at the truth of your calling, you have to crack open that false self and see what lies within."
-Justine Musk
"Infinite patience gets you immediate results."
-James Altucher
"The only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge."
-Orson Scott Card
"Yes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but everyone forgets the second half of that quote: the road to heaven is paved with good actions."
-Tucker Max
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable."
-C.S. Lewis
"Without a theory the facts are silent."
-F.A. Hayek
"The only teacher who's worth anything to you is your enemy."
-Orson Scott Card
"My path to wisdom began when I stopped pretending to know things I didn't know. When I explicitly admitted to the limits of my knowledge, stopped building on ambiguity and ignorance, and instead realized that I knew nothing, not even the things I thought I knew."
-Tucker Max
"If you set your bar at 'amazing' it's awfully difficult to start. Your first paragraph, sketch, formula, sample or concept isn't going to be amazing. Your tenth one might not be either. Confronted with the gap between your vision of perfect and the reality of what you've created, the easiest path is no path. Shrug. Admit defeat. Hit delete. One more reason to follow someone else and wait for instructions. Of course, the only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing. But not-yet-amazing is a great place to start, because that's where you are."
-Seth Godin
"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us in trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so."
-Artemus Ward
"Peace is knowing that the maze the mind plays in is not the truth. Peace is knowing that life is. Just is. How we choose to react to it determines our reality."
-Kamal Ravikant
"Fanaticism is the only way to put an end to the doubts that constantly trouble the human soul."
-Paulo Coehlo
"Great careers are getting easier to find and audition for, but harder to keep."
-Tucker Max
"The only persons who really changed history are those who changed men's thinking about themselves."
-Malcolm X
"If most of your courtship attempts have succeeded, you must be a very attractive and charming person who has been aiming too low."
-Geoffrey Miller
"This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic quality. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic."
-Ernest Hemingway
"Obstacles are only obstacles if you see them as obstacles. They can also be called opportunities."
-Tucker Max
"See to it that you temper yourself with one thousand days of practice, and refine yourself with ten thousand days of training."
-Miyamoto Mushashi
"Arguing with people is like reading your email at 4 in the morning. There is absolutely no good that can come of it. It's just scratching an itch."
-James Altucher
On Killing:
But as with cultural distance, there is a danger associated with moral distance. That danger is, of course, that every nation seems to think that God is on its side. The social class structure that exists in the military provides a denial mechanism that makes it possible for leaders to order their men to their deaths. But it makes military leadership a very lonely thing.
The recent loss of friends and beloved leaders in combat can also enable violence on the battlefield. The deaths of friends and comrades can stun, paralyze, and emotionally defeat soldiers. But in many circumstances soldiers react with anger (which is one of the well-known response stages to death and dying), and then the loss of comrades can enable killing. There is such a thing as a "natural soldier": the kind who derives his greatest satisfaction from male companionship, from excitement, and from the conquering of physical obstacles. He doesn't want to kill people as such, but he will have no objections if it occurs within a moral framework that gives him justification — like war — and if it is the price of gaining admission to the kind of environment he craves. Whether such men are born or made, I do not know, but most of them end up in armies (and many move on again to become mercenaries, because regular army life in peacetime is too routine and boring). But armies are not full of such men. They are so rare that they form only a modest fraction even of small professional armies, mostly congregating in the commando-type special forces. In large conscript armies they virtually disappear beneath the weight of numbers of more ordinary men. And it is these ordinary men, who do not like combat at all, that armies must persuade to kill. Until only a generation ago, they did not even realize how bad a job they were doing. — Gwynne Dyer
War
Several senior U.S. Air Force officers have told me that when the U.S. Air Force tried to preselect fighter pilots fter World War II, the only common denominator they could find among their World War II aces was that they had been involved in a lot of fights as children. Not bullies — for most true bullies avoid fights with anyone who is reasonably capable of fighting them — but fighters. If you can recapture or imagine the anger and indignity a child feels in a school-yard fight and magnify that into a way of life, then you can begin to understand these individuals and their
capacity for violence.
Milgram's Factors
Demands of Authority
• Proximity of the obedience-demanding authority figure to the subject
• Subject's subjective respect for the obedience-demanding authority figure
• Intensity of the obedience-demanding authority figure's demands of killing behavior
• Legitimacy of the obedience-demanding authority figure's authority and demands
Group Absolution
• Subject's identification with the group
• Proximity of the group to the subject
AN ANATOMY OF KILLING
Intensity of the group's support for the kill
Number in the immediate group
Legitimacy of the group
Total Distance from the Victim
Physical distance between the killer and the victim
Emotional distance between the killer and the victim, including:
—Social distance, which considers the impact of a lifetime of
viewing a particular class as less than human in a socially
stratified environment
—Cultural distance, which includes racial and ethnic differences
that permit the killer to "dehumanize" the victim
ALL FACTORS CONSIDERED 189
Those who commit atrocity have made a Faustian bargain with evil. They have sold their conscience, their future, and their peace of mind for a brief, fleeting, self-destructive advantage. The basic response stages to killing in combat are concern about killing, the actual kill, exhilaration, remorse, and rationalization and acceptance. Like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's famous stages in response to death and dying, these stages are generally sequential
but not necessarily universal.
Combat Addiction . . . is caused when, during a firefight, the body releases a large amount of adrenaline into your system and you get what is referred to as a "combat high." This combat high is like getting an injection of morphine — you float around, laughing, joking, having a great time, totally oblivious to the dangers around you. The experience is very intense if you live to tell about it. Problems arise when you begin to want another fix of combat,
and another, and another and, before you know it, you're hooked. As with heroin or cocaine addiction, combat addiction will surely get you killed. And like any addict, you get desperate and will do anything to get your fix.
—Jack Thompson
"Hidden Enemies"
The first is that when you have cause to identify with your victim (that is, you see him participate in some act that emphasizes his humanity, such as urinating, eating, or smoking) it is much harder to kill him, and there is much less satisfaction associated with the kill, even if the victim represents a direct threat to you and your comrades at the time you kill him. The second point is that subsequent kills are always easier, and there is much more of a tendency to feel satisfaction or exhilaration after the second killing experience, and less tendency to feel remorse.
Then I asked quietly, "Roger, when you got pushed just now, you came back with the fact that you had to kill in Vietnam. Was that the worst of it for you?" "Yah," he said. "That's half of it." "The other half was that when we got home, nobody understood."
It's easier if you catch them young. You can train older men to be soldiers; it's done in every major war. But you can never get them to believe that they like it, which is the major reason armies try to get their recruits before they are twenty. There are other reasons too, of course, like the physical fitness, lack of dependents, and economic dispensability of teenagers, that make armies prefer them, but the most important qualities teenagers bring to basic
training are enthusiasm and naivete. . . . The armed forces of every country can take almost any young
male civilian and turn him into a soldier with all the right reflexes and attitudes in only a few weeks. Their recruits usually have no more than twenty years' experience of the world, most of it as
WHAT HAVE WE DONE TO OUR SOLDIERS? 265
children, while the armies have had all of history to practice and perfect their technique. — Gwynne Dyer
War
The combatants of all wars are frightfully young, but the American combatants in Vietnam were significantly younger than in any war in American history. Most were drafted at eighteen and experienced combat during one of the most malleable and vulnerable stages of their lives. This was America's first "teenage war," with the average combatant having not yet seen his twentieth birthday, and these combatants were without the leavening of mature, older soldiers that has always been there in past wars. Vietnam was distinctly different from any war we have fought
before or since, in that it was a war of individuals. With very few exceptions, every combatant arrived in Vietnam as an individual replacement on a twelve-month tour — thirteen months for the U.S. Marines.
WHAT HAVE WE DONE TO OUR SOLDIERS? 269
The average soldier had only to survive his year in hell and thus, for the first time, had a clear-cut way out of combat other than as a physical or psychological casualty. In this environment it was far more possible, even natural, that many soldiers would remain aloof, and their bonding would never develop into the full, mature, lifelong relationships of previous wars. This policy (combined with the use of drugs, maintenance of proximity to
the combat zone, and establishment of an expectancy of returning to combat) resulted in an all-time-record low number of psychiatric casualties in Vietnam.
World War II soldiers joined for the duration. A soldier may have come into combat as an individual replacement, but he knew that he would be with his unit for the rest of the war. In Vietnam most soldiers arrived on the battlefield alone, afraid, and without friends. A soldier joined a unit where he was an FNG, a "f- ing new guy," whose inexperience and incompetence represented a threat to the continued survival of those in the unit. In a few months, for a brief period, he became an old hand who was bonded to a few friends and able to function well in combat.
But then, all too soon, his friends left him via death, injury, or the end of their tours, and he too became a short timer, whose only concern was surviving until the end of his tour of duty. Unit morale, cohesion, and bonding suffered tremendously. All but the best of units became just a collection of men experiencing endless leavings and arrivals, and that sacred process of bonding, which makes it possible for men to do what they must do in combat,
became a tattered and torn remnant of the support structure experienced by veterans of past American wars.
Two sources of public recognition and affirmation vital to the soldier are the parades that have traditionally welcomed them home from combat and the memorials and monuments that have commemorated and mourned their dead comrades. Parades are an essential rite of passage to the returning veteran in the same way Even the twenty-year-late Vietnam Veterans Memorial had to be constructed in the face of the same indignity and misunderstanding
that the veterans had endured for so long. Initially the memorial was not to have the flag and statue traditionally associated with such edifices: instead the monument to our nation's longest war was going to be just a "black gash of shame" with the names of the fallen engraved upon it. It was only after a long and bitter battle that veterans' groups were able to get a statue and a flagpole flying the U.S. flag added to their memorial.
Atlas Shrugged:
Yes, I know, I know, he's making money. But that is not the standard, it seems to me, by which one
gauges a man's value to society.
"I don't like Henry Rearden."
"I do. But what does that matter, one way or the other? We need rails and he's the only one who can
give them to us."
"The human element is very important. You have no sense of the human element at all."
"We're talking about saving a railroad, Jim."
"Yes, of course, of course, but still, you haven't any sense of the human element.
He wanted to meet someone, to face the first stranger, to stand
disarmed and open, and to say, "Look at me." People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as
he had always been—for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so
inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.
"Henry, you work too hard," said Philip. "It's not good for you."
Rearden laughed. "I like it."
"That's what you tell yourself. It's a form of neurosis, you know. When a man drowns himself in work,
it's because he's trying to escape from something. You ought to have a hobby."
The old man looked as if he had noticed the sudden stop and understood it; but he did not start
discussing it; he said, instead, "I don't like the thing that's happening to people, Miss Taggart."
"What?"
"I don't know. But I've watched them here for twenty years and I've seen the change. They used to rush
through here, and it was wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were
going and were eager to get there. Now they're hurrying because they are afraid.
It's not a purpose that drives them, it's fear. They're not going anywhere, they're escaping. And I don't
think they know what it is that they want to escape. They don't look at one another. They jerk when
brushed against. They smile too much, but it's an ugly kind of smiling: it's not joy, it's pleading. I don't
know what it is that's happening to the world." He shrugged. "Oh well, who is John Galt?"
mean?"
"Dagny, the whole world's in a terrible state right now. I don't know what's wrong with it, but
something's very wrong. Men have to get together and find a way out. But who's to decide which way
to take, unless it's the majority? I guess that's the only fair method of deciding, I don't see any other. I
suppose somebody's got to be sacrificed. If it turned out to be me, I have no right to complain. The
right's on their side. Men have to get together."
"We haven't any spiritual goals or qualities. All we're after is material things. That's all we care for,"
He concentrated on the relief of the mirror's cooling touch, wondering how one went about forcing
one's mind into blankness, particularly after a lifetime lived on the axiom that the constant, clearest,
most ruthless function of his rational faculty was his foremost duty
Dr. Pritchett picked a canape off a crystal dish, held it speared between two straight fingers and
deposited it whole into his mouth.
"Man's metaphysical pretensions," he said, "are preposterous. A miserable bit of protoplasm, full of
ugly little concepts and mean little emotions—and it imagines itself important! Really, you know, that
is the root of all the troubles in the world."
"But which concepts are not ugly or mean, Professor?" asked an earnest matron whose husband
owned an automobile factory.
"None," said Dr. Pritchett, "None within the range of man's capacity."
A young man asked hesitantly, "But if we haven't any good concepts, how do we know that the ones
we've got are ugly? I mean, by what standard?"
"There aren't any standards."
This silenced his audience.
"The philosophers of the past were superficial," Dr. Pritchett went on. "It remained for our century to
redefine the purpose of philosophy.
The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find the meaning of life, but to prove to them that there
isn't any."
An attractive young woman, whose father owned a coal mine, asked indignantly, "Who can tell us
that?"
"I am trying to," said Dr. Pritchett. For the last three years, he had been head of the Department of
Philosophy at the Patrick Henry University.
Lillian Rearden approached, her jewels glittering under the lights.
The expression on her face was held to the soft hint of a smile, set and faintly suggested, like the
waves of her hair.
"It is this insistence of man upon meaning that makes him so difficult," said Dr. Pritchett. "Once he
realizes that he is of no importance whatever in the vast scheme of the universe, that no possible
significance can be attached to his activities, that it does not matter whether he lives or dies, he will
become much more . . . tractable."
He shrugged and reached for another canape", A businessman said uneasily, "What I asked you about,
Professor, was what you thought about the Equalization of Opportunity Bill."
"Oh, that?" said Dr. Pritchett. "But I believe I made it clear that I am in favor of it, because I am in
favor of a free economy. A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be
forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free."
"But, look . . . isn't that sort of a contradiction?"
"Not in the higher philosophical sense. You must learn to see beyond the static definitions of oldfashioned
thinking. Nothing is static in the universe. Everything is fluid."
"But it stands to reason that if—"
"Reason, my dear fellow, is the most naive of all superstitions. That, at least, has been generally
conceded in our age,"
"But I don't quite understand how we can—"
"You suffer from the popular delusion of believing that things can be understood. You do not grasp the
fact that the universe is a solid contradiction."
"A contradiction of what?" asked the matron.
"Of itself."
"How . . . how's that?"
"My dear madam, the duty of thinkers is not to explain, but to demonstrate that nothing can be
explained."
"Yes, of course . . . only . , ,"
"The purpose of philosophy is not to seek knowledge, but to prove that knowledge is impossible to
man."
"But when we prove it," asked the young woman, "what's going to be left?"
"Instinct," said Dr. Pritchett reverently.
At the other end of the room, a group was listening to Balph Eubank. He sat upright on the edge of an
armchair, in order to counteract the appearance of his face and figure, which had a tendency to spread
if relaxed.
"The literature of the past," said Balph Eubank, "was a shallow fraud. It whitewashed life in order to
please the money tycoons whom it served. Morality, free will, achievement, happy endings, and man
as some sort of heroic being—all that stuff is laughable to us. Our age has given depth to literature for
the first time, by exposing the real essence of life,"
A very young girl in a white evening gown asked timidly, "What is the real essence of life, Mr.
Eubank?"
"Suffering," said Balph Eubank. "Defeat and suffering."
"But . . . but why? People are happy . . . sometimes . . . aren't they?"
"That is a delusion of those whose emotions are superficial."
The girl blushed. A wealthy woman who had inherited an oil refinery, asked guiltily, "What should
we do to raise the people's literary taste, Mr. Eubank?"
"That is a great social problem," said Balph Eubank. He was described as the literary leader of the
age, but had never written a book that sold more than three thousand copies. "Personally, I believe
that an Equalization of Opportunity Bill applying to literature would be the solution."
"Oh, do you approve of that Bill for industry? I'm not sure I know what to think of it."
"Certainly, I approve of it. Our culture has sunk into a bog of materialism. Men have lost all spiritual
values in their pursuit of material production and technological trickery. They're too comfortable.
They will return to a nobler life if we teach them to bear privations. So we ought to place a limit upon
their material greed."
"I hadn't thought of it that way," said the woman apologetically.
"But how are you going to work an Equalization of Opportunity Bill for literature, Ralph?" asked
Mort Liddy. "That's a new one on me."
"My name is Balph," said Eubank angrily. "And it's a new one on you because it's my own idea."
"Okay, okay, I'm not quarreling, am I? I'm just asking." Mort Liddy smiled. He spent most of his time
smiling nervously. He was a composer who wrote old-fashioned scores for motion pictures, and
modern symphonies for sparse audiences.
"It would work very simply," said Balph Eubank. "There should be a law limiting the sale of any
book to ten thousand copies. This would throw the literary market open to new talent, fresh ideas and
non-commercial writing. If people were forbidden to buy a million copies of the same piece of trash,
they would be forced to buy better books."
"You've got something there," said Mort Liddy. "But wouldn't it be kinda tough on the writers' bank
accounts?"
"So much the better. Only those whose motive is not money-making should be allowed to write."
the diamond band on the
wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained.
"I don't like people who speak or think in terms of gaining anybody's confidence. If one's actions
are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others, only their rational perception. The
person who craves a moral blank check of that kind, has dishonest intentions, whether he admits it to
himself or not."
To me,
there's only one form of human depravity—the man without a purpose."
What is man's fate? Hasn't it always been to hope, but never to achieve? The
wise man is the one- who does not attempt to hope.
But there were times when he felt a sudden access of desire, so violent that it could not be given to a
casual encounter. He had surrendered to it, on a few rare occasions through the years, with women he
had thought he liked. He had been left feeling an angry emptiness—because he had sought an act of
triumph, though he had not known of what nature, but the response he received was only a woman's
acceptance of a casual pleasure, and he knew too clearly that what he had won had no meaning. He
was left, not with a sense of attainment, but with a sense of his own degradation. He grew to hate his
desire. He fought it. He came to believe the doctrine that this desire was wholly physical, a desire,
not of consciousness, but of matter, and he rebelled against the thought that his flesh could be free to
choose and that its choice was impervious to the will of his mind. He had spent his life in mines and
mills, shaping matter to his wishes by the power of his brain—and he found it intolerable that he
should be unable to control the matter of his own body. He fought it. He had won his every battle
against inanimate nature; but this was a battle he lost.
She had never objected; she had never refused him anything; she submitted whenever he wished. She
submitted in the manner of complying with the rule that it was, at times, her duty to become an
inanimate object turned over to her husband's use.
She did not censure him. She made it clear that she took it for granted that men had degrading instincts
which constituted the secret, ugly part of marriage. She was condescendingly tolerant. She smiled, in
amused distaste, at the intensity of what he experienced. "It's the most undignified pastime I know of,"
she said to him once, "but I have never entertained the illusion that men are superior to animals."
His desire for her had died in the first week of their marriage. What remained was only a need which
he was unable to destroy. He had never entered a whorehouse; he thought, at times, that the selfloathing
he would experience there could be no worse than what he felt when he was driven to enter
his wife's bedroom.
"You go through life looking for beauty, for greatness, for some sublime achievement," he said. "And
what do you find? A lot of trick machinery for making upholstered cars or inner-spring mattresses."
line."
"What is morality?" she asked.
"Judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to
that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. But where does one find it?"
"You're young," he said. "At your age, I had the same faith in the unlimited power of reason. The same
brilliant vision of man as a rational being. I have seen so much, since. I have been disillusioned so
often.
"But, Mr. Taggart, the Line you built—"
"Oh, what's that Line, anyway? It's only a material achievement, is that of any importance? Is there any
greatness in anything material?
Only a low animal can gape at that bridge—when there are so many higher things in life. But do the
higher things ever get recognition? Oh no! Look at people. All that hue and cry and front pages about
some trick arrangement of some scraps of matter. Do they care about any nobler issue? Do they ever
give front pages to a phenomenon of the spirit? Do they notice or appreciate a person of finer
sensibility? And you wonder whether it's true that a great man is doomed to unhappiness in this
depraved world!" He leaned forward, staring at her intently. "I'll tell you . . . I'll tell you something . .
. unhappiness is the hallmark of virtue. If a man is unhappy, really, truly unhappy, it means that he is a
superior sort of person."
"It's great of you, Mr. Taggart, to think that
your own achievement isn't good enough for you. I guess no matter how far you've gone, you want to
go still farther. You're ambitious. That's what I admire most: ambition. I mean, doing things, not
stopping and giving up, but doing. I understand, Mr. Taggart . . . even if I don't understand all the big
thoughts."
I've just finished a huge swath of Alain De Botton's books. So I'm doing a special quote list of his quotes I liked.Note: A LOT of these come from his Twitter account, which is one of the best that I follow. Bolded quotes are my personal favorites:
"Fault finding without any interest in improvement: cynicism."
"In love, rather than being idealised as perfect, it seems better to be recognised as deeply flawed – but treated hopefully."
"Important truths of the age aren't uttered for fear of the wilful distortions and attacks they'd immediately suffer in the media."
"Insomnia is all the thoughts you escaped from having in the day, returning for revenge and their full due."
"The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice."
"When trying to decode the 'weird' behaviour of others, think of the most basic emotions: Fear, Envy, Guilt…"
"How special and omnipresent an adult needs to be is a measure of how invisible they were once made to feel."
"At a certain point, a 'boring evening' becomes one of the most exciting prospects."
"Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself."
"Anyone else feel that ache of a needy, fragile, mortal ego adrift in a vast and wholly indifferent universe?"
"Cynicism: disappointing yourself thoroughly before the world gets a chance to do it for you at a time of its own choosing."
"With many problems, the best you can do is move from feeling individually persecuted to (via art/conversation) collectively sad."
"So long as we continue to have such trouble telling each other what we really feel, there'll be room for literature."
"Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough."
"Almost all nastiness stems from fragility, sadness, disappointment: an impossible thing to believe when you're in the line of fire."
"Mind-body issue: people are so proud to go to the gym; so ashamed to go to a therapist."
"So easy to settle on feeling misunderstood; so much harder to spell things out."
"Irony: a way of sliding over emotions without having to feel them."
"If more people thought for themselves, a good reputation would be far less important."
"Now the age your parents were at when, as a child, you imagined they knew what was going on, you realize you don't know what is going on."
"Parenting: to make them feel so special, they'll later have the strength to deal with insignificance."
"Serial philanderers: they are loyal – to the emotions that accompany the start of love."
"Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves."
"She was so competitive about seeming good & kind, she would have fought to the death to prove she was nicer than you."
"As parents know, flattering someone ('you're such a good brother') has its role in enhancing the trait that's as yet only half there."
"Definition of good, emotionally-adept parenting: that the child grows up with no wish whatever to become a writer."
"The double betrayal of a liberal arts education: it neither properly teaches you how to live – nor how to make a living."
"The need to be liked by people you don't know (or like) should be treated as an illness like any other."
"Like the good parent, the lover should first wonder: 'perhaps they're sad and scared rather than mean'."
"When it finally happens, happiness chiefly feels worrying."
"Great social climbers don't just cynically exploit the powerful to get to the top: they sincerely fall in love with them."
"The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone."
"Marriage isn't a vow to stop being interested in other people; more about how to handle that interest."
"We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers. Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitternes?"
"Behind almost every inconvenience; a new business waiting to be born."
"Power replaces sex for the old and the committed."
"Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all."
"Reputation a bit like a table: one or two marks and everyone notices: a whole host of scratches and it all blends in."
"Compatibility is an achievement of love, not a precondition."
"It would be so much easier if we'd stop being mean when, mainly, we're just hurt."
"The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones."
"How aloof and uninterested a parental figure must usually have been for someone to grow up deeply charming."
"There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life."
"Previous generations messed up kids through harshness, neglect. This one: through perfectionist over-attentiveness and 'kindness'."
"We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next."
"Always assume that the most cheerful 'normal' person may inwardly be fighting immense anxiety and an urge to end it all."
"The best way to cheer someone up is to be so dark as to exceed their worst fears – and so raise a compensatory laugh."
"To have a chance to achieve something that will one day be in the news, we have to spend quite a lot of time away from the news."
"The only people we can still think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well."
"The best vaccine against anger: to watch others in its throes."
"Really polite people don't seem 'polite'; just kind."
"A capacity to appreciate life's small moments: related to an underlying darker sense that the whole can never be made perfect."
"The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did."
"The hope on picking up a book: it will tell us what we already feel and intuit but haven't had time to think."
"How much time we'd save if we transferred emotional knowledge across generations, as we do science or money."
"A strong desire not to be alone: a sure sign one is incubating a difficult message to tell oneself."
"Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice."
"Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them."
"Decadence: a forgetting of how privilege is gained, which heralds its loss."
"Where there's an attention seeking partner, an attention denying partner can't be far behind – and vice versa."
"People who are plain horrible are so much more survivable than those who also mix in a bit of real love with their abuse."
"Weakness is principally attractive in the strong."
"Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from."
"Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own."
"An intuition: the unconscious mind has reasons the conscious part still has to catch up with."
"Proper success for intellectuals should be that their special insights become the common-sense of the next generation."
"I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become."
-Carl Jung
"Those who write clearly have readers. Those who write obscurely have commentators."
-Albert Camus
"If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write."
-W. Somerset Maugham
"It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't."
-Josh Olson
"Imagine a large corporate machine mobilized to get you to buy something you don't need at a tremendously inflated cost, complete with advertising, marketing, and branding that says you're not hip if you don't have one, but when you get one you discover it's of poor quality and obsolete in ten months. That's a BA."
-The Last Psychiatrist
"There is a big difference between danger and fear."
-Paulo Coelho
"You cannot discourage a writer. If someone can talk you out of being a writer, you're not a writer. If I can talk you out of being a writer, I've done you a favor, because now you'll be free to pursue your real talent, whatever that may be. And, for the record, everybody has one. The lucky ones figure out what that is. The unlucky ones keep on writing shitty screenplays and asking me to read them."
-Josh Olson
"He who feeds a Chaos will raise a Demon."
-The Last Psychiatrist
"Middle-aged people–like me–often look back on our teenage selves with some mixture of amusement and chagrin. What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us. At every age we think we're having the last laugh, and at every age we're wrong."
-Dan Gilbert
"History repeats because the passions of man never change, but it is like lightening – it never strikes in the same manner and place twice."
-Martin Armstrong
"Irrationality lies not in failing to conform to some preconceived notion of how we should behave, but in persisting with a course of action that does not work."
-John Kay
"Critics stopped being relevant when they stopped writing to inform and contextualize, and when they started writing to signal who they are, to display their identity by their stance on what they are writing about. Criticism should never be about the critic, but thats what it has become, and that's why no one cares about them anymore."
-Tucker Max
"When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them."
-Martin Buber
"When we gawk at the illusion of stability dissolving, it's a reaction to the wrong half of the equation. If things need to change, it means that what we do becomes incredibly more important. Do. Action suddenly becomes more valuable. It means that there is opportunity, if one can perceive everyone else's blind spot and find some white space for themselves. If everyone is getting together and complaining, it means that there's a lot of unoccupied space somewhere. Basically, it means that your contribution matters. And if you can muster up the strength to push against your fear, you might be able to do something that changes the game, just like Eva did. It isn't about being Anti. It's about being pro-something-good and making and acting and moving towards Pre-something-incredible."
-Frank Chimera
"You should write the book you would want to read, not the one you believe you should write."
-David Ritz
"We are interested in others when they are interested in us."
-Publius Syrus
"A man generally has two reasons for doing things; one that sounds good, and a real one."
-JP Morgan
"You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself."
-Galileo
"Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so."
-Lord Chesterfield
"One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing."
-Socrates
"Civilization is the process of turning the incomprehensible into the arbitrary."
-Venkat Rao
"Don't be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of friends who flatter you."
-Alvaro Oberon
"Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see."
-Douglas Adams
"A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men."
-Thomas Carlyle
"In eras past, mainstream culture was blandly, blindly complacent, so underground music was angry and dissatisfied. But now, mainstream culture isn't complacent, it's stupid and angry; underground culture reacts by becoming smarter, more serene. That's not wimpy—it's powerful and productive."
-Michael Azerrad
"Look at what people are trying to conceal, and you'll see that they're revealing everything."
-William Monahan
"People constantly show you who they are. Believe them."
-Tucker Max
"Death isn't sad. There's nothing sad about it. Living a shitty life, that's sad."
-Mac Danzig
"If you really understand something, you can: 1) explain it using a clear metaphor and 2) explain the strongest counter-argument to the idea."
-Ben Casnocha
"You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail."
-Charlie Parker
"Facts that challenge basic assumptions—and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem—are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them."
-Daniel Kahneman
"If frequency with which you cite an education credential does not decrease over the course of your life, you're not accomplishing very much."
-Ben Casnocha
"Strong people are harder to kill and more useful in general."
-Mark Rippetoe
"The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly."
-Thomas Paine
"There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn't one."
-Scott Berkun
"To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means 'not like this' and 'not like that.' And the 'not like'—that's why postmodernism, with the prefix of 'post,' couldn't work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one."
-Eva Zeisel
"As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every two hours and cried."
-Ben Horowitz
"Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don't get that experience, but suddenly in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror — but, by God, you are alive."
-Joseph Campbell
"You can only know a good wine if you have first tasted a bad one."
-Paulo Coelho
"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted 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."
-Leo Tolstoy
"Even in that most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic disappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pain, loss, and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes in order not to see the bad things in life."
-Paulo Coelho
"The best way to learn is to do."
-Paul Halmos
"It isn't explanations that carry us forward, it's our desire to go on."
-Paulo Coelho
"What I've learned most clearly from blogs is that the majority of them write about the problems from the outside for a reason—because they are missing the abilities that allow people to move to the inside."
-Ryan Holiday
"Maybe strength in the 21st century isn't about dominance. My hunch is that it's about the very opposite — it's about the capacity to evoke. It's about the willingness to serve a bigger purpose than yourself, the capacity to subordinate yourself to a larger goal than your own gain, the ability to spark the enduring bonds of shared values, intrinsic motivation, and mutually committed perseverance. It is, in short, not the power merely to command, subordinate, demean, insult — and then crow about it with impunity. It's the power to inspire, animate, infuse, spark, evoke — and then connect, link, and collaborate, to be a force multiplier."
-Umair Haque
"All that is clever eschew. Do not do."
-Anne Herbert
"This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren't interested in your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story."
-Philip Pullman
"But you know what I learned from this? Nothing. I learned nothing. It's just something that happened. Life is crazy."
-Chuck Klosterman
"Fear is your best friend or your worst enemy. It's like fire. If you can control it, it can cook for you; it can heat your house. If you can't control it, it will burn everything around you and destroy you. If you can control your fear, it makes you more alert, like a deer coming across the lawn."
-Mike Tyson
"Design is the last great competitive advantage."
-Seth Godin
"If you want to be seen as courageous by some and hated by others, just say what you really think."
-Tucker Max
"Seeking advice is addicting and can become a proxy for action."
-Frank Chimero
"The moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they realize they're naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism. Literary modernism grew out of a sense that, "Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself?…a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller."
-Philip Pullman
"I have no idea what I'm doing, and everyone is just making it up as they go along. This about sums up everything I know."
-Frank Chimero
"Stop trying to be cool: it is stifling."
-Frank Chimero
"Gold is money. Everything else is credit."
-JP Morgan
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."
-Albert Einstein
"People tell us who they are but we ignore it because we want them to [be] who we want them to be."
-Don Draper
"There is often, in the course of this wayward and bewildered life, exterior opposition, and sincere and even violent condemnation, between persons and bodies who are nevertheless profoundly associated by ties and relations that they know not of."
-William Gladstone
"We take wondrously adaptive capacities for human self-display — language, intelligence, kindness, creativity, and beauty — and then forget how to use them in making friends, attracting mates and gaining prestige. Instead, we rely on goods and services acquired through education, work and consumption to advertise our personal traits to others. These costly signals are mostly redundant or misleading, so others usually ignore them. They prefer to judge us through natural face-to-face interaction. We think our gilding dazzles them, though we ignore their own gilding when choosing our friends and mates."
-Geoffrey Miller
"Consumerism is hard to describe when it's the ocean and we're the plankton."
-Geoffrey Miller
"If no one ever seems right for you, and then the one person who does seem right doesn't want you, then the problem isn't the person, the problem is you."
-The Last Psychiatrist
"Overall, I am for betting because I am against bullshit. Bullshit is polluting our discourse and drowning the facts. A bet costs the bullshitter more than the non-bullshitter so the willingness to bet signals honest belief. A bet is a taxon bullshit; and it is a just tax, tribute paid by the bullshitters to those with genuine knowledge."
-Alex Tabarrok
"Being a boss is much like being a high status primate in any group: The creatures beneath you in the pecking order watch every move you make – and so they know a lot more about you than you know about them."
-Bob Sutton
"Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery."
-Josephn Campbell
"Myths are stories for our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story. We all need to understand death and to cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to live and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are."
-Joseph Campbell
"I'm a huge believer that one of the best ways to figure out what you think is to write it out and then iterate. When you do this, you quickly discover how foggy your ideas are, and you work to clarify them."
-Ben Casnocha
"Without a theory the facts are silent"
-F.A. Hayek
"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine…War is hell."
-Clausewitz
"If the meek ever inherit the earth, the strong will take it away from them."
-Gustav Hasford
"The fighter (like the writer) must stand alone. If he loses he cannot call an executive conference and throw off on a vice president or the assistant sales manager. He is consequently resented by fractional characters who cannot live outside an organization."
-A.J. Liebling
"The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier."
-Jonathan Swift
"No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience."
-Jonathan Swift
"If you ever find yourself in complete agreement with the public, especially when "public" includes people you wanted to murder in the last election, then your position is not only wrong, it's not even yours. You have been trained to have this thought, so the money is in understanding why."
-The Last Psychiatrist
"Something is broken inside me, and it's easier to try to fix it in other people."
-Elgin James
"The goal [of meditation] is to awaken from our trance of discursive thinking–and from the habit of ceaselessly grasping at the pleasant and recoiling from the unpleasant–so that we can enjoy a mind that is undisturbed by worry, merely open like the sky, and effortlessly aware of the flow of experience in the present."
-Sam Harris
"It's insoluable! Yay! That means there will be a really interesting solution."
-Anne Herbert
"Making a judgment, taking a stand and then acting against an injustice or acting to support excellence is the stuff of the everyman hero. If you are an aspiring artist and you wish to avoid "judgments," you'll find that you have nothing to say."
-Steven Pressfield
"All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them."
-Isak Dinesen
"In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness."
-Antoine de Saint Exupery
"We need to believe that we're good people, and we'll do just about anything to maintain that perception."
-Dan Ariely
"Before if you were making a product, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into shouting about a product, and 30% into making a great product. So you could win with a mediocre product, if you were a good enough marketer. That is getting harder to do. The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies…the individual is empowered. The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other."
-Jeff Bezos
"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."
-William Blake
"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what it is worth of human life unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?"
-Cicero
"It taught me a lot about the right way of helping writers – mostly that there are no certainties. And that the very best writers would never dream of destroying the confidence of beginners."
-Catherine Czerkawska
"Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going."
-Jim Ryun
"For example, I don't care if anyone reads what I write here. I'm writing to satisfy myself first and foremost. If others read it and benefit from it, fantastic — that's a welcome side effect. If I worry about who is reading, why they're reading, or if anyone is even reading at all, I'd be too paralyzed to write! That'd be the least productive outcome of all."
-Jeff Atwood
"Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent."
-Unknown
"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 willbe 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
"Make the other person feel good and cause them to believe the feeling good came from your personal wonderfulness, and you can get away with a lot, later and elsewhere."
-Anne Herbert
"In training, there is no winning or losing. There is only learning."
-Tucker Max
"We know a great deal, but our ignorance is sobering and boundless. With each step forward, with each problem which we solve, we not only discover new and unsolved problems, but we also discover that where we believed that we were standing on firm and safe ground, all things are, in truth, insecure and in a state of flux."
-Karl Popper
"Persuasion isn't about the people you disagree with. It's about the fulcrum; the persuadable audience."
-Jay Heinrichs
"Brands communicate in two directions: they help us tell other people something about ourselves, but they also help us form ideas about who we are."
-Dan Ariely
"The reason I don't have a plan is because if I have a plan I'm limited to today's options."
-Sheryl Sandberg
"It's fitting that when all the artificial barriers are dropped those that have excelled with the barriers in place no longer seem the strongest. Instead, those that can most readily learn to use all possible tools — especially the ones that were formerly prohibited — are the new victors."
-Stowe Boyd
"In looking for someone to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. But the most important is integrity, because if they don't have that, the other two qualities, intelligence and energy, are going to kill you."
-Warren Buffett
"He is angry, and he's correct. He lets his anger sweep him to saying incorrect things inside the overall correct thing he's saying. This gives people who don't want to know that his big observation is correct a fairly easy way to scurry away from it."
-Anne Herbert
"A well-trained man knows how to answer questions; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking."
-E. Digby Baltzell
"If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well."
-Rilke
"The problem is not thoughts per se but the state of thinking without knowing that one is thinking."
-Sam Harris
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I can be dense at times, such as when I haven't gotten enough sleep or when I'm being fiercely clever in the wrong direction.
Anne Herbert
It is one thing to study war and another to live the warrior's life.
Telamon
Don "Why do we do this?"
Roger "Sex. But it's always disappointing."
Mad Men
Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
Paul Graham
I'm creating an ugly pearl. I build layers of self-righteousness around some tiny good thing I've done or some miniscule bad thing I haven't done.
Anne Herbert
When you find yourself hating someone (who did not directly hurt you) with blinding rage, know for certain that it is not the person you hate at all, but rather something about them that threatens your identity. Find that thing. This single piece of advice can turn your life around, Iguarantee it.
The Last Psychiatrist
According to a widely accepted model, intimacy begins when one person expresses revealing feelings, builds when the listener responds with support and empathy and is achieved when the discloser hears these things and feels understood, validated and cared for.
Elizabeth Weil
May I oversimplify you for my own convenience? I have got this story of the world going, and you don't fit. It seems simpler to grind you flatter than to rethink my story for the sake of mere accuracy.
Anne Herbert
The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.
Marcus Aurelius
No one can give you better advice than yourself.
Cicero
People are only as powerful as the coalitions around them.
Jake Selinger
Low culture, as some insisted on calling it, is more flexible, accommodating, and creative. It gives us a grammar instead of a language. It gives us form that gives freedom, not a form we must conform to.
Grant McCracken
Genius is actually the eventual public recognition of dozens (or hundreds) of failed attempts at solving a problem. Sometimes we fail in public, often we fail in private, but people who are doing creative work are constantly failing.
Seth Godin
If Your Actions Inspire People to Dream More, Learn More, Do More and Become More, Then You Are A Leader.
John Quincy Adams
Take away my people, but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floors……Take away my factories, but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory.
Andrew Carnegie
I wonder if real art comes when you build the thing that they don't have a prize for yet.
Seth Godin
The best part of college is that you could become whatever you wanted to become, but most people just do what they think they must.
Seth Godin
When you say 'design,' everybody has their definition which doesn't correspond to yours. There are many good definitions. One is the synthesis of form and content. In other words, without content there's no form. And without form, there's no content. A work of art is realized when form and content are indistinguishable. When form predominates, meaning is blunted. But when content predominates, interest lags. But the genius comes in when both of these things fuse.
Paul Rand
This is the problem with omnivores of contemporary media, the people who are constantly reading every magazine that comes out or every new book on X. Even the best stuff still suffers from its immersion in 2012. If you want to see things differently, you have to approach them from radically different contexts.
TLP
Jimmy's an American success story. I saw him driving down Santa Monica in his Rolls-Royce the other day… Does anybody even need one of these vehicles? Performance can be eclipsed by automobiles costing so much less, but nothing makes the same statement. And Jimmy wants to make a statement. But Jimmy is also the character in What Makes Sammy Run? Ultimately it's all about him, he needs to win to fill a hole inside. And now he's changed his look from a baseball hat to a knit cap. Does Lloyd Blankfein worry that he's follically challenged? If Jimmy owned his baldness he'd lose not an iota of power or respect, but the fact that he refuses to do so illustrates his insecurity. No matter how rich or powerful we are, we're all human.
Bob Lefsetz
"Without the aesthetic" means that it's not done with love, but is done for some ulterior motive: because it sells, because it's popular, because it's crazy – you know, all this stuff.
Paul Rand
"Graphic design" is one of those phrases that doesn't mean anything, because anything that's "graphic" is graphic. Painting, dancing, if you see it, writing – if you see it, it's graphic. The genre of art, of graphic design, of painting, is art. That's the genre. It's all art.
Paul Rand
Don't try to be original. Just try to be good. That sounds sort of naïve, but it's true.
Paul Rand
Without aesthetic, you can't find the truth to do things with quality. I think this is, in a big sense, what aesthetics means.
Paul Rand
When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that's merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you're probably looking at a loser.
Paul Graham
This desire to see our "enemies" suffer is natural to the human race, and is reason 1, 2, and 3 why power should never be centralized.
TLP
Create like a god. Command like a king. Work like a slave.
Constantin Brancusi
In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
Charles Darwin
The short answer to the question of what makes people happy is this: other people.
Tina Rosenberg
Our ability to simultaneously pursue our own goals while being mindful and supportive of other people's goals is fundamental to human life – so fundamental, in fact, that we actually have trouble turning it off.
Clay Shirky
The single biggest misconception in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
George Bernard Shaw
Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur's indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway.
Steven Pressfield
Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.
Alfred North Whitehead
When we ship, we'll be judged. The real world will pronounce upon our work and upon us. When we ship, we can fail. When we ship, we can be humiliated. When we ship, we open ourselves to judgment in the real world. Nothing is more empowering, because it plants us solidly on Planet Earth and gets us out of our self-devouring, navel-centered fantasies and self-delusions. Ship it.
Tom Peters
A little present-tense success forgives a lot of past-tense failure.
Anonymous
Nothing that came before or after–academic achievements, winning championships in sports, getting into Harvard, various other accomplishments–ever elicited the same intensity of feeling as a boy earning the approval of a man he respects.
Geoff Wolf
A community of seriously hip observers is a scary and depressing thing.
JD Salinger
That's what's gone today, honesty. If you're honest, you're outside the game, and if you're not playing the game, you're judging us, so we judge you in turn, you're a loser. But not necessarily. We revere those who refuse to play the game, who work hard, search out their own path. We call these people artists. They're in short supply. But we recognize them when we see them, we flock to them, we want more.
Bob Lefsetz
A lack of curiosity carefully designed to preserve the illusion of knowing something.
Anne Herbert
Thoreau
What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
I am a happy camper so I guess I'm doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.
Not till we are completely lost or turned around... do we begin to find ourselves.
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
A bore is someone who takes away my solitude and doesn't give me companionship in return.
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
However mean you life is, meet and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its doors as early in the spring. Cultivate property like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts… Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
Let go of the past and go for the future. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you imagined."
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust
What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
To be awake is to be completely alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake."
That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/10264.Henry_David_Thoreau?page=5
Faulkner
The past is never dead. It's not even past."
The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.
Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.
I decline to accept the end of man... I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
t's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be."
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3535.William_Faulkner?page=2
Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
'Classic' - a book which people praise and don't read.
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?
God created war so that Americans would learn geography.
Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.
The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.
The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.
Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it - haha, good one A lot of his quotes deal with Jane Austen.. kinda like how he ripped that one guy's writing about hte crystal on top of the building/castle.. forget his name. Fenwick Cooper?
Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.
Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one's head.
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little.
Worrying is like paying a debt you don't owe.
To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.
It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.
You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.
Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.
How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have earned it.
Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.
Why not go out on a limb? That's where the fruit is.
Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do.
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=mark+twain
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/2778055.Kurt_Vonnegut
Buber (ibid) argues that human beings are the only creatures we know who can distance themselves, not only from the outer world, but also from their inner selves. Shame does not usually arise from a violation of social or familial taboos.
2001: A space odyssey
any man, in the right circumstances, could be
dehumanized by panic.
Niels Bohr's "Your theory is crazy—but not crazy enough to be true."
July 29, 2013: The generation of Americans now in their twenties is the first to not be significantly better educated than their parents.
So now that you know I was in personal finance… let me quickly get this out of the way:
Don't spend more than you earn.
Contribute to your 401k at LEAST to the match.
Don't carry a balance on your credit card.
Save for retirement before you save for the kids' college.
Don't listen to the clowns on CNBC.
And mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys… unless they can find a good health plan.
Follow those and you'll be rich.
What I will say is I'd been unhappy for a while. Partly I was tired of the subject I covered week in and week out. There are about six stories in personal finance and I told them over and over and over again and got to the point where I wanted to reach through the radio, take listeners by the shoulders and say don't you get it?! Don't spend more than you save! That's it! I told you this last week! And the week before that! Do I really I have to tell you again this week?! (I didn't do that, of course, because… physics.)
out of the 100 million Americans with full-time jobs… 70 percent… 70 PERCENT… are disengaged. The survey mentions how these people cost companies money as they "roam the halls spreading discontent." "
from The Alchemist:
People from all over the world have passed through this village, son," said his father. "They come in search of new things, but when they leave they are basically the same people they were when they arrived. They climb the mountain to see the castle, and they wind up thinking that the past was better than what we have now. They have blond hair, or dark skin, but basically they're the same as the people who live right here."
The boy could see in his father's gaze a desire to be able, himself, to travel the world—a desire that was still alive, despite his father's having had to bury it, over dozens of years, under the burden of struggling for water to drink,
food to eat, and the same place to sleep every night of his life. When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person's life. And then they want the
person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.
"It's this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie. "It's a force that appears to be negative, but actually shows you how to realize your destiny. It prepares your spirit and your will, because there is one great truth on this planet: whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it's because that desire originated in the soul of the universe. It's your mission on earth." "At that point in their lives, everything is clear and everything is possible. They are not afraid to dream, and to yearn for everything they would like to see happen to them in
their lives. But, as time passes, a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible for them to realize their destiny."
"But bakers are more important people than shepherds. Bakers have homes, while shepherds sleep out in the open. Parents would rather see their children marry bakers than shepherds." "In the long run, what people think about shepherds and bakers becomes more important for them than their own destinies." when each day is the same as the next, it's because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun
rises.
About nagekomi:
It was born, like so much else that matters in Japan, of Buddhism, of martial arts, of bushido -- of the samurai spirit. At its purest, nagekomi is the repetition of a simple physical task beyond the point of exhaustion. It is the ceaseless completion of an exercise until you collapse. Baseball stuck so well here partly because in its routines, in its timelessness and pseudo-meditation, it might have been Japanese: a game of self-control, of precision, of craft. It also, conveniently, lent itself well to nagekomi. Baseball, as witnessed from a certain vantage point, could seem designed expressly to break you.
Take the infamous 1,000 Fungo Drill. For one day at Japanese spring training, professional players take a deep breath and begin fielding grounders. At first, fielding grounders is largely a mental exercise. You think about the process, about the careful placement of your feet, hands and head. Left. Right. Left. Right. After a few hundred grounders, however, your brain will pack up and leave town for the beach. Your body will start acting automatically, without central systemic guidance, and in turn a mental exercise will become a more purely physical one. Left, right, left, right. But after another few hundred grounders, your body too will stop working the way it normally might. It is no longer yours, and you are no longer you. Now you will have reached that very particular departure lounge where what was once a physical exercise becomes spiritual. Now it's your soul at work. Leftrightleftright. And there is no axon or muscle fiber that remembers anything the way your soul remembers everything. That is the purpose of nagekomi: to open your soul as wide as a prairie, allowing it to swallow those secrets you have learned about yourself and lock them away inside the deepest parts of you, where they will survive long after your body dies. Nagekomi is that moment of clarity that comes in the last hundred yards of a marathon; it is that instant your throat closes and tears begin to run down your face. It is not a pursuit of a temporary, earthly glory. It is not gravity bound. Nagekomi is weightless, and it is forever.
From "Dispatches":
"Best way's to just keep moving," one of them told us. "Just keep moving, stay in motion, you know what I'm saying?"We knew. He was a moving-target-survivor subscriber, a true child of the war, because except for the rare times when you were pinned or stranded the system was geared to keep you mobile, if that was what you thought you wanted. As a technique for staying alive it seemed to make as much sense as anything, given naturally that you were there to begin with and wanted to see it close; it started out sound and straight but it formed a cone as it progressed, because the more you moved the more you saw, the more you saw the more besides death and mutilation you risked, and the more you risked of that the more you would have to let go of one day as a "survivor." Some of us moved around the war like crazy people until we couldn't see which way the run was even taking us anymore, only the war all over its surface with occasional, unexpected penetration. As long as we could have
choppers like taxis it took real exhaustion or depression near shock or a dozen pipes of opium to keep us even apparently quiet, we'd still be running around inside our skins like something was after us, ha ha, La Vida Loca.
Men on the crews would say that once you'd carried a dead person he would always be there, riding with you. Like all combat people they were incredibly superstitious and invariably self-dramatic, but it was (I knew) unbearably true that close exposure to the dead sensitized you to the force of their presence and made for long reverberations; long. there, no way even to be clear about which was really worse, the wait or the delivery. Combat spared far more men than it wasted, but everyone suffered the time between contact, especially when they were going out every day looking for it; bad going on foot, terrible in trucks and APC's, awful in helicopters, the worst, traveling so fast toward something so frightening.
You know how it is, you want to look and you don't want to look. I can remember the strange feelings I had when I was a kid looking at war photographs in Life, the ones that showed dead people or a lot of dead people lying close together in a field or a street, often touching, seeming to hold each other. Even when the picture was sharp and cleanly defined, something wasn't clear at all, something repressed that
monitored the images and withheld their essential information. It may have legitimized my fascination, letting me look for as long as I wanted; I didn't have a language for it then, but I remember now the shame I felt, like looking at first porn, all the porn in the world. I could have looked until my lamps went out and I still wouldn't have accepted the connection between a detached leg and the rest of a body, or the
poses and positions that always happened (one day I'd hear it called "response-toimpact"), bodies wrenched too fast and violently into unbelievable contortion. Or the total impersonality of group death, making them lie anywhere and any way it left them, hanging over barbed wire or thrown promiscuously on top of other dead, or up into the trees like terminal acrobats, Look what I can do. Supposedly, you weren't going to have that kind of obscuration when you finally started seeing them on real ground in front of you, but you tended to manufacture it anyway because of how often and how badly you needed protection from what you were seeing... Then I heard an M-16 on full automatic starting to go through clips, a second to fire, three to plug in a fresh clip, and I saw a man out there, doing it. Every round was like a tiny concentration of high-velocity wind, making the bodies wince and shiver. When he finished he walked
by us on the way back to his hootch, and I knew I hadn't seen anything until I saw his face. It was flushed and mottled and twisted like he had his face skin on inside out, a patch of green that was too dark, a streak of red running into bruise purple, a lot of sick gray white in between, he looked like he'd had a heart attack out there. His eyes were rolled up half into his head, his mouth was sprung open and his tongue was out, but he was smiling. Really a dude who'd shot his wad. The captain wasn't too pleased about my having seen that.
the heaviest fighting in Vietnam since the la Drang Valley two years before, and one of the only times after la Drang when ground fire was so intense that the medevacs couldn't land through it. Wounded backed up for hours and sometimes days, and a lot of men died who might have been saved. Resupply couldn't make it in either, and the early worry about running out of ammunition grew into a panic and beyond, it became real. At the worst, a battalion of Airborne assaulting 875 got caught in an ambush sprung from behind, where no NVA had been reported, and its three companies were pinned and
cut off in the raking fire of that trap for two days. Afterward, when a correspondent asked one of the survivors what had happened he was told, "What the fuck do you think happened? We got shot to pieces." The correspondent started to write that down and the paratrooper said, "Make that 'little pieces.' We were still shaking the trees for dog tags when we pulled back out of there." The ground action had been over for nearly twenty-four hours now, but it was still going on in compulsive replay among the men who'd been there: "A dead buddy is some tough shit, but bringing your own ass out alive can sure help
you to get over it."
Once I ran into a soldier standing by himself in the middle of a small jungle clearing where I'd wandered off to take a leak. We said hello, but he seemed very uptight about my being there. He told me that the guys were all sick of sitting around waiting and that he'd come out to see if he could draw a little fire. What a look we gave each other. I backed out of there fast, I didn't want to bother him
while he was working. "We was getting killed and the Dinks was panicking, and when the choppers come in to get us out, there wasn't enough room for everybody. The Dinks was screaming and carrying on, grabbing hold of the treads and grabbing hold of our legs till we couldn't get the choppers up. So we just said smack it, let these people get their own fucking choppers, and we started shooting them. And even then they kept on coming, oh man it was wild. I mean they could sure as shit believe that Charlie was
shooting them, but they couldn't believe that we was doing it too.…" One afternoon I mistook a bloody nose for a head-wound, and I didn't have to wonder anymore how I'd behave if I ever got hit. We were walking out on a sweep north of Tay Ninh City, toward the Cambodian border, and a mortar round came in about thirty yards away. I had no sense of those distances then, even after six or seven weeks in Vietnam I still thought of that kind of information as a journalists' detail that could be picked up later, not something a survivor might have to know. When we fell down on the ground the kid in front of me put his boot into my face. I didn't feel the boot, it got lost in the tremendous concussion I made hitting the
ground, but I felt a sharp pain in a line over my eyes. The kid turned around and started going into something insane right away, "Aw I'm sorry, shit I'm sorry, oh no man I'm sorry." Some hot stinking metal had been put into my mouth, I thought I tasted brains there sizzling on the end of my tongue, and the kid was fumbling for his canteen and looking really scared, pale, near tears, his voice shaking, "Shit I'm just a
fucking oaf, I'm a fucking clod, you're okay, you're really okay," and somewhere in there I got the feeling that it was him, somehow he'd just killed me. I don't think I said anything, but I made a sound that I can remember now, a shrill blubbering pitched to carry more terror than I'd ever known existed, like the sounds they've recorded off of plants being burned, like an old woman going under for the last time. My hands went flying everywhere all over my head, I had to find it and touch it. There seemed to be no blood coming from the top, none from the forehead, none running out of my eyes, my eyes! In a moment of half-relief the pain became specific, I thought that just my nose had been blown off, or in, or apart, and the kid was still going into it for himself, "Oh man, I'm really fucking sorry." Twenty yards in front of us men were running around totally out of their minds. One man was dead (they told me later it was only because he'd been walking forward with his flak jacket open, another real detail to get down and never fuck with again),
one was on his hands and knees vomiting some evil pink substance, and one, quite near us, was propped up against a tree facing away from the direction of the round, making himself look at the incredible thing that had just happened to his leg, screwed around about once at some point below his knee like a goofy scarecrow leg. He looked away and then back again, looking at it for a few seconds longer each time, then he settled in for about a minute, shaking his head and smiling, until his face
became serious and he passed out. By then I'd found my nose and realized what had happened, all that had happened, not even broken, my glasses weren't even broken. I took the kid's canteen and soaked my sweat scarf, washing the blood off where it had caked on my lip and chin. He had stopped pologizing, and there was no pity in his face anymore. When I handed his canteen back to him, he was laughing at me. I never told that story to anyone, and I never went back to that outfit again either.
They'd say (I'd ask) that they didn't remember their dreams either when they were in the zone, but on R&R or in the hospital their dreaming would be constant, open, violent and clear... to God they'd seen him bayonet a wounded NVA and then lick the bayonet clean. There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, "How can you shoot women and children?" and he'd answered, "It's easy, you just
don't lead 'em so much." Well, they said you needed a sense of humor, there you go, even the VC had one. Once after an ambush that killed a lot of Americans, they covered the field with copies of a photograph that showed one more young, dead American, with the punch line mimeographed on the back, "Your X-rays have just come back from the lab and we think we know what your problem is."
You couldn't find two people who agreed about when it began, how could you say when it began going off? Mission intellectuals like 1954 as the reference date; if you saw as far back as War II and the Japanese occupation you were practically a historical visionary. "Realists" said that it began for us in 1961, and the common run of Mission flack insisted on 1965, post-Tonkin Resolution, as though all the killing that had gone before wasn't really war. Anyway, you couldn't use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter; might just as well lay it on the proto-Gringos who found the New England woods too raw and empty for their peace and filled them up with their own imported devils. Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina when Alden Pyle's body washed up under the bridge at Dakao, his lungs all full of mud; maybe it caved in with Dien Bien Phu.
I only jumped in once, spontaneous as shock, during Tet when I heard a doctor bragging that he'd refused to allow wounded Vietnamese into his ward. "But Jesus Christ," I said, "didn't you take the Hippocratic Oath?" but he was ready for me. "Yeah," he said, "I took it in America."
Charles [Charlie] really wrote the book on fire control, putting one round into the heart of things where fifty of ours might go and still not hit anything. Sometimes we put out so much fire you couldn't tell whether any of it was coming back or not. When it was, it filled your ears and your head until you thought you were hearing it with your stomach. An English correspondent I knew made a cassette of one of the heavy ones, he said he used it to seduce American girls.
I had friends in the press corps who went out once or twice and then never again. Sometimes I thought that they were the sanest, most serious people of all, although to be honest I never said so until my time there was almost over.
There is a point of view that says that the United States got involved in the Vietnam War, commitments and interests aside, simply because we thought it would be easy. But after the Ia Drang, that first arrogance sat less and less well about the shoulders of the Command; it never vanished. There was never again a real guerrilla war after Ia Drang, except in the Delta, and the old Giap stratagem of interdicting the South through the Highlands, cutting the country in two, came to be taken seriously, even
obsessively, by many influential Americans.
That first afternoon, before I'd boarded the Chinook, a black sergeant had tried to keep me from going. He told me I was too new to go near the kind of shit they were throwing around up in those hills. ("You a reporter?" he'd asked, and I'd said, "No, a writer," dumbass and pompous, and he'd laughed and said, "Careful. You can't use no eraser up where you wanna go.")He'd pointed to the bodies of all the dead Americans lined in two long rows near the chopper pad, so many that they could not even cover all of them decently. But they were not real then, and taught me nothing.
A twenty-four-year-old Special Forces captain was telling me about it. "I went out and killed one VC and liberated a prisoner. Next day the major called me in and told me that I'd killed fourteen VC and liberated six prisoners. You want to see the medal?" A bird colonel, commanding a brigade of the 4th Infantry Division: "I'll bet you always wondered why we call 'em Dinks up in this part of the country. I thought of it myself. I'll tell you, I never did like hearing them called Charlie. See, I had an uncle named Charlie, and I liked him too. No, Charlie was just too damn good for the little bastards. So I just thought, What are they really like? and I came up with rinky-dink. Suits 'em just perfect, Rinky-Dink. 'Cept that was too long, so we cut it down some. And that's why we call 'em Dinks."
There was a standard question you could use to open a conversation with troops, and Fouhy tried it. "How long you been in-country?" he asked. The kid half lifted his head; that question could not be serious. The weight was really on him, and the words came slowly.
"All fuckin' day," he said. (I figured this was coming.. there's a guy here that, when I asked him how long he's worked here, he plainly said, "12 hours." the first time i heard that answer, i busted out laughing. it's gotten old, though, so no wonder he wasn't cheerful about it.)
About Bill Clinton:
Clinton had also said, "there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship"[17] which he defended as truthful on August 17, 1998, hearing because of the use of the present tense, famously arguing "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is"[18] (i.e., he was not, at the time he made that statement, still in a sexual relationship with Lewinsky). Under pressure from Starr, who had obtained from Lewinsky a blue dress with Clinton's semen stain, as well as testimony from Lewinsky that the President had inserted a cigar tube into her vagina, Clinton stated, "I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate."[1] Clinton denied having committed perjury because, according to Clinton, the legal definition[19] of oral sex was not encompassed by "sex" per se. In addition, relying upon the definition of "sexual relations" as proposed by the prosecution and agreed by the defense and by Judge Susan Webber Wright, who was hearing the Paula Jones case, Clinton claimed that because certain acts were performed on him, not by him, he did not engage in sexual relations. Lewinsky's testimony to the Starr Commission, however, contradicted Clinton's claim of being totally passive in their encounters.[20]
Louis Zamperini:
In the Army Air Forces, or AAF,* there were 52,651 stateside aircraft accidents over the course of the war, killing 14,903 personnel. Though some of these personnel were probably on coastal patrol and other duties, it can be presumed that the vast majority were trainees, killed without ever seeing a combat theater. In the three months in which Phil's men trained as a crew, 3,041 AAF planes—more than 33 per day—met with accidents stateside, killing nine men per day.
According to Stay, who would become a squadron commander, airmen trying to fulfill the forty combat missions that made up a Pacific bomber crewman's tour of duty had a 50 percent chance of being killed.*
Marine Sniper:
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men hng enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter. -Ernest Hemingway
He thought of occasions on which the Viet Cong had wired three- and four-year-old children as booby traps and had blown away the unlucky Marines who stopped and offered the tots chewing gum or chocolate, and of the Marines who had accepted cold sodas from slightly older children. The sodas had been poured into cups filled with tiny shards of broken glass, mixed with chipped ice. It did not take many stories like those before a Marine learned to stay clear of children.
"During World War I, the Germans used a tactic of catching a man in the open, shooting him in the legs, and letting him lie there and beg for help. Pretty soon, there would be some hero who couldn't bear to hear any more, who would organize a rescue. It was always a big mistake.
"We've done it here, ourselves. We'll wound some gooner in a rice paddy and wait for his buddies to drag him away. We'll sometimes get two or three that way.
Inside Delta Force:
In combat, there are no winners. The victors just happen to lose less than the vanquished.
As a rule, armies hate change—and no one hates change more than the ones who have benefited most by the status quo: the general officers.
First they had to determine what types of missions their fictional unit would be tasked with, because the mission dictates a unit's size.
Army does not just have men hanging around and unemployed. Every unit has a manpower quota, and every soldier is assigned to a unit, even if he doesn't work there. But sometimes there are units that are alive on paper but not actually in existence at the time, with the men allocated to those paper units being used elsewhere.
1st Special Forces Operational Detachment—Delta was given official life on 21 November 1977
As most people suspect, military life is a highly regulated affair. And for experienced soldiers, that amount of regulation gives a certain sense of comfort.
What was the lesson here? Simple. Don't quit. Never quit no matter what. Keep going until someone tells you to sit down. Keep going as long as you're able to move, no matter how poorly you think you may be doing. Just don't quit.
I've talked about the unknown or unannounced time standard of the Selection course. After going through Selection, and later working as a cadre member of Selection, I'm still not sure what the time standard is. The only people who know for certain are the Selection detachment commander and noncommissioned officer in charge (NCOIC).
No one else is privy to that information. Not even the Delta Force commander himself. It is one of the best-kept, most well-compartmentalized secrets in the Western world. It ensures that no candidate will ever have an advantage over anyone else, even those who have to come back for a subsequent try.
Every man who ultimately makes it through Delta Selection has had to gauge his performance by his own internal yardstick. He's had to give his utmost because he couldn't be sure just how good was good enough. It keeps everyone honest.
Have you never heard of the Posse Comitatus Act? Don't you know it's against federal law for the military to be used for operations within the United States?"
nd in Delta Force, we operated like guerrillas. Or terrorists. Because the reality was, in order to become experts at counterterrorism, we had to first become expert terrorists.
There's an old saying in the Army that you should "train the way you fight." For the most part, the Army ignores it. That's why regular Army units almost always get their asses kicked in their initial battles, unless they have a long train-up period before their first taste of combat. Under those conditions, units will develop training programs that actually prepare men for combat. But for some strange reason, the generals and other senior officers see to it that peacetime training has little resemblance to reality.
Munich Massacre Syndrome.
when the order to shoot is given, he can't do it. He can't kill these people he has come to know
Texas Tower Syndrome
That characteristic manifests itself when a sniper starts shooting and he can't stop. It just feels so good—such an overwhelming sense of power—that he can't turn it off when there are no more legitimate targets left.
When protecting a traveling president, vice president, their families, or presidential candidates, the Secret Service calls upon—and gets—the assistance of every police force and governmental agency within the jurisdictions through which the official party travels.
The best way to make a vehicle easy to follow at night is to punch a small hole in a taillight. That lets a small spot of white light shine in the middle of the red lens, making the vehicle stand out from all the others. It's a simple trick, but it's damn effective.
The job of the negotiator is to make sure everything has a price. If the terrorists want water—they have to give something in exchange. If they want the toilets pumped out—they have to give something in return. With every communication, the effort is made to throw the terrorists off their plan and loosen their hold on the initiative. If they can't be induced to give up, we want them to be at their lowest possible state when an assault is mounted.
Delta's philosophy of operation was that we would go to any extremes to avoid harming a hostage. But national policy dictated that when nuclear materials were involved, hostage lives were of secondary importance. The mission was to recover the material—regardless of the cost in human lives.
A combat plan is an animal in a constant state of metamorphosis and is under continual revision right up until the first shot is fired—at which time it usually ceases to have relevance.
Stranger Than Fiction:
The philosopher Martin Heidegger pointed out how human beings tend to look at the world as a standing stock of material, ready for us to use. As inventory to be processed into something more valuable. Trees into wood. Animals into meat. He called this world of raw natural resources: bestand. It seems inevitable that people without access to natural bestand such as oil wells or diamond mines, that they'd turn to the only inventory they do have-their lives.
More and more, the bestand of our era is our own intellectual property. Our ideas. Our life stories. Our experience.
The problem with seeing the world as bestand, Heidegger said, was it leads you to use things, enslave and exploit things and people, for your own benefit.
With this in mind, is it possible to enslave yourself?
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard defines dread as the knowledge of what you must do to prove you're free, even if it will destroy you. His example is Adam in the Garden of Eden, happy and content until God shows him the Tree of Knowledge and says, "Don't eat this." Now Adam is no longer free. There is one rule he can break, he must break, to prove his freedom, even if it destroys him. Kierkegaard says the moment we are forbidden to do something, we will do it. It is inevitable.
Worse than that, written information can't teach, according to Thamus. You can't question it, and it can't defend itself when people misunderstand or misrepresent it. Written communication gives people what Thamus called "the false conceit of knowledge," a fake certainty that they understand something.
the press is, you know, the fourth arm of making sure our country stays free.
Lone Survivor, SEAL:
It always makes me laugh when I read about "the proud freedom fighters in Iraq." They're not proud. They'd sell their own mothers for fifty bucks. We'd go into some house, grab the guy we believed was the ringleader, and march him outside into the street. First thing he'd say was "Hey, hey, not me. You want those guys in that house down the street." Or "You give me dollars, I tell you what you want to know."
They would, and did. And what they told us was very often extremely valuable. Most of those big military coups, like the elimination of Saddam's sons and the capture of Saddam himself, were the result of military intel. Somebody, someone from their own side, shopped them, as they had shopped hundreds of others. Anything for a buck, right? Pride? Those guys couldn't even spell it.
Judging by the one guy I knew, I didn't think any of the ones who quit were in much worse shape than they had been twelve hours before. They might have been a bit more tired, but we had done nothing new, it was all part of our tried-and-tested routines. And in my view, they had acted in total defiance of the advice handed to us by Captain Maguire.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."
We Were Soldiers Once.. and Young:
Many of our countrymen came to hate the war we fought. Those who hated it the most--the professionally sensitive-- were not, in the end, sensitive enough to differentiate between the war and the soldiers who had been ordered to fight it. They hated us as well, and we went to ground in the crossfire, as we had learned in the jungles. , In time our battles were forgotten, our sacrifices were discounted, and both our sanity and our suitability for life in polite American society were publicly questioned. Our young-old faces, chiseled and gaunt from the fever and the heat and the sleepless nights, now stare back at us, lost and damned strangers, frozen in yellowing snapshots packed away in cardboard boxes with our medals and ribbons.
In the summer of 1957, Lieutenant General James M. Gavin, who won early fame and swift promotion with the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II, was chief of research and development for the Army. He had a vision of a new fighting force, something that he described in a seminal article as "Cavalry--And I Don't Mean Horses." His vision centered on the helicopter, that ungainly bumblebee, which made a very limited combat debut in Korea, principally hauling wounded to the rear two at a time.
Jim Gavin's dream was that someday bigger, faster, and better helicopters would carry the infantry into battle, forever freeing it of the tyranny of terrain and permitting war to proceed at a pace considerably faster than that of a man walking. The helicopter, Gavin believed, held the possibility of making the battlefield truly a three-dimensional nightmare for an enemy commander.
Johnson decided, against the advice of his military chiefs, that the American escalation in South Vietnam be conducted on the cheap: There would be no mobilization of reserve and National Guard units; no declaration of a state of emergency that would permit the Army to extend for the duration the enlistments of the best-trained and most experienced soldiers. Instead, the war would be fed by stripping the Army divisions in Europe and the continental United States of their best personnel and materiel, while a river of new draftees, 20,000 of them each month, flowed in to do the shooting and the dying.
There's a well-known gunnery sergeant in the Marine Corps who explains to his young Marines, when they complain about pay, that they get two kinds of salary—a financial salary and a psychological salary. The financial salary is indeed meager. But the psychological salary? Pride, honor, integrity, the chance to be part of a corps with a history of service, valor, glory; to have friends who would sacrifice their lives for you, as you would for them—and to know that you remain a part of this brotherhood as long as you live. How much is that worth?
The Warrior Ethos:
The tenets of the Warrior Ethos, directed inward, inspire us to contend against and defeat those enemies within our own hearts.
Sociologists tell us that there are two types of cultures: guilt-based and shame-based.
Individuals in a guilt-based culture internalize their society's conceptions of right and wrong.
A shame-based culture is the opposite. In a shame-based culture, "face" is everything. All that matters is what the community believes of us.
The assessment tool, which has since become standard, lists five factors researchers look for when judging whether post-traumatic growth has occurred: greater appreciation of life and changed priorities; more-intimate personal relationships; a greater sense of personal strength; recognition of "new possibilities or paths for one's life"; and spiritual growth. The degree to which any or all of these might appear has less to do with the negation of PTSD symptoms—which, Tedeschi stresses, may coexist with, or even form the launch pad for post-traumatic growth—and more to do with sheer persistence.
The Education of Millionaires:
You've been fed a lie. The lie is that if you study hard in school, get good grades, get into a good college, and get a degree, then your success in life is guaranteed.
This might have been true fifty years ago. But it is no longer true today.
If you want to succeed now, then you must also educate yourself in the real-world skills, capabilities, and mind-sets that will get you ahead outside of the classroom. This is true whether you've been to college or not.
But if you ask, what is the primary thing parents, teachers, politicians, and society want us to focus on during sixteen years, roughly between the ages of six and twenty-two, the answer is plain and simple: get good grades.
Have you ever stopped to ponder how utterlybizarre this state of affairs is? How in the world did we all get so convinced that academic rigor constituted a prerequisite, necessary, and sufficient training forsuccess in life? How did we all get convinced that this one end merited devoting sixteen of the best years of our lives toward it? That we should spend almost our entire youth—potentially some of the most creative, enthusiastic, energetic, and fun years of our lives—in pursuit of little numbers and letters certifying our academic intelligence?
in order to prepare for success in life, you must spend sixteen years of your life essentially training toward an ideal of academic perfection.
Malcolm Gladwell argues meticulously that, above a certain IQ (around 120, which is considered "above average/bright," but not even "moderately gifted"3), additional IQ points have little correlation to real-world success. Ditto for grades—beyond a middling level of academic achievement, there is little evidence that grades (the center point of our waking lives for almost the entire sixteen years of our educational track) bear any causal relationship at all to real-world results, success, achievement, or satisfaction in life.4
In his book, Gladwell shows that once a person has demonstrated passable logical, analytic, and academic skills, other factors have much more influence on real-world results—specifically, creativity, innovative thinking, and practical and social intelligence. To the extent that we develop these aptitudes in our lives, we tend to do so out in the real world, not in formal institutions.5
All of the millionaires and successful people I interviewed for this book said "no thanks" to the current educational model.
your success and happiness in life will have little to do with what you study there or the letters after your name once you graduate. It has to do with your drive, your initiative, your persistence, your ability to make a contribution to other people's lives, your ability to come up with good ideas and pitch them to others effectively, your charisma, your ability to navigate gracefully through social and business networks (what some researchers call "practical intelligence"), and a total, unwavering belief in your own eventual triumph, throughout all the ups and downs, no matter what the naysayers tell you.
If you wanted to be successful and have an impact, you studied hard in high school, got into a good college, got an entry-level job at a large corporate or government bureaucracy, and rose through the ranks of middle management.
It is now widely understood that the latter portion of this timeline—getting an entry-level job and rising through the ranks of middle management at a large bureaucracy—is no longer the best way to do things, for two reasons.
First, job security is dead, as anyone who has had a job recently knows. You're going to have many different jobs, employers, and even careers in your life. So where you get your first, entry-level one—the single thing that a BA credential really helps with—becomes less and less relevant. Building a portfolio of real-world results and impacts you've created, over time, becomes more and more relevant.
Second, the Internet, cell phones, and virtually free longdistance calling have created new opportunities for flexible, self-created, independent careers; this trend has been helped along by the gathering storms of millions of hungry, highly educated young men and women in India, China, Eastern Europe, the Philippines, and elsewhere, happy to do the work that entry-level Organization Men would have done in years past, for a fraction of the cost. This emerging competition has encouraged many people in the West to "think outside the organization" to create careers for themselves that can't be outsourced, offshored, or automated.
Very few of us, when we dream about the kind of impact we want to make on the world, dream about things we could achieve with little risk.
The more you want to be a star in your respective field—whether it's being a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, or an artist, musician, or entrepreneur—the more risk you will have to take in your career choices.
Parents want their kids' lives to feel meaningful and satisfying as well, but they see that the kinds of careers that young people tend to dream about (arts and entertainment, literature, blogging, social media, sports, activism, entrepreneurialism, etc.) are also very risky.
If you want to become wealthy or famous, which I presume you do if you're buying and reading a book on success, then you're going to need to make a difference in the lives of many people.
Randy calls the safe-and-narrow path, which pretends to incur no risks but which incurs the biggest risk of all (regretting your life at the end of it), "The Deferred Life Plan." In his book, he gives a simple formula for living this infelicitous Deferred Life Plan: "Step one: Do what you have to do... Step two: Do what you want to do.... The lucky winners may get to step two only to find themselves aimless, directionless. Either they never knew what they 'really' wanted to do or they've spent so much time in the first step and invested so much psychic capital that they're completely lost without it."4
So this is the "Art of Earning a Living." It is the art of creating a career path that both provides a high likelihood of financial security and allows you to follow your dreams and make a difference in the world.
The Art of Earning a Living requires a great deal of self-inquiry into what, exactly, the difference you want to make is, and also a lot of creative, entrepreneurial problem solving to figure out how you could make decent money while making that difference.
You're going to have to create a solution unique to you and your circumstances. No similar solution will have ever existed before, for a very simple reason: in the whole of human history, no one has yet made the difference you want to make.
The Heart and the Fist:
As Americans we often have a tendency to want to build things in an effort to promote goodwill. We'd often be far better off investing in people.
I'd learned that the classic view of "the poor" as a breeding ground for terrorists and insurgents was mistaken. Poor people, hungry people, rarely dedicate their lives to violence. They are too focused on their next meal. Revolutionaries are often middle and upper class, comfortable but frustrated people who choose violence.
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
My second, related, fear was that I'd miss my ticket to a meaningful life. I had been told—perhaps since kindergarten—that if I wanted to live a successful life, I had to go to a place called college. College, they said, was "the ticket." I understood that they gave out tickets after high school, and if you wanted one, you had to have good grades.
I had been told, over and over again, that college was the place where I could pursue big dreams. College was the place where life began. College was the first step into the "real world," where every great purpose could be pursued.
So I went to college. And after just a few weeks, I felt that I'd been lied to. I remember the moment. I had decided to study public policy, because public policy was concerned with—I believed—the great affairs of the world. It was the study of all we had in common and how we could improve the world together. Yet in my first class, Introductions to Public Policy Studies, the professor droned, "First, we calculate the values of the proposed outcomes." He scratched a graph on the chalkboard. "Then, we assess the probability of achieving those outcomes." He scratched again. "And then we multiply." He scratched a final time. "Now we know what decision to make."
This was public policy? Great decisions about the fate of the world made by multiplication? Where was the romance, the energy, the great cuases? When were we going to talk a bout how to live well, how to lead, what to fight for? They had promised me that in college we would dive into the deep pools of the world's wisdom about how to live, but instead I was being taught how to plot decision trees. They had promised me that in college we would learn how to shape the world, but they wanted me to do it with math.
13 Rings by Phil Jackson:
In their groundbreaking book, Tribal Leadership, management consultants Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright lay out the five stages of tribal development, which they formulated after conducting extensive research on small to midsize organizations. Although basketball teams are not officially tribes, they share many of the same characteristics and develop along much the same lines:
STAGE 1—shared by most street gangs and characterized by despair, hostility, and the collective belief that "life sucks."
STAGE 2—filled primarily with apathetic people who perceive themselves as victims and who are passively antagonistic, with the mind-set that "my life sucks." Think The Office on TV or the Dilbert comic strip.
STAGE 3—focused primarily on individual achievement and driven by the motto "I'm great (and you're not)." According to the authors, people in organizations at this stage "have to win, and for them winning is personal. They'll outwork and outthink their competitors on an individual basis. The mood that results is a collection of 'lone warriors.'
STAGE 4—dedicated to tribal pride and the overriding conviction that "we're great (and they're not)." This kind of team requires a strong adversary, and the bigger the foe, the more powerful the tribe.
STAGE 5—a rare stage characterized by a sense of innocent wonder and the strong belief that "life is great." (See Bulls, Chicago, 1995–98.)
All things being equal, contend Logan and his colleagues, a stage 5 culture will outperform a stage 4 culture, which will outperform a 3, and so on. In addition, the rules change when you move from one culture to another. That's why the so-called universal principles that appear in most leadership textbooks rarely hold up.
One thing I've learned as a coach is that you can't force your will on people. If you want them to act differently, you need to inspire them to change themselves.
he Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki likened the mind to a cow in a pasture. If you enclose the cow in a small yard, it will become nervous and frustrated and start eating the neighbor's grass. But if you give it a large pasture to roam around in, it will be more content and less likely to break loose.
Management guru Stephen Covey tells this old Japanese tale about a samurai warrior and his three sons: The samurai wanted to teach his sons about the power of teamwork. So he gave each of them an arrow and asked them to break it. No problem. Each son did it easily. Then the samurai gave them a bundle of three arrows bound together and asked them to repeat the process. But none of them could. "That's your lesson," the samurai said. "If you three stick together, you will never be defeated."
In the strictest form of Zen, monitors roam the meditation hall, striking sleeping or listless meditators with a flat wooden stick, called a keisaku, to get them to pay attention. This is not intended as punishment. In fact, the keisaku is sometimes referred to as a "compassionate stick." The purpose of the blow is to reinvigorate the meditator and make him or her more awake in the moment.
War:
n American patrol hasn't taken 100 percent casualties in a firefight since Vietnam.
Lieutenants have a lot of theoretical knowledge but not much experience, so they are paired with a platoon
sergeant who has probably been in the Army for years. Tests with soccer players have shown that the "point of no return" for a penalty kick -- when the kicker can no longer change his mind about where to send the ball -- is around a quarter of a second.
Complex motor skills start to diminish at 145 beats per minute, which wouldn't matter much in a swordfight but could definitely ruin your aim with a rifle. At 170 beats per minute you start to experience tunnel vision, loss of depth perception, and restricted hearing. And at 180 beats per minute you enter a netherworld where rational thought decays, bowel and bladder control are lost, and you start to exhibit the crudest sorts of survival behaviors: freezing, fleeing, and submission.
To function effectively, the soldier must allow his vital signs to get fully ramped up without ruining his concentration and control. A study conducted by the Navy during the Vietnam War found that F-4 Phantom fighter pilots landing on aircraft carriers pegged higher heart rates than soldiers in combat and yet virtually never made mistakes (which tended to be fatal). To give an idea of the delicacy of the task, at one mile out the aircraft carrier is the size of a pencil eraser held at arm's length. The plane covers that distance in thirty-six seconds and must land on a section of flight deck measuring seven yards wide and forty-five yards long.
The Navy study compared stress levels of the pilots to that of their radar intercept officers, who sat immediately behind them but had no control over the two-man aircraft. The experiment involved taking blood and urine samples of both men on no-mission days as well as immediately after carrier landings. The blood and urine were tested for a hormone called cortisol, which is secreted by the adrenal gland during times of stress to sharpen the mind and increase concentration.
Radar intercept officers lived day-to-day with higher levels of stress -- possibly due to the fact that their fate was in someone else's hands -- but on mission days the pilots' stress levels were far higher. The huge responsibility borne by the pilots gave them an ease of mind on their days off that they paid for when actually landing the plane.
"There are guys in the platoon who straight up hate each other," O'Byrne told me one morning. We were sitting in ambush above the village of Bandeleek listening to mortars shriek over our heads, and there wasn't much to do but flinch and talk about the platoon. "But they would also die for each other. So you kind of have to ask, 'How much could I really hate the guy?'"
Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of quick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense it's much more like football than, say, like a gang fight. The unit that choreographs their actions best usually wins.
During World War II, the British and American militaries conducted a series of studies to identify what makes men capable of overcoming their fears. A psychiatrist named Herbert Spiegel, who accompanied American troops on the Tunisia campaign, called it the "X-factor": "Whether this factor was conscious or unconscious is debatable," he wrote for a military journal in 1944, "but this is not so important. The important thing was that it is influenced greatly by devotion to their group or unit, by regard for their leader and by conviction for their cause. In the average
soldier, which most of them were, this factor... enabled men to control their fear and combat their fatigue to a
degree that they themselves did not believe possible." The U.S. military found that, to a great degree, fearfulness was something they couldn't do much about. A fearful man is likely to remain that way no matter what kind of training he undergoes. During one experiment, completely untrained airborne candidates were told to jump off a thirty-four-foot tower. They jumped in a harness that allowed them to fall about twelve feet and then ride a 400-foot cable to the ground. As easy as it sounds, more than half of a group of qualified paratroopers said that jumping off the tower was more frightening than jumping out of a real airplane. The military tested roughly thirteen hundred candidates on the tower and then tracked their success through airborne school. They found that the men who were
"slow" to jump off the tower were more than twice as likely to fail out of the program as "fast" jumpers, and
those who refused to jump at all were almost guaranteed to fail.
One of the most puzzling things about fear is that it is only loosely related to the level of danger. During World War II, several airborne units that experienced some of the fiercest fighting of the war also reported some of the lowest psychiatric casualty rates in the U.S. military. Combat units typically suffer one psychiatric casualty for every physical one, and during Israel's Yom Kippur War of 1973, frontline casualty rates were roughly consistent with that ratio. But Israeli logistics units, which were subject to far less danger, suffered three psychiatric cases for every physical one. And even frontline troops showed enormous variation in their rate of psychological breakdown. Because many Israeli officers literally led from the front, they were four times more likely to be killed or wounded than their men were -- and yet they suffered one-fifth the rate of psychological collapse. The primary factor determining breakdown in combat does not appear to be the objective level of danger so much as the feeling -- even
the illusion -- of control. Highly trained men in extraordinarily dangerous circumstances are less likely to break down than untrained men in little danger. The division between those who feel in control of their fate and those who don't can occur even within the same close-knit group. During World War II, British and American bomber crews experienced casualty rates as high as 70 percent over the course of their tour; they effectively flew missions until they were killed. On those planes, pilots reported experiencing less fear than their turret gunners, who were crucial to operations but had no direct control over the aircraft. Fighter pilots, who suffered casualty rates almost as high as bomber crews, nevertheless reported extremely low levels of fear. They were both highly trained and entirely in
control of their their own fate, and that allowed them to ignore the statistical reality that they had only a fifty-fifty
chance of surviving their tour. Among men who are dependent on one another for their safety -- all combat soldiers, essentially -- there is often an unspoken agreement to stick together no matter what. The reassurance that you will never be abandoned seems to help men act in ways that serve the whole unit rather than just themselves. Sometimes,
however, it effectively amounts to a suicide pact. During the air war of 1944, a four-man combat crew on a B- 17 bomber took a vow to never abandon one another no matter how desperate the situation. (A fifth team member, the top turret gunner, was not part of the pact.) The aircraft was hit by flak during a mission and went into a terminal dive, and the pilot ordered everyone to bail out. The top turret gunner obeyed the order, but the ball turret gunner discovered that a piece of flak had jammed his turret and he could not get out. The other three men in his pact could have bailed out with parachutes, but they stayed with him until the plane hit the ground and exploded. They all died.
in a book about psychopaths:
"Why is the world so unfair? Why all that savage economic injustice, those brutal wars, the everyday corporate cruelty? The answer: psychopaths. That part of the brain that doesn't function right....We aren't all good people just trying to do good. Some of us are psychopaths. And psychopaths are to blame for this brutal, misshapen society. They're the jagged rocks thrown into the still pond."
Startup of You:
Professional loyalty now flows "horizontally" to and from your network rather than "vertically" to your boss, as Dan Pink has noted.
The Tiger:
'First, there was the word and then a deed.' It is always better to warn a person first; if he does not understand that warning, take action. That's the principle that I follow. Not for everyone, though."
from an article, I forget which one:
Anna's fears — that Ian would get in trouble for attempting suicide — weren't unfounded. For young soldiers still working their way up the chain of command, admitting a mental health problem isn't seen as a wise career move.
In 2010, a former Marine named Lazzaric Caldwell was given six months in the brig, dishonorably discharged and court-martialed after he attempted suicide by slitting his wrists while on a base in Okinawa. Although his conviction — for bringing "discredit on the armed forces" — was overturned, it was still an undeniable message to many active-duty service members and veterans.
Anna, who also grew up in a military family, says there's also a stigma in the ranks for military members who admit to having mental health issues. "It's pride," she explains, "and a fear of your peers picking at you. In the Army, the group of guys you're close to are like your brothers. There's a fear you'll get picked on."
He estimates that the Malayalam translator job, for example, will pay between $180,000 and $225,000 a year. That's partly to compensate for the austere conditions as well as insurgents' tendency, unmentioned in the posting, to target translators first.
A majority of the mass shootings in the four-year period were domestic-violence related. In 32 of the 56 mass shootings, or 57 percent, the perpetrator "killed a current or former spouse or intimate partner or other family member."
access to guns increases the risk of intimate partner homicide more than five times.
Boasting but 6 percent of the world's people, [the U.S.] makes up 60 percent of its market for illegal drugs.
Heroin is a remarkably efficacious cough remedy. No cure for the common cold, eh? Give smack a whirl and you can join millions of satisfied junkies who claim never to have suffered a cold, cough, or flue.
June 27, 2012: Overall, almost one-fifth of the total job growth since the recession ended in mid-2009 has been in the temp sector, federal data shows. But according to the American Staffing Association, the temp industry's trade group, the pool is even larger: Every year, a tenth of all U.S. workers finds a job at a staffing agency.
No More Mr. Nice Guy:
Whenever a child experiences any kind of abandonment he will always believe that he is the cause of what has happened to him.
Few thoughts on this: 1) Not Gender neutral. He. Maybe the kid is a she. 2) The reason for this is that children are ego-centered. 3) I can't say I felt that I was the reason that my parents split up. I don't ever remember thinking that. Maybe Sean did? I'd have to ask him, but I never got that feeling. 4) I do usually attempt to have people abandon me. It's supposedly because I think there's something wrong with me, but really it's cause I know I'm not good enough. I'm not the type of person I feel I should be.. One could argue that I think there's something wrong with me, but it's that I know I'll be a failure in some way.
I believe the significant number of Nice Guys produced in the '40s, '50s, and '60s is the direct result of mothers, not fathers, teaching their sons how to be male. Consequently, many Nice Guys have adopted a female perspective of masculinity and are comfortable having their manhood defined by women.
Yeah, growing up in a female household definitely teaches children the feminine way of masculinity. I can attest to that.
Nice Guys interpret a woman's approval as the ultimate validation of their worth.
It is true that Nice Guys often pick partners who appear to be projects, and indeed, they do at times pick some pretty messed up people. The fact that these partners may have challenges — they are single moms, they have financial problems, they are angry, addictive, depressed, overweight, non-sexual, or unable to be faithful — is precisely the reason Nice Guys invite these people into their lives. As long as attention is focused on the flaws of the partner, it is diverted away from the internalized toxic shame of the Nice Guy. This balancing act ensures that the Nice Guy's closest relationship will most likely be his least intimate.
Occasionally, the person the Nice Guy chooses to help him recreate his childhood relationship patterns isn't the way he unconsciously needs her to be when the relationship begins. If this is the case, he will often help her become what he needs. He may project upon her one or more traits of his parents. He may act as if she is a certain way, even when she isn't. His unconscious dysfunctional needs may literally force his partner to respond in an equally dysfunctional way.
All Nice Guys have shame and fear about being sexual and about being sexual beings.
1 If it frightens you, do it.
2. Don't settle. Every time you settle, you get exactly what you settled for.
3 Put yourself first.
4 No matter what happens, you will handle it.
5 Whatever you do, do it 100%.
6 If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got.
7 You are the only person on this planet responsible for your needs, wants, and happiness.
8 Ask for what you want.
9 If what you are doing isn't working, try something different.
10 Be clear and direct.
11 Learn to say "no."
12 Don't make excuses.
13 If you are an adult, you are old enough to make your own rules.
14 Let people help you.
15 Be honest with yourself.
16 Do not let anyone treat you badly. No one. Ever.
17 Remove yourself from a bad situation instead of waiting for the situation to change.
18 Don't tolerate the intolerable — ever.
19 Stop blaming. Victims never succeed.
20 Live with integrity. Decide what feels right to you, then do it.
21 Accept the consequences of your actions.
22 Be good to yourself.
23 Think "abundance."
24 Face difficult situations and conflict head on.
25 Don't do anything in secret.
26 Do it now.
27 Be willing to let go of what you have so you can get what you want.
28 Have fun. If you are not having fun, something is wrong.
29 Give yourself room to fail. There are no mistakes, only learning experiences.
30 Control is an illusion. Let go; let life happen.
He also found that young animals given tiny doses of opiates like morphine cried less or not at all when separated from their mothers. The same could not be said of anti-anxiety medications, suggesting anxiety grows more from FEAR circuits than the PANIC circuits involved in social separation, loneliness, and sadness.
In other words, social bonds are mediated by brain opioids, says Panksepp.
"That appears to be one of the main sources of opiate addiction," he says. "People that are isolated, they've got a lot of psychological pain, they learn to treat themselves."
I remember being endlessly entertained by the adventures of my toys. Some days they died repeated, violent deaths, other days they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons and how I absolutely should be allowed in the deep end of the pool, especially since I was such a talented doggy-paddler.
I didn't understand why it was fun for me, it just was.
But as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren't the same.
I played out all the same story lines that had been fun before, but the meaning had disappeared. Horse's Big Space Adventure transformed into holding a plastic horse in the air, hoping it would somehow be enjoyable for me. Prehistoric Crazy-Bus Death Ride was just smashing a toy bus full of dinosaurs into the wall while feeling sort of bored and unfulfilled. I could no longer connect to my toys in a way that allowed me to participate in the experience.
Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything.
Sociologists in general believe that when society robs people of self-control, individual dignity, or a connection to something larger than themselves, suicide rates rise
"The greater the proportion of online iSociologists in general believe that when society robs people of self-control, individual dignity, or a connection to something larger than themselves, suicide rates rise
"The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are,"
three factors to death, that when combined, increase risk of suicide: loneliness, a sense of burden, and not being afraid to die.
