Assumptions Kill Quotes

Our enemy is fear. Blinding, reason-killing fear. Fear consumes the truth and poisons all the evidence, leading us to false assumptions and irrational conclusions.

Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship, so let’s you and me not go there, okay?

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy.

You damn fool. You realize, even if all your assumptions are correct-even then, you still have to steal the world's most coveted sword from the world's safest place then be pursued by the ultimate hunter until you reach the heart of an enemy country in the middle of a war in which any side will happily kill you as a traitor, a spy, a wytch, or all three?" "I thought you'd like it.

On either side of a potentially violent conflict, an opportunity exists to exercise compassion and diminish fear based on recognition of each other's humanity. Without such recognition, fear fueled by uninformed assumptions, cultural prejudice, desperation to meet basic human needs, or the panicked uncertainty of the moment explodes into violence.

Our culture, self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology and egocentric ideology, is the unhappy inheritor of the dominator attitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants or substances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. I will argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us of life’s meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, and our grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style.

The unchallenged assumption is that humans may use animals for their own purposes, and they may raise and kill them to satisfy their preference for a diet containing animal flesh.

There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as "succesful" and "unsuccesful" to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who "fail" at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompeent incapable even of getting their dying quite right.

To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. We are often taught we have no control over our "feelings." Yet most of us accept that we choose our actions, that intention and will inform what we do. We also accept that our actions have consequences. To think of actions shaping feelings is one way we rid ourselves of conventionally accepted assumptions such as that parents love their children, or that one simply "falls" in love without exercising will or choice, that there are such things as "crimes of passion," i.e. he killed her because he loved her so much. If we were constantly remembering that love is as love does, we would not use the word in a manner that devalues and degrades its meaning.

Finally, and definitely the coolest part, is that you get a card from the State Department that gives you diplomatic immunity. I wasn't exactly sure what diplomatic immunity meant, so I asked around to see if I could kill someone. Not someone important, of course, but someone normal - like Doug. I never got a call back on the question so I'm operating under the assumption that I can.

To begin with, this case should never have come to trial. The state has not produced one iota of medical evidence that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took place... It has relied instead upon the testimony of two witnesses, whose evidence has not only been called into serious question on cross-examination, but has been flatly contradicted by the defendant. Now, there is circumstantial evidence to indicate that Mayella Ewel was beaten - savagely, by someone who led exclusively with his left. And Tom Robinson now sits before you having taken the oath with the only good hand he possesses... his RIGHT. I have nothing but pity in my heart for the chief witness for the State. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance. But my pity does not extend so far as to her putting a man's life at stake, which she has done in an effort to get rid of her own guilt. Now I say "guilt," gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She's committed no crime - she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She must destroy the evidence of her offense. But what was the evidence of her offense? Tom Robinson, a human being. She must put Tom Robinson away from her. Tom Robinson was to her a daily reminder of what she did. Now, what did she do? She tempted a *****. She was white, and she tempted a *****. She did something that, in our society, is unspeakable. She kissed a black man. Not an old uncle, but a strong, young ***** man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards. The witnesses for the State, with the exception of the sheriff of Maycomb County have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption... the evil assumption that all Negroes lie, all Negroes are basically immoral beings, all ***** men are not to be trusted around our women. An assumption that one associates with minds of their caliber, and which is, in itself, gentlemen, a lie, which I do not need to point out to you. And so, a quiet, humble, respectable *****, who has had the unmitigated TEMERITY to feel sorry for a white woman, has had to put his word against TWO white people's! The defendant is not guilty - but somebody in this courtroom is. Now, gentlemen, in this country, our courts are the great levelers. In our courts, all men are created equal. I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and of our jury system - that's no ideal to me. That is a living, working reality! Now I am confident that you gentlemen will review, without passion, the evidence that you have heard, come to a decision and restore this man to his family. In the name of GOD, do your duty. In the name of God, believe... Tom Robinson

As editor of the largest newspaper in West Virginia, I scan hundreds of reports daily . . . and I am amazed by the frequency with which religion causes people to kill each other. It is a nearly universal pattern, undercutting the common assumption that religion makes people kind and tolerant.

Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man's environment, but in man. Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment. I know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle. I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest — if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this — that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable. You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to kill the rich as violators of definable justice. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown the rich as convenient rulers of society. It is not certainly un-Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor.

It is not the case that one can create new people on the assumption that if they are not pleased to have come into existence they can simply kill themselves. Once somebody has come into existence and attachments with that person have been formed, suicide can cause the kind of pain that makes the pain of childlessness mild by comparison. Somebody contemplating suicide knows (or should know) this. This places an important obstacle in the way of suicide. One’s life may be bad, but one must consider what affect ending it would have on one’s family and friends. There will be times when life has become so bad that it is unreasonable for the interests of the loved ones in having the person alive to outweigh that person’s interests in ceasing to exist. When this is true will depend in part on particular features of the person for whom continued life is a burden. Different people are able to bear different magnitudes of burden. It may even be indecent for family members to expect that person to continue living. On other occasions one’s life may be bad but not so bad as to warrant killing oneself and thereby making the lives of one’s family and friends still much worse than they already are.

Still rarer is the man who thinks habitually, who applies reason, rather than habit pattern, to all his activity. Unless he masques himself, his is a dangerous life; he is regarded as queer, untrustworthy, subversive of public morals; he is a pink monkey among brown monkeys -- a fatal mistake. Unless the pink monkey can dye himself brown before he is caught. The brown monkey's instinct to kill is correct; such men are dangerous to all monkey customs. Rarest of all is the man who can and does reason at all times, quickly, accurately, inclusively, despite hope or fear or bodily distress, without egocentric bias or thalmic disturbance, with correct memory, with clear distinction between fact, assumption, and non-fact.

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed. —HERMAN MELVILLE

(I)f you try to treat the medical problem you *think* you see without fully exploring the differential diagnosis -- call(ed) "speculation on a foundation of assumption" -- you can kill your patient.

The witnesses for the state, with the exception of the sheriff of Maycomb County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption—the evil assumption—that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber. Which, gentlemen, we know is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson’s skin, a lie I do not have to point out to you. You know the truth, and the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men are not to be trusted around women—black or white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men. There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire.

Right. This all happened because he”—I can’t say his name—“assumed that we were up to no good. Because we’re black and because of where we live. We were just two kids, minding our business, you know? His assumption killed Khalil. It could’ve killed me.

But black men consistently differed from white men in how they conceived of government intervention and group identity. Whereas white men jumped unthinkingly to assumptions about “them,” black men frequently answered questions about health and health systems through the language of “us.

Rape. It brings with it connotations, assumptions, a whole steamer trunk full of other people's ideas of it, because other people only know it as a word. A concept that's discussed, argued, demonized. If you actually know what it is, if you live and experience it and know what it is beyond a word, you have to carry that word with you. You're now "rape victim", "rape survivor." Your identity is attached permanently to a word you hate. I'm also a murder victim, but murder carries with it what it is. People don't debate what defines murder. Politicians don't argue the body's ability to fight off being killed. There's no talk of a "murder culture." No one says that you asked for murder. What you wear doesn't excuse being killed.

In the first half of 1944, battle casualty rates for every 1,000 bomber crewmen serving six months in combat included 712 killed or missing and 175 wounded: 89 percent. By one calculation, barely one in four U.S. airmen completed twenty-five missions over Germany, a minimum quota that was soon raised to thirty and then thirty-five on the assumption that the liberation of France and Belgium and the attenuation of German airpower made flying less lethal.

The notion of the 'Black male predator' is so historically rooted in the American consciousness that we have come to accept the brutalization and murder of citizens by the police as an acceptable method of law enforcement. The assumption is that Black men are the bad guys, the police are the good guys, and if the police killed someone it must have been for a good reason. They must have done something.

Yeah,” Bryce said, “but I mean, I drove her to it, you know? That’s the thing. If I just hadn’t broken up with her—” “You have a pretty high opinion of yourself, don’t you?” He looked taken aback. “What?” “Well, your assumption that she killed herself because you broke up with her. I don’t think that’s why she killed herself at all. She killed herself because she was sick. You had nothing to do with making her that way. Your breaking up with her may have acted as a sort of catalyst for her final breakdown, but it could just have easily been some other crisis in her life—her parents getting divorced, her not making the cheerleader squad, her cat dying. Anything. So try not to be so hard on yourself.

Your fundamental assumption is wrong. You think you are this vehicle. This naked ape. Homo sapiens. I tell you, you are no more human than a driver is the car he is driving. You would never go to a junkyard to look for the driver would you?

Within the church, good questions and good listening kill the assumptions we make about others that often exacerbate divisions and gaps between us. How can we love and bear with one another if we don’t know and listen to one another? Consider

I think it's important to have clearly defined goals in life, don't you? Especially if you don't have a lot of life left. Because if you don't have clear goals, you might run out of time, and when the day comes, you'll find yourself standing on the parapet of a tall building, or sitting on your bed with a bottle of pills in your hand, thinking, Shit! I blew it. If only I'd set clearer goals for myself! I'm telling you this because I'm actually not going to be around for long, and you might as well know this up front so you don't make assumptions. Assumptions suck. They're like expectations. Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship, so let's you and me not go there, okay? The truth is that very soon I'm going to graduate from time, or maybe I shouldn't say graduate because that makes it sound as if I've actually met my goals and deserve to move on, when the fact is that I just turned sixteen and I've accomplished nothing at all. Zilch. Nada. Do I sound pathetic? I don't mean to. I just want to be accurate. Maybe instead of graduate, I should say I'm going to drop out of time. Drop out. Exit my existence. I'm counting the moments.

....confident that you gentlemen will go along with them on the assumption-the evil assumption-that all negro men are not to be trusted, all negro men are basically immoral beings, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber which we know it is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson's skin.

Few black men can look at the data about black male lives and not see clearly the dangers they face and the extent to which those dangers are in place because of their blind allegiance to dominator culture. Black male-on-black male homicide would not exist if it were not encouraged and reinforced by notions of patriarchal manhood and white supremacy. For if it was just about manhood shootouts, black males would be killing white men at the same rates that they kill one another. They buy into the racist/sexist assumption that the black male is valueless and therefore when you take a black man 's life you are just taking nothing from nothing,

Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy.

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy.

It seems clear, from reading the daily news if nothing else, that there will always be some in this world who want their holy wars, who will discriminate, vilify, and even kill in the name of God. They have narrowed down the concept of neighbor to include only those like themselves, in terms of creed, caste, race, sex, or sexual orientation. But there is also much evidence that there are many who know that a neighbor might be anyone at all, and are willing to act on that assumption.

Identity politics is killings free speech on campus, silencing Muslim women struggle, boosting both Islamism and the far Right and pushing reconciled Muslim voices to the fringes. It makes implicit assumptions about Islam - from an Islamist, Left or Right- perspective - and insists all Muslims must adhere to that definition or be regarded not truly Muslim. It ignores the fact that most ordinary Muslims are not in favour of a violent and that in surveys and polls they support British values more than the general UK population. Yet the myth persists that the ideology of Islamism is the true expression of what it means to be Muslim.

Jesus said the thief comes to “steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10), and this is exactly what the Devil does in our lives when we give him a foothold. He tries to steal our faith and leave us with fear, steal our joy and leave us with depression, steal our love and leave us with hateful thoughts toward others. The name Satan means “accuser.” And by accusing others in our minds, he causes us to dwell on their wrongs, filling in the unknowns with negative assumptions, keeping us focused on how we’ve been mistreated and unappreciated. He feeds us what we want to hear with one hand, then takes from us the peace that is rightly ours with the other.

On January 1, they proclaimed the independence of a new country, which they called Haiti—the name they believed the original Taino inhabitants had used before the Spaniards killed them all. Although the country’s history would be marked by massacre, civil war, dictatorship, and disaster, and although white nations have always found ways to exclude Haiti from international community, independent Haiti’s first constitution created a radical new concept of citizenship: only black people could be citizens of Haiti. And who was black? All who would say they rejected both France and slavery and would accept the fact that black folks ruled Haiti. Thus, even a “white” person could become a “black” citizen of Haiti, as long as he or she rejected the assumption that whites should rule and Africans serve.18

Any time you look into the face of a man you must realize you have a 100% chance of looking into the face of a rapist. You must realize you are looking into the face of a man who will kill. It does not matter if this man is your father, brother, cousin, uncle or grandfather, or whether the man is a neighbor, coworker, a uniform police officer or a fireman. We do not care if the man is White; the young and White kill as often and with as much frequency as the old and Black. Nothing precludes a man from being a rapist. Nothing! Any time you look into the face of a man you must realize you have a 100% chance of looking into the face of a rapist. This is a life saving assumption. To think counter to this assumption is to put your life in that man’s hands. Accepting this fact may save your life or you may avoid being raped.

Jane knew from Dom’s flinch that he’d been hoping for a different response, but she couldn’t help it--she spoke the truth. When he acted like a gentleman, as he had at dinner, she remembered exactly why she’d fallen in love with him. But when he reminded her of how he’d made assumptions and, worse yet, used those assumptions to decide her future for her, she couldn’t bear it. Because he was still doing it, still demanding his way and dictating terms and ignoring her concerns. She understood the courtly gentleman. It was the autocratic devil she had trouble understanding. And she might as well admit it. She twisted her head to look up at him. “I don’t know how I feel about you anymore.” The pain that slashed over his features only confused her further. Was he genuinely hurt by the thought that he’d killed her love? Or was his pride merely bruised because he hadn’t been able to step right back into her life as if the past meant nothing? “At least tell me the truth about Blakeborough,” he said hoarsely. “Do you love him?” “Why does it matter?” His eyes ate her up. “If you do, I’ll keep my distance. I’ll stay out of your life from now on.” “You’ve been doing that easily enough for the past twelve years,” she snapped. “I don’t see why my feelings for Edwin should change anything.” “Easily? It was never easy, I assure you.” His expression was stony. “And you’re avoiding the question. Are you in love with Blakeborough?” How she wished she could lie about it. Dom would take himself off, and she wouldn’t be tempted by him anymore. Unfortunately, he could always tell when she was lying. “And if I say I’m not?” “Then I won’t rest until you’re mine again.

In 1517, few western Christians worried that Muslims might have a more convincing message to offer than Christianity or that Christian youth might start converting to Islam. The Turks were at the gate, it's true, but they weren't in the living room, and they certainly weren't in the bedroom. The Turks posed a threat to the physical health of Christians, but not to the spiritual health of Christianity. Muslims were in a different boat. Almost from the start, as I've discussed, Islam had offered its political and military successes as an argument for its doctrines and a proof of its revelations. The process began with those iconic early battles at Badr and Uhud, when the outcome of battle was shown to have theological meaning. The miracle of expansion and the linkage of victory with truth continued for hundreds of years. Then came the Mongol holocaust, which forced Muslim theologians to reexamine their assumptions. That process spawned such reforms as Ibn Taymiyah. Vis-a-vis the Mongols, however, the weakness of Muslims was concrete and easy to understand. The Mongols had greater killing power, but they came without an ideology. When the bloodshed wound down and the human hunger for meaning bubbled up, as it always does, they had nothing to offer. In fact, they themselves converted. Islam won in the end, absorbing the Mongols as it has absorbed the Turks before them and the Persians before that. ... The same could not be said of the new overlords. The Europeans came wrapped in certainty about their way of life and peddling their own ideas of ultimate truth. They didn't challenge Islam so much as ignore it, unless they were missionaries, in which case they simply tried to convert the Muslims. If they noticed Islam, they didn't bother to debate it (missionaries are not in the debating business) but only smiled at it as one would at the toys of a child or the quaint relics of a more primitive people. How maddening for the Muslim cognoscenti! And yet, what could Muslims do about it?

The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide ‘These are the lies we tell today.’ No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they’ve chosen to live their lives. It’s a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was fucked up, torture never works, and mad Vietnam sniper Carl Hitchcock killed the saintly peace demonstrators. Cheney’s a devil, Biden’s a genius. Soft power good,

How do we know that?” Lucy was frowning. “By inference. She did not attach a piece of paper to a blanket with a bare pin and wrap the blanket around the baby. Mr. Goodwin found a tray half full of safety pins in her house. But he found no rubber-stamp kit and no stamp pad, and one was used for the message on the paper. The inference is not conclusive, but it is valid. I am satisfied that on May twentieth Ellen Tenzer delivered the baby to someone, either at her house or, more likely, at a rendezvous elsewhere. She may or may not have known that its destination was your vestibule. I doubt it; but she knew too much about its history, its origin, so she was killed.” “Then you know that?” Lucy’s hands were clasped, the fingers twisted. “That that’s why she was killed?” “No. But it would be vacuous not to assume it. Another assumption: Ellen Tenzer not only did not leave the baby in your vestibule or know that was its destination; she didn’t even know that it was to be so disposed of that its source would be unknown and undiscoverable. For if she had known that, she would not have dressed it in those overalls. She knew those buttons were unique and that inquiry might trace their origin. Whatever she—” “Wait a minute.” Lucy was frowning, concentrating. Wolfe waited. In a moment she went on. “Maybe she wanted them to be traced.

Now, in the academy, you cannot just say anything about male theory. You have to proceed with an immanent critique, that is to say, you have to expertly play the parts against the whole. You show, for example, how certain assumptions in the work actually defeat its stated purpose of human liberation, but once remedied, i.e. salvaged, the theory will work for women. An immanent critique can stay within the masculinist academic circle. In this position women become the technicians of male theory who have to reprogram the machine, turning it from a war machine against women into a gentler, kinder war machine, killing us softly. This is a very involving task and after years of playing this part it is understandable that there may be little desire to admit that the effort was virtually futile. An investment has been made, and the conformity is not wholly outer. What attitudes and feelings does this sexist context produce towards oppositional women who refuse this male material? Does a male-circled woman have the power and security to be generous? Having compromised her freedom, will she be less willing to compromise ours? Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this arrangement, besides the ways it sets women against one another, is the fact that although the male academy values owning our freedom, it does not have to pay a lot for it. Masculine culture already controls gross amounts of female lives. Still, it seems to want more, but always at the same low price. The exploited are very affordable.

Assumptions can get you killed. --Titus Ray, Chapter 2

Beerlight was a blown circuit, where to kill a man was less a murder than a mannerism. Every major landmark was a pincushion of snipers. Cop tanks navigated a graffiti-rashed riot of needle bars, oil-scabbed neon and diced rubble. Fragile laws were shattered without effort or intent and the cops considered false arrest a moral duty. Integrity was no more than a fierce dream. Crime was the new and only art form. The authorities portrayed shock and outrage but never described what it was they had been expecting. Anyone trying to adapt was persecuted. One woman had given birth to a bulletproof child. Other denizens were bomb zombies, pocketing grenades and wandering gaunt and vacant for days before winding down and pulling the pin on themselves. There was no beach under the sidewalk. Yet in dealing with this environment the one strategy common to all was the assumption that it could be dealt with.

The Princeton ethicist Peter Singer has espoused the right of women to choose abortion through to the end of pregnancy and to commit infanticide on newborns if they so choose. He has defended this position with the utilitarian argument that most women who eliminate an unwanted child will produce a wanted one, and that the loss of happiness of the child who is killed is outweighed by the happiness of the healthy child who follows. 1zAlthough Singer's position is extreme, it reflects the pervasive devaluation of people with Down's syndrome and the assumption that their lives are displeasing to others and themselves.

In summary, those who have cultural belief systems that see control as external tend to react passively to authoritative orders rather than proceed on the assumption that they can redefine situations through their own actions.

No matter what happened, there was always one thing Isla could rely on: the sheer arrogance of male wolves. That, and their overriding assumption all females found them irresistible and were desperate to get them in the sack. Mostly she was desperate to get them in the sack, if only to stop their whining, but she didn't think a sack six feet under was precisely what they meant.

He had lived so many years in this room that he still could not quite grasp the idea that now it was finished. He would never again see this place which had been the very center of his life. Others would come into it, destroy the order of things that existed now, transform these four walls into something he would not even recognize, and kill off forever any lingering assumption that a certain Monsieur Trelkovsky had lived here before. Unceremoniously, from one day to the next, he would have vanished.

What I did next was predicated on the assumption that she had told the DeltFall SecUnit to kill me. If I was wrong, we were screwed, and Mensah and I would both die, and the plan to save the rest of the group would fail and PreservationAux would be back to where it started, except minus their leader, their SecUnit, and their little hopper.

If you gather a team of experienced leaders and ask them why past projects failed, the explanations flow readily: The project was bigger than we realised . . . we were too slow . . . our design was flawed . . . we were operating from faulty assumptions . . . the market changed . . . we had the wrong people . . . our technology didn’t work . . . our strategy was unclear . . . our costs were too high . . . our organisation sabotaged us . . . the competition was tougher than we thought . . . we reorganised ourselves to death . . . we fought among ourselves . . . our strategy was flawed . . . our strategy was good but our execution was lousy . . . we ran into unexpected bottlenecks . . . we misunderstood our customers . . . we were short on resources . . . the economics didn’t work . . . we got killed by internal politics . . .

Finally, we must believe that we are pursuing true goals - not merely effective ones. Darwinian evolution leaves no room for the true; it only leaves room for the evolutionarily beneficial. Survival of the fittest isn't a moral principle; survival itself isn't a moral proposition. If it were beneficial to use to kill babies and eat them, that would not make it moral; if it were beneficial for us to calculate 2+2=5, it would not make it true. But we care about both moral and true, and that requires a base line assumption: that we can discover the moral and true.

Finally, we must believe that we are pursuing true goals - not merely effective ones. Darwinian evolution leaves no room for the true; it only leaves room for the evolutionarily beneficial. Survival of the fittest isn't a moral principle; survival itself isn't a moral proposition. If it were beneficial to us to kill babies and eat them, that would not make it moral; if it were beneficial for us to calculate 2+2=5, it would not make it true. But we care about both moral and true, and that requires a base line assumption: that we can discover the moral and true.

Day after day, the curtain rises on a stage of epic proportions, one that has been running for centuries. The actors wear the costumes of their predecessors and inhabit the roles assigned to them. The people in these roles are not the characters they play, but they have played the roles long enough to incorporate the roles into their very being, to merge the assignment with their inner selves and how they are seen in the world. The costumes were handed out at birth and can never be removed. The costumes cue everyone in the cast to the roles each character is to play and to each character’s place on the stage. Over the run of the show, the cast has grown accustomed to who plays which part. For generations, everyone has known who is center stage in the lead. Everyone knows who the hero is, who the supporting characters are, who is the sidekick good for laughs, and who is in shadow, the undifferentiated chorus with no lines to speak, no voice to sing, but necessary for the production to work. The roles become sufficiently embedded into the identity of the players that the leading man or woman would not be expected so much as to know the names or take notice of the people in the back, and there would be no need for them to do so. Stay in the roles long enough, and everyone begins to believe that the roles are preordained, that each cast member is best suited by talent and temperament for their assigned role, and maybe for only that role, that they belong there and were meant to be cast as they are currently seen. The cast members become associated with their characters, typecast, locked into either inflated or disfavored assumptions. They become their characters. As an actor, you are to move the way you are directed to move, speak the way your character is expected to speak. You are not yourself. You are not to be yourself. Stick to the script and to the part you are cast to play, and you will be rewarded. Veer from the script, and you will face the consequences. Veer from the script, and other cast members will step in to remind you where you went off-script. Do it often enough or at a critical moment and you may be fired, demoted, cast out, your character conveniently killed off in the plot. The social pyramid known as a caste system is not identical to the cast in a play, though the similarity in the two words hints at a tantalizing intersection. When we are cast into roles, we are not ourselves. We are not supposed to be ourselves. We are performing based on our place in the production, not necessarily on who we are inside. We are all players on a stage that was built long before our ancestors arrived in this land. We are the latest cast in a long-running drama that premiered on this soil in the early seventeenth century.

So long as one assumes death as an absolute fact, one must have, as an assumed absolute value based on it, the decision either to kill or to be killed in the last extreme (and this includes attitudes to suicide and to 'natural death'). This alternative ultimately divides all people (who make that assumption about death) into two types. With a proper understanding of death, the decision (dialectic) must collapse on the laying bare of the assumption. Freud has remarked, that death is inconceivable to the Unconscious, a statement which, though open to the usual criticisms of F's mechanistic assumptions about consciousness, does point to a very important factual dialectic in assumptions about death.

Assumptions suck. They’re like expectations. Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship

Most big freshwater fish, in most parts of the world, have all but disappeared from most places where they used to live. As with arapaima, the main reason is over-harvesting, but there are other factors too. Dams block the migration routes of many fish, so they disappear from the water above the dam — or even altogether, if breeding grounds are cut off. Draining of floodplains, cutting off backwaters, competition from invasive species and pollution also play a part. And sometimes it's just willful slaughter, as was the case with the North American alligator gar in the early 1900s, thanks to the incorrect assumption that killing these predators would boost populations of ‘game’ fish.

To speak for the people of Europe was to be on the side of the devil. And all the time there existed that strange assumption that Europe was simply letting one more person into the room. Whether that person was genuinely about to be killed in the corridor became immaterial. If he was cold, poor, or just worse off there than the people inside the room, he too had the right to come in.

To begin by always thinking about love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. We are often taught we have no control over our 'feelings'. Yet most of us accept that we choose our actions, that intention and will inform what we do. We also accept that our actions have consequences. To think of actions shaping feelings is one way we rid ourselves of conventionally accepted assumptions such as parents love their children, or that simply 'falls' in love without exercising will or choice, that there are such things as 'crimes of passion' i.e. he killed her because he loved her so much.

And for their saying, “We have killed the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the Messenger of God.” In fact, they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but it appeared to them as if they did. Indeed, those who differ about him are in doubt about it. They have no knowledge of it, except the following of assumptions. Certainly, they did not kill him.

You've been keeping in touch with the reporter?" "He came by the diner the other day. And that reminds me, you told me he was a by-the-book detective. Calhoun has evidence to the contrary." He squared his shoulders and faced me head-on. Betsy was pushed out of the middle. "What are you implying?" he spat. "Hey, y'all," Betsy interjected. "I'm not implying anything. I just want to know if you still think Detective Thornton is a pristine detective." "Do you always believe everything people tell you?" Alex's jaw clenched. "No." I bared my teeth. If he wanted a fight, he'd certainly get one! He took a step closer to me. "You believe the reporter?" I jerked my head. His neck was corded and his arms tensed. Boy, was he angry. "Some asshole floats into town with tall tales, dangling bait in front of your pretty little face, and you just bite? You've known him for two damn seconds. Me, you've known your whole damn life." "Um... y'all," Betsy said louder. "Where is all this anger comin' from?" I shrieked. "Somebody is going around murdering people. And since the department had to march to the tune of a crooked cop, I felt I had to do something." That was a grave allegation I honestly didn't believe. He had ruffled my feathers and I was lashing out. "And your keen investigative skills led you to believe I was dirty? Perhaps you think I'm the one going around killing people?" His voice teetered on unhinged. "Don't be stupid," I said, more calmly. He felt patronized, that was beyond obvious. Guilt washed over me like a tidal wave and I was searching for the appropriate words to apologize effectively, when he said, "What's with you and older men? Daddy issues?" I gasped. "How dare you?" That was the ugliest thing he could have ever said in this moment. And he'd said it. His facial expression changed, and he took a step forward. I took one backward. Eddie's commanding voice boomed, "Enough." "I tried to warn y'all," Betsy said softly.

Be a skeptic. Respect your instructors, but also remember they are experts in the subject of martial arts training, not fighting. Even if they are former champions themselves, the best they can do is offer you a glimpse into what happened to work for them. Keep your ears open for potential garbage at all times. Some of the most common red flags for garbage are speaking in absolutes (“This kick will always knock him out”) and making untestable claims (“This kick will break the knee,” or “This strike will kill your opponent”). The truth is you have no good way of knowing what will happen as a result of most of your techniques. Replace untested assumptions with uncertainty, and learn to embrace that uncertainty. Ask why. At the most basic level, you want to ask “why” to make sure you understand the technique. Ask, “Why do we tuck our thumb in for this technique?” or “Why do we turn our foot for this kick?” The more you understand the “why” behind a rule, the better you will understand when it is OK to break it. Go deeper with your questions and ask about choices. Ask, “Why do we use a knife hand to strike the neck instead of a straight punch?” Go even deeper and ask about strategy with questions such as, “Why do we kick the leg?” Ultimately, ask about goals, such as, “What are we trying to accomplish by punching our opponent?” No instructor could ever answer every question you ask, and different instructors may have different answers to the same question, so don’t be disappointed if they don’t always have a good answer, but don’t forget to be skeptical as you listen either. Break everything. Every technique you learn, every strategy you employ, every weapon you use, and every piece of safety gear you wear, you should try to break. Find out what the limits are on your own terms, when you have time to soak it all in, instead of when you need your mind focused on your opponent. If you learned how to block a punch, have a friend throw punches harder and harder until one either flies through the block or hurts your arm. See what happens when you block too close or too far away. Does it also work on kicks? Try out various incoming punch angles. Take each technique to multiple extremes, and make a mental note of not only how far you can take it, but also the way it breaks down when you get there. Get it wrong on purpose. Make mistakes when you practice a technique with a partner and make mistakes when you spar. Mistakes are learning opportunities, and you won’t get enough of them if you are always flawless in class. Get sloppy and watch what happens. Overcommit, drop your hands, or use a narrow base on the mat. Zone out or let yourself get distracted for a moment and see what it takes to recover. Get used to making mistakes and dealing with the repercussions.

Once male and female poles have bonded together, the undifferentiated energies of life can then circulate through us. Looking at the state of the earth, it's no surprise that we worship the patriarchal state of stillness and silence while disregarding the feminine artistic and biological forces. We exist in a patriarchal society where the feminine influence of production has been distorted and ignored. The profound feminine intelligence within us is our souls, the spirit world, the natural world, and our emotions. These were all stolen, killed, or demonized. The patriarchal axis forces us into stereotypical awareness. In somatic studies, the brain, the "working" force, and our rational minds are portrayed. We need that force to shed light on our ideas, to act upon our feminine intuition. There will always be two polarities of masculine forms of consciousness at odds with one another. The masculine vs. the feminine, me vs. someone else— what we see as opposite and inward and outwardly warring forces. There is a triple form of consciousness rooted in the feminine pole: the power to see two things but also what lies between them, to access liminal space, to continually create and re-create. In the end, this is the power from which we all emerge to separate into binary consciousness. Only by revering intensely the feminine force of existence, by linking the head with the body, the masculine with the feminine, may we push beyond the constraints of patriarchal truth and into awareness of the divine concept that gave birth to all of us. It is an incorrect assumption to state that awakening kundalini is purely feminine energy or energy of the goddess. The power of creation and evolution, which are profoundly feminine powers, certainly never stops being. Yet illumination arrives as the masculine and feminine powers within us intertwine and embrace each other rather than hinder each other. By merging these feminine and masculine principles, we move into wholeness beyond a state of separation and thus become fully realized. We become masculine and feminine, empty, and full. We can even go beyond those states and witness them, observe consciousness or energy waves that flow through our body. In kundalini awakenings, the completion state is not one of a single energy chain streaming from the genitals through the top of the head or into the brain, but of all energies merging and becoming one, and both flowing downwards, entangled, into the space of the heart. This is a state of being constantly at odds with each other within and without, between two forces— male and female, void and non-void, extension and contraction, fullness, and absence. This is a state of being both forces at the same time, as well as falling between them.

The darker side of this story is that parents in such (cot death) cases have often had their tragedy compounded by suspicion that they have killed their child. In one particularly sad case a few years ago an ‘expert’ witness informed a UK court that the chances of a couple’s first cot death through natural causes were 1 in 8,000, and, that, following the second cot death in the same family, the chances of that were 1 in 8,000 x 8,000 (i.e. 1 in 64 million). The mother went to prison because the ‘expert’ failed to understand that, if the first death, however unlikely, had a genetic cause, then the chances of the same defect affecting the next child were 1 in 4. For a recessive condition (see above), the assumption is that the two parents are carriers, each carrying one ‘bad’ copy and one ‘good’ copy of the gene. They are therefore unaffected themselves but both have a 50:50 chance of passing on the bad copy to their offspring. Hence a 25 per cent chance that the child will be affected and a 50 per cent chance that the child will be unaffected but also be a carrier like the parents.

If I, too, knew some guy that had been killed and placed inside a cave with a rock in front of it, and I visited the cave to find the rock moved and his body gone, the only logical assumption would be that he had risen from the dead and is the Son of God.

Cruel randomness [...] Besides, if God really was selecting people to protect on the basis of some bigger picture, then you would not expect the number of people who are killed in various ways to be subject to the rules of probability. However, I can predict with remarkable accuracy the road toll each year, the number of people who will be struck by lightning, the number of people who will be killed by shark attacks, and so on. Each of these causes of death has a certain rate of occurrence that is quite predictable. It is not just the number of deaths that is predictable, it is the whole probability distribution of deaths that is predictable. If you know the average number of deaths by car accidents in a city, then it is possible to calculate all the percentiles for that city. For example, you can estimate the numbers of deaths that would be exceeded only once every ten years. When you do this for many cities, you find that the 1-in-10-year extremes are exceeded in approximately 10% of cities each year. This is exactly what you would expect if the world was random, but not what you would expect if anyone was in control. Car accidents, diseases, and industrial accidents all follow the same probability distribution, known as the “Poisson distribution”. The Poisson probability distribution is based on the assumption that accidents happen randomly. It is simply not possible for tragedies to appear to follow the Poisson probability distribution while actually being controlled by God. Any interventions of God that interfere in the random processes would be detectable. If they are not detectable, then they are random and God is not involved. If we accept that the world is random, and that bad things happen to everyone by chance, where does that leave God? Either he does not exist, or he has no power, or he does not care. Whichever of those answers you prefer, God does not deserve our thanks.

Some children respond to our educational matrix with This is my natural home. But there’s a whole range of mismatches between that matrix and the rest of the actual human beings who are funneled into it. Just past I’m good at school, we find I can do this, it’s just boring, progress through I can do some of this, but other parts of it are a complete mystery to me, continue on to If I grit my teeth I can probably squeak by, and end with I am stupid. I can’t do this. It’s just unending torture that I can’t get out of until I graduate. If your child falls anywhere on this mismatch spectrum, there’s a very good chance that the problem is school, not your child. And this is most definitely not the message that most struggling learners receive. Our current school system, as Sir Ken Robinson explains in his wildly popular TED talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?,”3 was designed to produce good workers for a capitalistic society. Built inextricably into that model is the assumption that “real intelligence consists [of a] capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning . . . what we come to think of as academic ability.” Deep in “the gene pool of public education,” Sir Ken concludes, is the unquestioned premise that “there are only two types of people—academic and nonacademic; smart people and non-smart people. And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they’re not, because they’ve been judged against this particular view of the mind. . . . [T]his model has caused chaos in many people’s lives. It’s been great for some; there have been people who have benefitted wonderfully from it. But most people have not. Instead, they suffer.

But traveling faster than light would require infinite energy; it is possible on paper, not in practice. More recently, physicists have theorized other ways that physical travel into the past could be achieved, but they are still exotic and expensive. A technological civilization thousands or more years in advance of our own, one able to harness the energy of its whole galaxy, could create a wormhole linking different points in the fabric of spacetime and send a spaceship through it.8 It is an idea explored widely in science fiction and depicted vividly in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar. But all this is academic for our purposes. For Gleick, what we are really talking about with time travel is a thought experiment about the experiencer—the passenger—in a novel, disjointed relationship to the external world. We can readily perform feats of “mental time travel,” or at least simulate such feats, as well as experience a dissociation between our internal subjective sense of time and the flux of things around us and even our own bodies.9 According to Gleick, part of what suddenly facilitated four-dimensional thinking in both popular writing and the sciences was the changing experience of time in an accelerating society. The Victorian age, with its steam engines and bewildering pace of urban living, increased these experiences of dissociation, and they have only intensified since then. Time travel, Gleick argues, is basically just a metaphor for modernity, and a nifty premise upon which to base literary and cinematic fantasies that repair modernity’s traumas. It also shines a light on how confused we all are about time. The most commonly voiced objection to time travel—and with it, precognition—is that any interaction between the future and past would change the past, and thus create a different future. The familiar term is the grandfather paradox: You can’t go back in time and kill your grandfather because then you wouldn’t have been born to go back in time and kill your grandfather (leaving aside for the moment the assumed inevitability of wanting to kill your grandfather, which is an odd assumption). The technical term for meddling in the past this way is “bilking,” on the analogy of failing to pay a promised debt.10 Whatever you call it, it is the kind of thing that, in Star Trek, would make the Enterprise’s computer start to stutter and smoke and go haywire—the same reaction, in fact, that greets scientific claims of precognition. (As Dean Radin puts it, laboratory precognition results like those cited in the past two chapters “cause faces to turn red and sputtering noises to be issued from upset lips.”11) Information somehow sent backward in time from an event cannot lead to a future that no longer includes that event—and we naturally intuit that it would be very hard not to have such an effect if we meddled in the timeline. Our very presence in the past would change things.

As I’ve argued previously, there is no rule that says we need to allow self-defeating prophecies in our picture of precognition. The common assumption that people could (and would) “use” precognitive information to create an alternative future flies in the face of the way precognition seems to work in the real world. It is largely unconscious (thus evades our “free will”), and it is oblique and invariably misrecognized or misinterpreted until after events have made sense of it. Laius and his son both fulfill the dark prophecies about them in their attempts to evade what was foretold; their attempts backfire precisely because of things they don’t know (Laius, that his wife failed to kill his son, as ordered; Oedipus, that his adopted family in Corinth was not his real family). The Greeks called these obliquely foreseen outcomes, unavoidable because of our self-ignorance, our fate. Any mention of Oedipus naturally calls to mind Sigmund Freud, whom I am recruiting as a kind of ambivalent guide in my examination of the time-looping structure of human fate. Making a central place for Freud in a book on precognition may perplex readers given (a) his reputed disinterest in psychic phenomena, and (b) the fact that psychological science long since tossed psychoanalysis and its founder into the dustbin. In fact, (a) is a myth, as we’ll see, and (b) partly reflects the “unreason” of psychological science around questions of meaning. Although deeply flawed and occasionally off-the-mark, the psychoanalytic tradition—including numerous course-corrections by later thinkers who tweaked and nuanced Freud’s core insights—represents a sincere and sustained effort to bring the objective and subjective into suspension, to include the knower in the known without reducing either pole to the other. More to the point, it was Freud, more than probably any other thinker of the modern age, who took seriously and mapped precisely the forms of self-deception and self-ignorance that make precognition possible in a post-selected universe. The obliquity of the unconscious—the rules Freud assigned to what he called “primary process” thinking—reflect the associative and indirect way in which information from the future has to reach us. We couldn’t just appear to ourselves bearing explicit messages from the future; those messages can only be obscure, hinting, and rich in metaphor, more like a game of charades, and they will almost always lack a clear origin—like unsigned postcards or letters with no return address. Their import, or their meaning, will never be fully grasped, or will be wrongly interpreted, until events come to pass that reveal how the experiencer, perhaps inadvertently, fulfilled the premonition. It may be no coincidence that Freud’s theory maps so well onto an understanding of precognition if the unconscious is really, as I suggested, something like consciousness displaced in time.

Whenever I hear of a police officer being killed, my assumption is they were probably corrupt and deserved it.

Last week, I was living my nice quiet life in my nice quiet apartment in San Francisco. Since then, I’ve discovered that my sister is getting married to the head of the Irish Mob, and that I caught the eye of a notorious Russian assassin whose hobbies include stalking, appearing out of thin air, making wildly incorrect assumptions about people based on their wardrobes, and handing out large quantities of cash to strangers in restrooms. He’s also on a mission to kill my future brother-in-law.

But if most men have been sheep, why is it that man’s life is so different from that of sheep? His history has been written in blood; it is a history of continuous violence, in which almost invariably force has been used to bend his will. Did Talaat Pasha alone exterminate millions of Armenians? Did Hitler alone exterminate millions of Jews? Did Stalin alone exterminate millions of political enemies? These men were not alone; they had thousands of men who killed for them, tortured for them, and who did so not only willingly but with pleasure. Do we not see man’s inhumanity to man everywhere—in ruthless warfare, in murder and rape, in the ruthless exploitation of the weaker by the stronger, and in the fact that the sighs of the tortured and suffering creature have so often fallen on deaf ears and hardened hearts? All these facts have led thinkers like Hobbes to the conclusion that homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to his fellow man); they have led many of us today to the assumption that man is vicious and destructive by nature, that he is a killer who can be restrained from his favorite pastime only by fear of more powerful killers.

To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. We are often taught we have no control over our "feelings." Yet most of us will accept that we choose our actions, that intention will inform what we do. We also accept that our actions have consequences. To think of actions shaping feelings is one way we rid ourselves of conventionally accepted assumptions such as that parents love their children, or that one simply "falls" in love without exercising will or choice, that there are such things as "crimes of passion," i.e., he killed her because he loved her so much. If we were constantly remembering that love is as love does, we would not use the word in a manner that devalues and degrades its meaning. When we are loving we openly and honestly express care, affection, respect, commitment, and trust.

On March 26, 1871, French workers cheered as the socialist red flag waved atop the Tuileries Palace. The Commune lasted less than three months against the army of the Third French Republic. Communard cannons were set amid barricades made from cobblestones and mattresses, some on the steep hills of Montmartre. The last barricades were smashed during the “Bloody Week” massacre beginning May 18. Immediate executions, death in prisons, and exile followed. “An orgy of killing took place. Many innocent were killed,” mistaken for Communards, including chimney sweeps “on the assumption that their hands had been blackened by gunpowder.” In two prisons, some 2,300 were said to be shot in two days. As reprisals continued, even anti-Communard newspapers implored “Let us kill no more!” Some 25,000 Communards were allegedly killed, another 6,000 were executed or died in prison, and 7,500 were exiled.

Almost everything you’ve just said is wrong,” said Delaney. “In BAU we call them repeaters. They can be from any ethnic group. Any age, within reason. A lot of them are married with a big family. You could live next to one and never know it. The poor social skills and low intelligence are reasonable assumptions, but not always the case. Most evade capture for a long time due to their victim selection. Most victims of repeaters have never met their killer before. Even a dumb repeater can operate for years before the cops catch up to them. But then there’s the one percent. They have highly developed social skills, their IQ is off the scale, and whatever it is in their heads that makes them kill can be successfully hidden from even their closest friends. We don’t catch their kind too often. Best example would be Ted Bundy. And contrary to what you’ll see on TV—these killers don’t want to get caught. Ever. Some will go to extraordinary lengths to ensure they stay out of jail, including masking their kills. Others, while they still don’t want to get caught, secretly want someone to acknowledge their work.

It is the work of the preacher to connect the dots. Our participation in the dominant system is so “normal” that we do not notice. As a result our life is caught up in endless TV ads, mostly concerning new cars and more drugs that will kill us. It is assumed among us that more consumer goods will make us happy. It is assumed that more aggressive militarism will make us safe. It is assumed that more soccer practices will make us more ready for college applications. It is assumed that more spectator sports will give us companionship. It is assumed that anger toward Muslims is appropriate and can be unrestrained. All of these assumptions are sponsored by the empire and are regarded as “normal.” It is assumed that it is okay to treat “the other” as a commodity or as an object without merit who qualifies for no respect, compassion, or justice.

But was her death really ‘premature’? Ought she to have sat in her eat-in kitchen with her chicken and her anger for another fifty years? I’m assuming she wasn’t going to change, and I may be wrong. She certainly made that assumption, and she may also have been wrong. And if she’d sat there for only thirty years, and killed herself at forty-nine instead of at nineteen, would her death still be ‘premature’? I got better and Daisy didn’t and I can’t explain why.” (158)

assumption is mother and midwife to the most egregious mistakes.

After Quibell and Green, the following decades saw the wide adoption of those evolutionary principles of intellectual development so alluringly described by the likes of Freud and Frazer. These held that the ‘primitive’ – that is, the non-Western mind which, they imagined, was expressed in Narmer’s Palette – was the opposite of the scientific mind and close to the world of ‘feeling’ and to mystical and childish thoughts, where savage passions lurk just beneath the surface. Once again, this was based on the assumption that the behaviour of ancient peoples was similar to that of nineteenth-century tribal communities which had been studied and evaluated by the founding fathers of anthropology – people who often shared the same attitude to their subjects as their colonial administrators and whose view of their subjects has now become a part of intellectual history. And yet the vision still prevails. Kings like Narmer are portrayed as living in a time when humans were ‘closer to nature’ than we are today, and Narmer, the first pharaoh, is presented as a primal hero whose killing gesture symbolized the struggle of humanity emerging from the chaos of the primitive world. Thus everything is explained; ancient people were automatons with no facility for thoughtfulness, and all you have to do for their explanation is to find the key with which to wind up their imaginary clockwork. As for the early kings, caught in imaginary wars and forever planning for a mumbo-jumbo afterlife, Narmer’s gesture is explained as a method of filling his contemporaries with shock and awe.

It was like someone had died-like I had died. Because it had to be more than just losing the truest of true love as if that were not enough to kill anyone. It was also losing a whole future, a whole family- the whole life that I'd chosen… Mr. Anderson went on in a hopeless tone. ‘I don't know if she's going to get over it-I'm not sure if it's in her nature to heal from something like this. She's always been such a constant little thing. She doesn't get past things, change her mind.’ ‘She's one of a kind,’ Olivia agreed in a dry voice. ‘And Olivia…’ Mr. Anderson hesitated. ‘Now, you know how fond I am of you, and I can tell that she's happy to see you, but… I'm a little worried about what your visit will do to her.’ ‘So am I, Mr. Anderson, so am I. I wouldn't have come if I'd had any idea. I'm sorry.’ ‘Don't apologize, honey. Who knows? Maybe it will be good for her.’ ‘I hope you're right.’ There was a long break while Pittsburgh scraped plates and Mr. Anderson chewed. I wondered where Olivia was hiding the food. ‘Olivia, I have to ask you something,’ Mr. Anderson said awkwardly. Olivia was calm. ‘Go ahead.’ ‘He's not coming back to visit, too, is he?’ I could hear the suppressed anger in Mr. Anderson’s voice. Olivia answered in a soft, reassuring tone. ‘He doesn't even know I'm here. The last time I spoke with him, he was in South America.’ I stiffened as I heard this added information and listened harder. ‘That's something, at least.’ Mr. Anderson snorted. ‘Well, I hope he's enjoying himself.’ For the first time, Olivia's voice had a bit of steel in it. ‘I wouldn't make assumptions, Mr. Anderson.’ I knew how her eyes would flash when she used that tone. A chair scooted from the table, scraping loudly across the floor. I pictured Mr. Anderson getting up; there was no way Olivia would make that kind of noise. The faucet ran, splashing against a dish.

People build assumptions about the world around them in countless ways, every single day. It’s a form of mental shorthand, and most of the time, it’s a useful survival mechanism. There’s nothing wrong with assuming, say, that gravity will tether you safely to the Earth, or that fire will burn so you shouldn’t touch it. If you stopped to question everything around you, at every moment, you’d be paralyzed.

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy.” —ADDENDA TO ORDERS IN COUNCIL THE EMPEROR PAUL MUAD’DIB

I get to attend a lot of meetings, dinners, and working groups in which people are trying to bridge the divide between Washington and Silicon Valley, the defense and technology worlds, and I have come to believe that we are radically overthinking this problem. Much of the answer hinges on basic supply and demand. Again, it is a question of incentives. On any given day, billions of dollars of private capital sit on the sidelines in America, looking for promising new ventures that could yield big returns. More of that money does not flow into the defense sector because most venture capitalists have come to believe that defense is a lousy investment, and plenty of empirical evidence supports that assumption. For decades, too many defense technologies have failed to transition from promising research and development efforts to successful military programs fielded at scale. Too many small companies doing defense work have become casualties in the “valley of death” rather than billion-dollar “unicorns.” The reason there are not more success stories is not a mystery: the US government did not create the necessary incentives. It did not buy what worked best in large quantities.

My objective is to place these issues in their broader political context by exploring how the denial of Black reproductive autonomy serves the interests of white supremacy. I am also interested in the way in which the dominant understanding of reproductive rights has been shaped by racist assumptions about Black procreation. Three central themes, then, run through the chapters of this book. The first is that regulating Black women’s reproductive decisions had been a central aspect of racial oppression in America. Not only do these policies injure individual Black women, but they also are a principal means of justifying the perpetuation of a racist social structure. Second, the control of Black women’s reproduction has shaped the meaning of reproductive liberty in America. The traditional understanding of reproductive freedom has had to accommodate practices that blatantly deny Black women control over critical decisions about their bodies. Highlighting the racial dimensions of contemporary debates such as welfare reform, the safety of Norplant, public funding of abortion, and the morality of new reproductive technologies is like shaking up a kaleidoscope and taking another look. Finally, in light of the first two themes, we need to reconsider the meaning of reproductive liberty to take into account its relationship to racial oppression. While Black women’s stories are sometimes inserted as an aside in deliberations about reproductive issues, I place them at the center of this reconstructive project.

He would momentarily relive all the joyous and sad moments of his life and understand their deeper significance. He would recognize an overall pattern that is the essential structure informing his mode of existence in the hereafter and his eventual rebirth. Self-transcending spiritual practitioners will undoubtedly have many of the above experiences in common with worldly individuals. But they will presumably look back upon fewer missed opportunities for self-improvement and inner growth. In their depth-mind there will be powerful impressions that are incompatible with re-embodiment in the material realm. If the practitioners are advanced, these subliminal activators (samskāra) will outweigh all others. Individuals who have always lived typical human lives invite rebirth (punar-janman) as typical human beings. But those Yoga practitioners who model their whole existence not on mere human standards but on the ultimate Reality will, if they have succeeded in setting up incisive enough impressions in their depth-memory, merge with that Reality. And if these practitioners are sufficiently advanced on the spiritual path, they will be able to monitor the process of dying and so ensure that no vestiges remain in their depth-mind, which would force them to assume another physical body. In fact, the conscious departure from this world is one of the sure marks by which one can recognize a genuine yogin or yoginī. The Self-realized adept regards the body like a vessel that is engulfed by space, both within and without, the space being the omnipresent Reality itself. Death does not shake an adept in the least. Many moving stories are told by disciples who have witnessed their guru’s exit from the world—“with a single breath” and a smile. A dying yogin in agony or a state of stupor is almost a contradiction in terms. The maxim holds: Show me how you die, and I show you who you are. But, the reader may ask, what if the Yoga adept drowns unexpectedly or is killed by a stray bullet? Will the element of surprise not outwit him or her? The traditional answer is a most emphatic No. There can be no surprise for the enlightened being—hence the smile. Otherwise we would have to assume that the universe is ruled by chance, which is an assumption that is explicitly rejected by the Yoga masters. In whichever way the masters of Yoga take leave from this world—and, as the poet knew, death has ten thousand doors—they will have foreknowledge of their death. There are too many well-attested examples for this to be purely fictional icing on the cake of hagiolatry. How such knowledge is obtained remains a mystery that need not concern us here. The process of conscious exit from the body, however, is not a secret—at least not in principle. The archaic Chāndogya-Upanishad (8.6.5–6) discloses the following: Now, when he thus departs from this body, then he ascends upward with these rays [of the Sun]. Uttering [the sacred syllable] om, he dies. As soon as the mind is cast off, he goes to the Sun.

Arthur was tired out. He had been broken by the two battles which he had fought already, the one at Dover, the other at Barbara Down. His wife was a prisoner. His oldest friend was banished. His son was trying to kill him. Gawaine was buried. His Table was dispersed. His country was at war. Yet he could have breasted all these things in some way, if the central tenet of his heart had not been ravaged. Long ago, when his mind had been a nimble boy's called Wart—long ago he had been taught by an aged benevolence, wagging a white beard. He had been taught by Merlyn to believe that man was perfectible: that he was on the whole more decent than beastly: that good was worth trying: that there was no such thing as original sin. He had been forged as a weapon for the aid of man, on the assumption that men were good. He had been forged, by that deluded old teacher, into a sort of Pasteur or Curie or patient discoverer of insulin. The service for which he had been destined had been against Force, the mental illness of humanity. His Table, his idea of Chivalry, his Holy Grail, his devotion to Justice: these had been progressive steps in the effort for which he had been bred He was like a scientist who had pursued the root of cancer all his life. Might—to have ended it— to have made men happier. But the whole structure depended on the first premise: that man was decent. Looking back at his life, it seemed to him that he had been struggling all the time to dam a flood, which, whenever he had checked it, had broken through at a new place, setting him his work to do again. It was the flood of Force Majeur. During the earliest days before his marriage he had tried to match its strength with strength—in his battles against the Gaelic confederation—only to find that two wrongs did not make a right. But he had crushed the feudal dream of war successfully. Then, with his Round Table, he had tried to harness Tyranny in lesser forms, so that its power might be used for useful ends. He had sent out the men of might to rescue the oppressed and to straighten evil —to put down the individual might of barons, just as he had put down the might of kings. They had done so—until, in the course of time, the ends had been achieved, but the force had remained upon his hands unchastened. So he had sought for a new channel, had sent them out on God's business, searching for the Holy Grail. That too had been a failure, because those who had achieved the Quest had become perfect and been lost to the world, while those who had failed in it had soon returned no better. At last he had sought to make a map of force, as it were, to bind it down by laws. He had tried to codify the evil uses of might by individuals, so that he might set bounds to them by the impersonal justice of the state. He had been prepared to sacrifice his wife and his best friend, to the impersonality of Justice. And then, even as the might of the individual seemed to have been curbed, the Principle of Might had sprung up behind him in another shape—in the shape of collective might, of banded ferocity, of numerous armies insusceptible to individual laws. He had bound the might of units, only to find that it was assumed by pluralities. He had conquered murder, to be faced with war. There were no Laws for that.

...sometimes it just sort of floods in on you that you survive by killing other creatures, and you get a little sad. An excellent point, said his dad. But at least you are sensitive to it. That's a step in the right direction...at least you have a certain respect and honesty about the system. That's good. That's a step toward reverence. Better that than the arrogant assumption that you can kill anything you like any time you like. That's the wrong direction. That direction leads to more killing. Trust me on this one.

Tell me who the guy is who did this to you.” Her head snapped up and her eyes widened before she could look away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her body started shaking again and she pulled her knees up to her chest like earlier. Oh fuck. No, Rach . . . God, no. Swallowing the lump in my throat, I kept going. “When did it happen?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she repeated. “What’s his name?” “Whose?” “Do you know him, or was it a stranger?” She paused before answering. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kash.” “You know him. Does Candice know about this?” “Why are you doing this?” she whispered. God, baby, trust me, I don’t want to be. “When did it happen?” We continued to go in circles as I asked the same questions over and over, and then asked somewhat different variations of the same questions, every now and then throwing in an assumption, and after almost ten minutes, the tears started falling down her face. It killed me, but I couldn’t stop. I kept my voice monotone and forced myself to stay in my spot on the couch as her body tried hopelessly to curl in on itself while it vibrated almost forcefully. When I finally had her on the edge, I softened my voice and asked the question I didn’t want to know the answer to but needed to. “When were you raped, Rachel?” “I wasn’t raped!” she yelled, and her hands flew up to her face as a sob left her. Her shoulders began shaking harder with the sobs that were now coming, and I ground my jaw as I waited for her. “He didn’t—he wasn’t able to finish—Candice came back!” she cried. “He tried . . . he started to, but she came back. I tried to get him off me! He was choking me, I couldn’t breathe.” “So, Candice knows?” Her head shook furiously back and forth. “I tried—tried to tell her. She wouldn’t listen, and she won’t believe me. She . . . everyone thinks he can do no wrong. But he’s crazy, Logan.” She looked at me, her tear-streaked face breaking my heart as she willed me to understand. “He told me no one would believe me, he said I was his and he wouldn’t let anyone touch me. H-he’s crazy, I swear!” “What’s his name?” She shook her head again and I wanted to shake her. “I need to know his name, Rach. What’s his name?” “He works at the school. I have to see him every day because of my major. Candice too. But no one will believe you. Everyone loves him.” This sick fuck is a professor? “Name. What’s his name?” When she didn’t respond, I went back to my earlier questions. “Did this happen last night?” She jerked back and stared at me. “N-no! I haven’t seen him since that night. It was the week before school let out.” “This morning?” “I had another nightmare about him. He showed up at the door. This time—” She broke off on a sob. “No one was there to stop him before he finished this time.” Rachel. I wanted nothing more than to hold her, but with how she’d flinched away from us earlier, that would have been anything but helpful. My heart continued to break as she mumbled, “It felt so real,” over and over again. Giving

Now that we have seen what is in the Koran, let’s consider what is not in the Muslim holy book. Islam, being one of the “world’s great religions,” as well as one of the “three great Abrahamic faiths,” enjoys the benefit of certain assumptions on the part of uninformed Americans and Europeans. Many people believe that since Islam is a religion, it must teach universal love and brotherhood—because that is what religions do, isn’t it? It must teach that one ought to be kind to the poor and downtrodden, generous, charitable, and peaceful. It must teach that we are all children of a loving God whose love for all human beings should be imitated by those whom he has created. Certainly Judaism and Christianity teach these things, and they are found in nearly equivalent forms in Eastern religions. But when it comes to Islam, the assumptions are wrong. Islam makes a distinction between believers and unbelievers that overrides any obligation to general benevolence. A moral code from the Koran As we have seen, the Koran recounts how Moses went up on the mountain and encountered Allah, who gave him tablets—but says nothing about what was written on them (7:145). Although the Ten Commandments do not appear in the Koran, the book is not bereft of specific moral guidelines: its seventeenth chapter enunciates a moral code (17:22–39). Accordingly, Muslims should:           1.    Worship Allah alone.           2.    Be kind to their parents.           3.    Provide for their relatives, the needy, and travelers, and not be wasteful.           4.    Not kill their children for fear of poverty.           5.    Not commit adultery.           6.    Not “take life—which Allah has made sacred—except for just cause.” Also, “whoso is slain wrongfully, We have given power unto his heir, but let him not commit excess in slaying”—that is, one should make restitution for wrongful death.           7.    Not seize the wealth of orphans.           8.    “Give full measure when ye measure, and weigh with a balance that is straight”—that is, conduct business honestly.           9.    “Pursue not that of which thou hast no knowledge.”           10.  Not “walk on the earth with insolence.” Noble ideals, to be sure, but when it comes to particulars, these are not quite equivalent to the Ten Commandments. The provision about not taking life “except for just cause” is, of course, in the same book as the thrice-repeated command to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” (9:5; 4:89; 2:191)—thus Infidels must understand that their infidelity, their non-acceptance of Islam, is “just cause” for Muslims to make war against them. In the same vein, one is to be kind to one’s parents—unless they are Infidels: “O ye who believe! Choose not your fathers nor your brethren for friends if they take pleasure in disbelief rather than faith. Whoso of you taketh them for friends, such are wrong-doers” (9:23). You

It’s stupid because it makes the assumption that your enemies are weaker than you, and will do what you want if you murder a few of them. But people aren’t like that. I mean, think about how it will fall out. You go down that canyon and kill a bunch of people doing their jobs, and later other people come along and find the bodies. They’ll hate you forever. Even if you do take over Mars someday they’ll still hate you, and do anything they can to screw things up.

and then the scene sped forward once more. ‘NO!’ I yelled, only it came out as a barely audible whisper. Like one of those nightmares where you try to scream for help but nothing more than a rasping breath escapes your lips. It was beyond cruel. My life had ended, and yet I wasn’t given time to mourn, or even process what had just happened. Murmurs rose and fell, and the court went on. ‘How many of you agreed to the verdict and how many dissented?’ It didn’t even matter. It meant nothing that one person argued in my favour while the rest casually sealed my fate with their assumptions. I was guilty. I would be sent back to prison with all hope of escaping from this nightmare extinguished. And the person who killed Calum would carry on as though nothing had happened. I was powerless to stop it. All I could do was sit, silent, blood lining the inside of my mouth, and wait to learn how many years of my life would be stolen from me. Chapter Fifty-five Calum had told me, moments before he died, that I needed to choose. ‘It’s time for you to make a decision,’ he’d said. I’d needed to decide whether I loved Jason or not. Whether I wanted my marriage to be riddled with lies, or whether I wanted to make it work with the man I’d promised to be faithful to forever. I’d known he was right, but I’d been a coward. For so long I had been waiting for life to make the hard choices for me.

Sports evolve when sacred cows are killed, when basic assumptions are tested. The same is true in life and in lifestyles.

You could kill a military man or woman and most people would simply shrug, because that was within the rules they accepted. Fighters knew the risks going in, or that was the assumption at least. Soldier deaths were tragic but expected, no matter what side you were on. Oh, people liked to make noise as if they didn’t think that way, but precious few actually ponied up to the bar and put their money where their mouths were. You kill a soldier’s family or a civilian bystander, however, and that rule went out the window.

Meanwhile, the constant pressure of Islam was becoming an increasing danger for Europe, and Hungary was in the forefront of the fight; yet this did not awaken the Catholic countries to see the folly of destroying a barrier between them and their most dangerous foe, and the Pope wrote (1325) to the Ban of Bosnia: “Knowing that thou art a faithful son of the Church, we therefore charge thee to exterminate the heretics in thy dominions, and to render aid and assistance unto Fabian, our Inquisitor, forasmuch as a large multitude of heretics from many and divers parts collected, have flowed together into the Principality of Bosnia, trusting there to sow their obscene errors and to dwell there in safety. These men, imbued with the cunning of the Old Fiend, and armed with the venom of their falseness, corrupt the minds of Catholics by outward show of simplicity and lying assumption of the name of Christians; their speech crawleth like a crab, and they creep in with humility, but in secret they kill, and are wolves in sheep’s clothing, covering their bestial fury as a means whereby they may deceive the simple sheep of Christ.

I believe reincarnation is fundamentally true, even though most of these religions taught it in a metaphorical and popular form called metempsychosis. This is the belief that the soul, the supposed (but false) unity of will and intellect, is fully reborn. This is false. The intellect is a merely physical quality like muscular strength and can’t be “reborn” any more than your muscles are literally reborn. You are not at bottom your intellect, this is impossible, although this is the assumption of almost all modern people even when they claim otherwise. They pay lip service to “supremacy of the desires,” or to biological determinism, but they still believe they are their intellects, just imprisoned by flesh and matter and genes and a biological “programming.” This is wrong! And it’s not the intellect that is reborn, I will tell you what is. Take a fruitfly, or a worker ant. This type of being is very close to plant-life in some ways. It has very primitive intellect, very primitive nervous system. There are inborn ways of behaving, of reacting to certain stimuli, inborn desires and orientations “in the blood,” and when you kill one ant, the next one over will be identical in this regard. Its rebirth is “instantaneous” because the ant has a will that is shared uniformly across its type in the hive, and is therefore persistent and enduring. Once the queen dies, the next queen is indistinguishable from it in that thing that Schopenhauer calls the will, what he says is inborn way of wanting, and is in a very literal sense a “reincarnation” of this same thing.

There are several aspects of the domestication of the sheep that might confound our assumptions. First, sheep were not initially domesticated for their meat or wool, but for their milk. The larger and more dangerous aurochs would not be transformed into docile and milk-yielding cattle for another two millennia, so sheep and goats provided the first source of animal milk for prehistoric human societies. To use animals in this way makes better economic sense than raising them for meat: it takes far more energy, land and water for humans to produce feed for animals than it does to derive nourishment directly from crops, so a milk-producing animal delivers on that expensive investment better than one killed for meat. As a result, domestication at first led to a decline rather than an increase in meat consumption.

Within the church, good questions and good listening kill the assumptions we make about others that often exacerbate divisions and gaps between us. How can we love and bear with one another if we don’t know and listen to one another?