Classical Conditioning Quotes

Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation. Now, it's long been understood very well that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited: that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage-can. At this stage of history, either one of two things is possible: either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community-interests, guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others; or, alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control. As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole and, by now, that means the global community. The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass-communication, and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely, to impose necessary illusions, manipulate and deceive the stupid majority, and remove them from the public arena. The question, in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival.

Always blame conditions, not men

Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever.

An uninstructed person will lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others. Someone just starting instruction will lay the fault on himself. Some who is perfectly instructed will place blame neither on others nor on himself.

...my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism...many philistines reduce my ideas to an opposition of technology when in fact I am opposing the naive blindness to it's side affects - the fragility criterion. I'd rather be unconditional about ethical and conditional about technology than the the reverse.

The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind chance. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity.

Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. It's smell and it's color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.

Freedom is a need of the soul, and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom. He is the only guarantor. External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom. Necessity is the only ultimate justification known to the mind.

Napoleon in his classical manner at one time declared: ‘I have the right to answer any complaint against me with an eternal “this is what I am.”' [He] stands aloof from the whole world and accepts conditions from no one.

observations suggest that the survivor as ANP typically engages in tasks of daily life such as reproduction, attachment, caretaking, and other social action tendencies, and avoidance of traumatic memories, which support a focus on daily life issues. In contrast, the survivor as EP primarily displays evolutionary defensive and emotional reactions to the (perceived) threat on which he or she seems to be fixated. Third, survivors should be very susceptible to classical conditioning, because, as we discuss below, EP and ANP strongly respond to unconditioned and conditioned threat cues.

Perhaps a stable order can only be established on earth if man always remains accurately conscious that his condition is that of a traveller.

Thoughts of wealth create a wealthy life. Thoughts of poverty create the conditions of poverty. Thoughts of every kind create.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Since Pawlow and his pupils have succeeded in causing the secretion of saliva in the dog by means of optic and acoustic signals, it no longer seems strange to us that what the philosopher terms an 'idea' is a process which can cause chemical changes in the body.

Language is not law; it is in fact a lot like music. Speech is jazz – first you learn the basic rules, and then you become good enough to improvise all the time. Writing is somewhat more like classical composition, where established forms and conditions will hold greater sway.

To be free one must be a slave to reason. But to be a slave to reason (the very condition of freedom) exposes one to both the revisionary power and the constructive compulsion of reason. This susceptibility is terminally amplified once the commitment to the autonomy of reason and autonomous engagement with discursive practices are sufficiently elaborated. That is to say, when the autonomy of reason is understood as the automation of reason and discursive practices—the philosophical rather than classically symbolic thesis regarding artificial general intelligence.

He had been a mere man railing at a condition, but now he was out of it and could see that it had been very proper and just. It had been necessary for him to swallow swords that he might have a better throat for grapes.

Jung has said that to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realise that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision. Naturally, if a man says, "Oh well, then I shall just let everything go and make no decision, but just protract and wriggle out of [it]," the whole thing is equally wrong, for then naturally nothing happens. But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally because of the insolubility of the conscious situation, the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man's life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self. When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.

The seventh John Smith had even conspired to have a conspiracy against himself in Argentina, with resulting civil war, so that the weapons could be tested under actual battle conditions--for the region had been overpopulated anyway.

Home is the first point of investment. The first and most important thing to invest in is your home. Make sure your house is in good condition physically and energetically, make sure you’re paid up on the household bills, make sure you’re stocked up on supplies and food, make sure your home is furnished to your style and comfort, make sure you’ve got nice plants to clean the air, nice art, nice crystals and essential oils, nice things that promote your wellbeing…. Make sure your garden is growing nutritious plants. Invest in your household and your family because they have the greatest Return on Investment. And your investment in your home will be a magnet for many other different kinds of investments.

I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers, the sectarians (almost all of them), and most priests. Party workers and the military are the first to fall apart and do so most easily.

Hostile armies may face each other for years, striving for the victory which is decided in a single day. This being so, to remain in ignorance of the enemy's condition simply because one grudges the outlay of a hundred ounces of silver in honors and emoluments, is the height of inhumanity.

He had so long since ceased to direct his life toward any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of quotidian satisfactions, that he had come to believe, though without ever formally stating his belief even to himself that he would remain all his life in that condition, which only death could alter.

In both cases, it is the prejudice, not the condition, that does the harm. It may be, as some would have it, that blacks are inherently inferior to whites or that homosexuals are all, by definition, sick. So what? Even if either condition truly is inherently undesirable, no manner of social pressure will turn blacks into whites or gays into straights. Social pressure will only exaggerate the handicap. It is still the prejudice, more than the condition, that does the harm.

The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.

If the wars of civilised people are less cruel and destructive than those of savages, the difference arises from the social condition both of states in themselves and in their relations to each other. Out of this social condition and its relations war arises, and by it war is subjected to conditions, is controlled and modified. But these things do not belong to war itself; they are only given conditions; and to introduce into the philosophy of war itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity.

In America, the materio-economic conditions relate to a societal, multi-group existence in a way never before know in world history. American Negro nationalism can never create its own values, find its revolutionary significance, define its political and economic goals, until Negro intellectuals take up the cudgels against the cultural imperialism practiced in all of its manifold ramifications on the Negro within American culture. But this kind of revolution would have to be predicated on the recognition that the cultural and artistic originality of the American nation is founded, historically, on the ingredients of a black aesthetic and artistic base.

The way to grow while enjoying life is to create a higher form of order out of the entropy that is an inevitable condition of living. This means taking each new challenge not as something to be repressed or avoided, but as an opportunity for learning and for improving skills.

When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.

What is more, the whole apparatus of life has become so complex and the processes of production, distribution, and consumption have become so specialized and subdivided, that the individual person loses confidence in his own unaided capacities: he is increasingly subject to commands he does not understand, at the mercy of forces over which he exercises no effective control, moving to a destination he has not chosen. Unlike the taboo-ridden savage, who is often childishly over-confident in the powers of his shaman or magician to control formidable natural forces, however inimical, the machine-conditioned individual feels lost and helpless as day by day he metaphorically punches his time-card, takes his place on the assembly line, and at the end draws a pay check that proves worthless for obtaining any of the genuine goods of life. This lack of close personal involvement in the daily routine brings a general loss of contact with reality: instead of continuous interplay between the inner and the outer world, with constant feedback or readjustment and with stimulus to fresh creativity, only the outer world-and mainly the collectively organized outer world of the power system-exercises authority: even private dreams must be channeled through television, film, and disc, in order to become acceptable. With this feeling of alienation goes the typical psychological problem of our time, characterized in classic terms by Erik Erikson as the 'Identity Crisis.' In a world of transitory family nurture, transitory human contacts, transitory jobs and places of residence, transitory sexual and family relations, the basic conditions for maintaining continuity and establishing personal equilibrium disappear. The individual suddenly awakens, as Tolstoi did in a famous crisis in his own life at Arzamas, to find himself in a strange, dark room, far from home, threatened by obscure hostile forces, unable to discover where he is or who he is, appalled by the prospect of a meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.

What troubled people especially was not just the tragedy--or even the needlessness--but the element of fate in it all. If the Titanic had heeded any of the six ice messages on Sunday . . . if ice conditions had been normal . . . if the night had been rough or moonlit . . . if she had seen the berg 15 second sooner--or 15 seconds later . . . if she had hit the ice any other way . . . if her watertight bulkheads had been one deck higher . . . if she had carried enough boats . . . if the Californian had only come. Had any one of these "ifs" turned out right, every life might have been save. But they all went against her--a classic Greek tragedy.

This posture of skepticism towards the classics displays a profound misjudg- ment. For the great works of Western culture are remarkable for the dis- tance that they maintained from the norms and orthodoxies that gave birth to them. Only a very shallow reading of Chaucer or Shakespeare would see those writers as endorsing the societies in which they lived, or would over- look the far more important fact that their works hold mankind to the light of moral judgment, and examine, with all the love and all the pity that it calls for, the frailty of human nature. It is precisely the aspiration towards universal truth, towards a God’s-eye perspective on the human condition, that is the hallmark of Western culture.

But while Americans are well conditioned to death on the highways, they are not ready to accept death on the battlefield for apparently futile reasons.

The concentration of the flow experience—together with clear goals and immediate feedback—provides order to consciousness, inducing the enjoyable condition of psychic negentropy.

Authentic happiness is always independent of external conditions.

If a parent like this raises you, it’s easy to see why you turn into a classic people-pleaser when you become an adult. You grow up thinking that all love is conditional

Making Waves I would do anything for you. Would you be yourself? In the Hans Christian Anderson classic, The Little Mermaid, Ariel gives up her beautiful voice in exchange for legs. This is a seemingly innocent fable that captures our deal with the modern devil. For aren't we taught that mobility is freedom, whether it be moving from state to state, or from marriage to marriage, or from adventure to adventure? Aren't we convinced that upward mobility, moving from job to job, is the definition of success? Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with change or variety or newness or with improving our condition. The catch is when we are asked to give up our voice in order to move freely, when we are asked to silence what makes us unique in order to be successful. When not making waves means giving up our chance to dive into the deep, then we are bartering our access to God for a better driveway. As a story about relationship, the lesson of Ariel is crucial. On the surface, her desire for legs seems touching and sweetly motivated by love and the want to belong. Yet here too is another false bargain that plagues everyone who ever tries it. For no matter how badly we want to love or be loved, we cannot alter our basic nature and survive inside, where it counts.

As long as subject is centred in a phenomenal object, and thinks and speaks therefrom, subject is identified with that object and is bound. As long as such condition obtains, the identified subject can never be free—for freedom is liberation from that identification. Abandonment of a phenomenal centre constitutes the only 'practice', and such abandonment is not an act volitionally performed by the identified subject, but a non-action (wu wei) leaving the noumenal centre in control of phenomenal activity, and free from fictitious interference by an imaginary 'self. Are you still thinking, looking, living, as from an imaginary phenomenal centre? As long as you do that you can never recognise your freedom. Could any statement be more classic? Could any statement be more obvious? Could any statement be more vital? Yet—East and West—how many observe it? So Could any statement be more needed?

C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, said, “The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come .

THERE ARE TWO main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.

One more thing, gentlemen, before I quit. Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal, a phrase that the Yankees and the distaff side of the Executive branch in Washington are fond of hurling at us. There is a tendency in this year of grace, 1935, for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious—because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe—some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others—some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men.

Sailors need to know when to use ballast or throw down the anchor, lest the ship sink and they drown. In like manner, the virtues enable us to respond correctly to those moments of life that are the moral equivalents to such conditions at sea.

One hundred and seven. Since charity obliges us to wish well to the souls of all men, and religion ought to alter nothing in any man’s civil estate or right, it shall be lawful for slaves, as well as others, to enter themselves, and be of what church or profession any of them shall think best, and, therefore, be as fully members as any freeman. But yet no slave shall hereby be exempted from that civil dominion his master hath over him, but be in all things in the same state and condition he was In before.

If they had not been rapacious, lustful, narrow and persecuting beyond the people of their time, the incarnation had been impossible; but it was an intellectual impulse from the Condition of Fire that shaped their antithetical self into that of the classic world.

The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind chance. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity. The grace of a minuet by Handel or Couperin, the sensuality sublimated into delicate gesture to be found in many Italian composers or in Mozart, the tranquil, composed readiness for death in Bach – always there may be heard in these works a defiance, a death-defying intrepidity, a gallantry, and a note of superhuman laughter, of immortal gay serenity. Let that same note also sound in our Glass Bead Games, and in our whole lives, acts, and sufferings.

Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

The task and potential greatness of mortals lie in their ability to produce things works and deeds and words which would deserve to be and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness, so that through them mortals could find their place in a cosmos where everything is immortal except themselves.

He noted the remarkable contrast between how the depressed person feels—that they are a loser or that their life has gone horribly wrong—and the actual conditions of their life, which are often high in achievement. Beck’s conclusion was that depression therefore had to be based on problems in thinking. By

The merger of religion and politics is a classical Islamic ideal; in the recent era, they have again been brought together. The utopian aspirations of the Islamic movements evoke the Muslim ideal of the caliphate, but in many respects they are an altogether novel adaptation of Islamic concepts to modern conditions.

What looks good to you?” he asked as if we were out for ice cream. Rocky road or pistachio? Like my Corvette sitting back in the shop, he had a penchant for American-made classics, the ones Detroit had long-since forgotten it once knew how to make. Slowly, I walked around looking at each one—the acid green Shelby Mustang with white racing stripes, the powder blue Ford Fairlane, the black Chevy Bel-Air— each in pristine condition and only because his blood and sweat coursed through them as surely as gasoline. But if he was serious that I could take my pick and drive it out of here, there was only one choice for me: the cherry red 1955 Ford Bronco.

Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy. Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it.

What psychology failed to appreciate, Frankl believed, is the multidimensional nature of human beings. He did not deny that biology or conditioning shapes us, but he also insisted that there is room for free will—to choose to develop certain values or a particular course in life, or to retain our dignity in difficult situations.

Employment procedures that are unwittingly biased towards men are an issue in promotion as well as hiring. A classic example comes from Google, where women weren’t nominating themselves for promotion at the same rate as men. This is unsurprising: women are conditioned to be modest, and are penalised when they step outside of this prescribed gender norm.

All finite things are limited expressions, graciously imparted, of that actuality that he possesses in infinite abundance. And, simply said, this way of thinking about God is—or so the classical traditions claim—the inevitable result of any genuinely coherent attempt to prescind from the conditions of dependent finitude to a rational definition of the divine.

The Raccoon It happened in the dead of night while I was slicing bread for a guilty snack. My attention was caught by the scuttering of a raccoon outside my window. That was, I believe, the first time I noticed my strange tendencies as an unordinary human. I gave the raccoon a piece of bread, my subconscious well aware of the consequences. Well aware that a raccoon that is fed will always come back for more. The enticing beauty of my cutting knife was the symptom. The bread, my hungry curiosity. The raccoon, an urge. The moon increments its phase and reflects that much more light off of my cutting knife. The very same light that glistens in the eyes of my raccoon friend. I slice the bread, fresh and soft. The raccoon becomes excited. Or perhaps I'm merely projecting my emotions onto the newly-satisfied animal. The raccoon has taken to following me. You could say that we've gotten quite used to each other. The raccoon becomes hungry more and more frequently, so my bread is always handy. Every time I brandish my cutting knife, the raccoon shows me its excitement. A rush of blood. Classic Pavlovian conditioning. I slice the bread. And I feed myself again.

If the concept of the hero is a physical one, then, just as Alexander the Great acquired heroic stature by modeling himself on Achilles, the conditions necessary for becoming a hero must be both a ban on originality and a true faithfulness to a classical model; unlike the words of a genius, the words of a hero must be selected as the most impressive and noble from among ready-made concepts.

It begins at school and you go through life repeating what others have said. You are therefore secondhand human beings. How can such a secondhand human being find out something that is original, that is true? It is very important to understand what conditioning is and to go into this very deeply; as you look at it you have the energy to break down all those conditionings that hold the mind.

early childhood she had given her deepest trust, and which for half a century has suggested what she might do, think, feel, desire, and become, has suddenly fallen silent. Now, at last, all those books have no instructions for her, no demands—because she is just too old. In the world of classic British fiction, the one Vinnie knows best, almost the entire population is under fifty, or even under forty—as was true of the real world when the novel was invented. The few older people—especially women—who are allowed into a story are usually cast as relatives; and Vinnie is no one’s mother, daughter, or sister. People over fifty who aren’t relatives are pushed into minor parts, character parts, and are usually portrayed as comic, pathetic, or disagreeable. Occasionally one will appear in the role of tutor or guide to some young protagonist, but more often than not their advice and example are bad; their histories a warning rather than a model. In most novels it is taken for granted that people over fifty are as set in their ways as elderly apple trees, and as permanently shaped and scarred by the years they have weathered. The literary convention is that nothing major can happen to them except through subtraction. They may be struck by lightning or pruned by the hand of man; they may grow weak or hollow; their sparse fruit may become misshapen, spotted, or sourly crabbed. They may endure these changes nobly or meanly. But they cannot, even under the best of conditions, put out new growth or burst into lush and unexpected bloom. Even today there are disproportionately few older characters in fiction. The

The kind of knowledge required in such endeavors is not deductive knowledge from first principles but rather what Greeks of the classical period called métis, a concept to which we shall return. Usually translated, inadequately, as “cunning,” métis is better understood as the kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by long practice at similar but rarely identical tasks, which requires constant adaptation to changing circumstances.

Determinism was the linchpin of classical physics, the crucial principle of causality. Born was now putting into words Einstein’s greatest fear, one he had expressed repeatedly for years. In classical physics, when anything happens, it happens for a reason, because prior events led up to it, set the conditions for it, made it inevitable. But in quantum mechanics, apparently, things just happen one way or another, and there is no saying why.

Then he launched into a classic statement of his political philosophy. I appreciate all you say about what Bryanism means, and I also … [am] as strongly opposed to populism in every stage as the greatest representative of corrupt wealth, but … these representatives … have themselves been responsible for a portion of the conditions against which Bryanism is in ignorant, and sometimes wicked revolt. I do not believe it is wise or safe for us as a party to take refuge in mere negation and to say that there are no evils to be corrected. It seems to me that our attitude should be one of correcting the evils and thereby showing, that, whereas the populists, socialists and others really do not correct the evils at all … the Republicans hold the just balance and set our faces as resolutely against improper corporate influence on the one hand as against demagogy and mob rule on the other.66

BELOVED fellow-servants of Christ, our work requires us to be in the best possible condition of heart. When we are at our best, we are feeble enough; we would not, therefore, fall below our highest point. As instruments, we owe all our power for usefulness to the Divine hand; but, since tools should always be kept in order, we would have our spirit free from rust, and our mind sharp of point and keen of edge to answer at once to the Master's will.

Consider these traditional theories of domestic abuse: - Learned helplessness suggest that abused women learn to become helpless under abusive conditions; they are powerless to extricate themselves from such relationships and/or unable to make adaptive choices - The cycle of violence describes a pattern that includes a contrition or honeymoon phase. The abusive husband becomes contrite and apologetic after a violent episode, making concerted efforts to get back in his wife’s good graces. - Traumatic bonding attempts to explain the inexplicable bond that is formed between a woman and her abusive partner - The theory of past reenactments posits that women in abusive relationships are reliving unconscious feelings from early childhood scenarios. My research results and experience with patients do not conform to these concepts. I have found that the upscale abused wife is not a victim of learned helplessness. Rather, she makes specific decisions along the path to be involved in the abusive marriage, including silent strategizing as she chooses to stay or leave the marriage. Nor does the upscale abused wife experience the classic cycle of violence, replete with the honeymoon stage, in which the husband courts his wife to seek her forgiveness. As in the case of Sally and Ray, the man of means actually does little to seek his wife’s forgiveness after a violent episode. Further, the upscale abused wife voices more attachment to her lifestyle than the traumatic bonding with her abusive mate. And very few of the abused women I have met over the years experienced abuse in their childhoods or witnessed it between their parents. In fact, it is this lack of experience with violence, rage, and abuse that makes this woman even more overwhelmed and unclear about how to cope with something so alien to her and the people in her universe.

Meanwhile the old Marquess, visibly moved, was charging Odo to respect his elders and superiors, while in the same breath warning him not to take up with the Frenchified notions of the court, but to remember that for a lad of his condition the chief virtues were a tight seat in the saddle, a quick hand on the sword and a slow tongue in counsel. "Mind your own business," he concluded, "and see that others mind theirs." The Marchioness thereupon, with many tears, hung a

To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased, and I turned away with disgust and loathing.

How It Works: Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency When people become angry, or frightened, they stop thinking with their forebrain (the mind of a human being) and start thinking with their midbrain (which is indistinguishable from the mind of an animal). They are literally “scared out of their wits.” The only thing that has any hope of influencing the midbrain is also the only thing that influences a dog: classical and operant conditioning. That is what is used when training firefighters

One of the main forces that affects consciousness adversely is psychic disorder—that is, information that conflicts with existing intentions, or distracts us from carrying them out. We give this condition many names, depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, or jealousy. All these varieties of disorder force attention to be diverted to undesirable objects, leaving us no longer free to use it according to our preferences. Psychic energy becomes unwieldy and ineffective.

Wandering across the vast room, I stopped at a set of shelves as high as the ceiling, and holding about six hundred volumes - all classics on the history of Soalris, starting with the nine volumes of Giese's monumental and already relatively obsolescent monograph. Display for its own sake was improbable in these surroundings. The collection was a respective tribute to the memory of the pioneers. I took down the massive volumes of Giese and sat leafing through them. Rheya had also located som reading matter. Looking over her shoulder, I saw that she had picked one of the many books brought out by the first expedition, the Interplanetary Cookery Book, which could have been the personal property of Giese himself. She was pouring over the recipes adapted to the arduous conditions of interstellar flight. I said nothing, and returned to the book resting on my knees. Solaris - Ten Years of Exploration had appeared as volumes 4-12 of the Solariana collection whose most recent additions were numbered in the thousands.

2. The classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them. For the fact is that the reading we do when young can often be of little value because we are impatient, cannot concentrate, lack expertise in how to read, or because we lack experience of life. This youthful reading can be (perhaps at the same time) literally formative in that it gives a form or shape to our future experiences, providing them with models, ways of dealing with them, terms of comparison, schemes for categorising them, scales of value, paradigms of beauty: all things which continue to operate in us even when we remember little or nothing about the book we read when young. When we reread the book in our maturity, we then rediscover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms though we have forgotten where they came from. There is a particular potency in the work which can be forgotten in itself but which leaves its seed behind in us. The definition which we can now give is

The instructions contained in our genes, the pull of gravity, the pollen in the air, the historical period into which we are born—these and innumerable other conditions determine what we see, how we feel, what we do. It is not surprising that we should believe that our fate is primarily ordained by outside agencies. Yet we have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes

What is the secret mesmerism which friendship possesses, and under the operation of which a person ordinarily sluggish, or cold, or timid, becomes wise, active, and resolute, in another’s behalf? As Alexis, after a few passes from Dr. Elliotson, despises pain, reads with the back of his head, sees miles off, looks into next week, and performs other wonders, of which, in his own private normal condition, he is quite incapable; so you see, in the affairs of the world and under the magnetism of friendships, the modest man becomes bold, the shy confident, the lazy active, or the impetuous prudent and peaceful. What

What troubled people especially was not just the tragedy—or even its needlessness—but the element of fate in it all. If the Titanic had heeded any of the six ice messages on Sunday … if ice conditions had been normal … if the night had been rough or moonlit … if she had seen the berg 15 seconds sooner—or 15 seconds later … if she had hit the ice any other way … if her watertight bulkheads had been one deck higher … if she had carried enough boats … if the Californian had only come. Had any one of these “ifs” turned out right, every life might have been saved. But they all went against her—a classic Greek tragedy.

The republican institutions of our country have produced simpler and happier manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround it. Hence there is less distinction between the several classes of its inhabitants; and the lower orders being neither so poor nor so despised, their manners are more refined and moral. A servant in Geneva does not mean the same thing as a servant in France and England. Justine, thus received in our family, learned the duties of a servant; a condition which, in our fortunate country, does not include the idea of ignorance, and a sacrifice of the dignity of a human being.

I offer the wisdom of Eric Fromm, in his classic book The Art of Loving.1 He says that the healthiest people he has known, and those who very often grow up in the most natural way, are those who, between their two parents and early authority figures, experienced a combination of unconditional love along with very conditional and demanding love! This seems to be true of so many effective and influential people, like St. Francis, John Muir, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mother Teresa, and you can add your own. I know my siblings and I received conditional love from our mother and unconditional love from our father. We all admit now that she served us very well later in life, although we sure fought Mom when we were young. And we were glad Daddy was there to balance her out. I know this is not the current version of what is psychologically “correct,” because we all seem to think we need nothing but unconditional love. Any law, correction, rule, or limitation is another word for conditional love. It is interesting to me that very clear passages describing both God's conditional love and also God's unconditional love are found in the same Scriptures, like Deuteronomy and John's Gospel. The only real biblical promise is that unconditional love will have the last word!

In the classic liberal formulation, the press is seen as a pure expression of democracy. Thus, in the United States, the Constitution protects the press from the government, which, despite having been elected democratically, is assumed by American political culture to harbour undemocratic tendencies. In the Singapore model, the formula is reversed. The elected government is the embodiment of democratic expression. Government, which expresses the will of the people, must be protected by the unelected press, which is prone to being swayed by private commercial interests, narrow ideological missions or, at the very least, the hubris of journalists' inflated egos.

February 12 MORNING “For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by Christ.” — 2 Corinthians 1:5 HERE is a blessed proportion. The Ruler of Providence bears a pair of scales — in this side He puts His people’s trials, and in that He puts their consolations. When the scale of trial is nearly empty, you will always find the scale of consolation in nearly the same condition; and when the scale of trials is full, you will find the scale of consolation just as heavy. When the black clouds gather most, the light is the more brightly revealed to us. When the night lowers and the tempest is coming on, the Heavenly Captain is always closest to His crew. It is a blessed thing, that when we are most cast down, then it is that we are most lifted up by the consolations of the Spirit. One reason is, because trials make more room for consolation. Great hearts can only be made by great troubles. The spade of trouble digs the reservoir of comfort deeper, and makes more room for consolation. God comes into our heart — He finds it full — He begins to break our comforts and to make it empty; then there is more room for grace. The humbler a man lies, the more comfort he will always have, because he will be more fitted to receive it. Another reason why we are often most happy in our troubles, is this — then we have the closest dealings with God. When the barn is full, man can live without God: when the purse is bursting with gold, we try to do without so much prayer. But once take our gourds away, and we want our God; once cleanse the idols out of the house, then we are compelled to honour Jehovah. “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.” There is no cry so good as that which comes from the bottom of the mountains; no prayer half so hearty as that which comes up from the depths of the soul, through deep trials and afflictions. Hence they bring us to God, and we are happier; for nearness to God is happiness. Come, troubled believer, fret not over your heavy troubles, for they are the heralds of weighty mercies.

cause of cavities, even more damaging than sugar consumption, bad diet, or poor hygiene. (This belief had been echoed by other dentists for a hundred years, and was endorsed by Catlin too.) Burhenne also found that mouthbreathing was both a cause of and a contributor to snoring and sleep apnea. He recommended his patients tape their mouths shut at night. “The health benefits of nose breathing are undeniable,” he told me. One of the many benefits is that the sinuses release a huge boost of nitric oxide, a molecule that plays an essential role in increasing circulation and delivering oxygen into cells. Immune function, weight, circulation, mood, and sexual function can all be heavily influenced by the amount of nitric oxide in the body. (The popular erectile dysfunction drug sildenafil, known by the commercial name Viagra, works by releasing nitric oxide into the bloodstream, which opens the capillaries in the genitals and elsewhere.) Nasal breathing alone can boost nitric oxide sixfold, which is one of the reasons we can absorb about 18 percent more oxygen than by just breathing through the mouth. Mouth taping, Burhenne said, helped a five-year-old patient of his overcome ADHD, a condition directly attributed to breathing difficulties during sleep. It helped Burhenne and his wife cure their own snoring and breathing problems. Hundreds of other patients reported similar benefits. The whole thing seemed a little sketchy until Ann Kearney, a doctor of speech-language pathology at the Stanford Voice and Swallowing Center, told me the same. Kearney helped rehabilitate patients who had swallowing and breathing disorders. She swore by mouth taping. Kearney herself had spent years as a mouthbreather due to chronic congestion. She visited an ear, nose, and throat specialist and discovered that her nasal cavities were blocked with tissue. The specialist advised that the only way to open her nose was through surgery or medications. She tried mouth taping instead. “The first night, I lasted five minutes before I ripped it off,” she told me. On the second night, she was able to tolerate the tape for ten minutes. A couple of days later, she slept through the night. Within six weeks, her nose opened up. “It’s a classic example of use it or lose it,” Kearney said. To prove her claim, she examined the noses of 50 patients who had undergone laryngectomies, a procedure in which a breathing hole is cut into the throat. Within two months to two years, every patient was suffering from complete nasal obstruction. Like other parts of the body, the nasal cavity responds to whatever inputs it receives. When the nose is denied regular use, it will atrophy. This is what happened to Kearney and many of her patients, and to so much of the general population. Snoring and sleep apnea often follow.

If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845, available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead-weight upon the limbs of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital. Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labour constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the labourer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation. Thus it comes about that the evolutioni of the instruments of labour becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labour-power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labour functions; that machinery, the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital.

The phrase “white privilege” is not the only verbal sleight of hand used to make achievement differences vanish. Even racial or ethnic groups that arrived in the United States destitute during the nineteenth century, and were forced to live in a desperate poverty and squalor almost inconceivable today, have had their later rise from such dire conditions verbally erased by calling their eventual achievement of prosperity a “privilege.”19 The histories of Irish, Jewish, Chinese and Japanese immigrants in America are classic examples of this process—and of their achievements being verbally air-brushed out of history by simply calling them “privilege.” Even middle-class blacks today have likewise been characterized by some as “privileged,”20 even though their ancestors arrived as slaves.

Suppose we had some kind of device with particles moving with a certain definite symmetry, and suppose their movements were bilaterally symmetrical (fig. 20). Then, following the laws of physics, with all the movements and collisions, you could expect, and rightly, that if you look at the same picture later on it will still be bilaterally symmetrical. So there is a kind of conservation, the conservation of the symmetry character. This should be in the table, but it is not like a number that you measure, and we will discuss it in much more detail in the next lecture. The reason this is not very interesting in classical physics is because the times when there are such nicely symmetrical initial conditions are very rare, and it is therefore a not very important or practical conservation law. But

Women are not party to the original contract through which men transform their natural freedom into the security of civil freedom. Women are the subject of the contract. The (sexual) contract is the vehicle through which men transform their natural right over women into the security of civil patriarchal right. But if women have no part in the original contract, if they can have no part, why do the classic social contract theorists (again with the exception of Hobbes) make marriage and the marriage contract part of the natural condition? How can beings who lack the capacities to make contracts nevertheless be supposed always to enter into this contract? Why, moreover, do all the classic theorists (including Hobbes) insist that, in civil society, women not only can but must enter into the marriage contract?

Einstein’s “physical strategy” began with his mission to generalize the principle of relativity so that it applied to observers who were accelerating or moving in an arbitrary manner. Any gravitational field equation he devised would have to meet the following physical requirements: • It must revert to Newtonian theory in the special case of weak and static gravitational fields. In other words, under certain normal conditions, his theory would describe Newton’s familiar laws of gravitation and motion. • It should preserve the laws of classical physics, most notably the conservation of energy and momentum. • It should satisfy the principle of equivalence, which holds that observations made by an observer who is uniformly accelerating would be equivalent to those made by an observer standing in a comparable gravitational field.

If one awakens in a healthy body, and with a clear brain rested by normal sleep and retaining memories of a normally agreeable yesterday, one may lie watching the housemaid building the fire; and after she has swept the hearth and put things in order, lie watching the flames of the blazing and crackling wood catch the coals and set them blazing also, and dancing merrily and filling corners with a glow; and in so lying and realizing that leaping light and warmth and a soft bed are good things, one may turn over on one’s back, stretching arms and legs luxuriously, drawing deep breaths and smiling at a knowledge of the fog outside which makes half-past eight o’clock on a December morning as dark as twelve o’clock on a December night. Under such conditions the soft, thick, yellow gloom has its picturesque and even humorous aspect. One feels enclosed by it

It was in Cleveland that Magic Slim became the most successful pornographic film producer in America. His training center was a key link in a human trafficking supply chain stretching from the former Soviet Republics in Eastern Europe to the United States. Trafficking accounts for an estimated $32 billion in annual trade with sex slavery and pornographic film production accounting for the greatest percentage. The girls arrived at Slim’s building young and naive, they left older and wiser. This was a classic value chain with each link making a contribution.  Slim’s trainers were the best, and it showed in the final product. Each class of girls was judged on the merits. The fast learners went on to advanced training. They learned proper etiquette, social skills and party games. They learned how to dress, apply makeup and discuss world events.  Best in-class were advertised in international style magazines with code words. These codes were known only to select clients and certain intermediaries approved by Slim. This elaborate distribution system was part of Slim’s business model, his clients paid an annual subscription fee for the on-line dictionary. The code words and descriptions were revised monthly.  An interested client would pay an access fee for further information that included a set of professional  photographs, a video and voice recordings of the model addressing the client by name.  Should the client accept, a detailed travel itinerary was submitted calling for first class travel and accommodation.  Slim required a letter of understanding spelling out terms and conditions and a 50% deposit. He didn’t like contracts, his word was his bond, everyone along the chain knew that. Slim's business was booming.

Love, he said, is not a god, for a god cannot want anything; but one of those great spirits who are messengers between gods and men. He does not visit fools, who are content with their low condition, but those who aware of their own need and desire, by embracing the beautiful and good, to beget goodness and beauty; for creation is man’s immortality and brings him nearest to the gods. All creatures, he said, cherish the children of their flesh; yet the noblest progeny of love are wisdom and glorious deeds, for mortal children die, but these live forever; and these are begotten not of the body but the soul. Mortal passion sinks us in mortal pleasure, so that the wings of the soul grow weak; and such lovers may rise to the good indeed, but not to the very best. But the winged soul rises from love to love, from the beautiful that is born and dies, to beauty is only a moving shadow flung upon a wall.

Is it necessary to recall that the earth is not infinite, and that our civilization is close to having invaded all of it? The end of the world, this great terror of the Middle Ages, is destined to become a source of anguish again in another sense. It is no longer in time but in space that this terrestrial globe reveals itself as inextensible; and the deluge of civilized humanity already hurls itself at its limits, at its new Pillars of Hercules, these ones insurmountable. What are we going to do when soon we will no longer be able to count on external markets, Asian, African, to serve as a palliative or derivative for our discords, as outlets for our merchandise, for our instincts of cruelty, of pillage and of prey, for our criminality as well as for our overflowing birthrate? How will we manage to reestablish among ourselves a relative peace which has had as its condition for so long our conquering projection outside ourselves, far from ourselves?" -1902

We must remember with Heine that Aristophanes is the God of this ironic earth, and that all argument is apparently vitiated from the start by the simple fact that Wagner and a rooster are given an analogous method of making love. And therefore it seems impeccable logic to say that all that is most unlike the rooster is the most spiritual part of love. All will agree on that, schisms only arise when one tries to decide what does go farthest from the bird's automatic mechanism. Certainly not a Dante-Beatrice affair which is only the negation of the rooster in terms of the swooning bombast of adolescence, the first onslaught of a force which the sufferer cannot control or inhabit with all the potentialities of his body and soul. But the rooster is troubled by no dreams of a divine orgy, no carnival-loves like Beethoven's Fourth Symphony, no heroic and shining lust gathering and swinging into a merry embrace like the third act of Siegfried. It is desire in this sense that goes farthest from the animal.

The democratic gospel of the French Revolution rested upon the glorification of man rather than God. The Church of Rome recognized this and struck back at the heresy as she had always done. She saw more clearly than did most Protestant churches that the devil, when it is to his advantage, is democratic. Ten thousand people telling a lie do not turn the lie into truth. That is an important lesson from the Age of Progress for Christians of every generation. The freedom to vote and a chance to learn do not guarantee the arrival of utopia. The Christian faith has always insisted that the flaw in human nature is more basic than any fault in man’s political or social institutions. Alexis de Tocqueville, a visitor in the United States during the nineteenth century, issued a warning in his classic study, Democracy in America. In the United States, he said, neither aristocracy nor princely tyranny exist. Yet, asked de Tocqueville, does not this unprecedented “equality of conditions” itself pose a fateful threat: the “tyranny of the majority”? In the processes of government, de Tocqueville warned, rule of the majority can mean oppression of the minority, control by erratic public moods rather than reasoned leadership.

Love one another, Fathers,” said Father Zossima, as far as Alyosha could remember afterwards. “Love God’s people. Because we have come here and shut ourselves within these walls, we are no holier than those that are outside, but on the contrary, from the very fact of coming here, each of us has confessed to himself that he is worse than others, than all men on earth... And the longer the monk lives in his seclusion, the more keenly he must recognize that. Else he would have had no reason to come here. When he realizes that he is not only worse than others, but that he is responsible to all men for all and everything, for all human sins, national and individual, only then the aim of our seclusion is attained. For know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual man. This knowledge is the crown of life for the monk and for every man. For monks are not a special sort of men, but only what all men ought to be. Only through that knowledge, our heart grows soft with infinite, universal, inexhaustible love. Then every one of you will have the power to win over the whole world by love and to wash away the sins of the world with your tears... Each of you keep watch over your heart and confess your sins to yourself unceasingly. Be not afraid of your sins, even when perceiving them, if only there be penitence, but make no conditions with God. Again I say, Be not proud. Be proud neither to the little nor to the great. Hate not those who reject you, who insult you, who abuse and slander you. Hate not the atheists, the teachers of evil, the materialists—and I mean not only the good ones—for there are many good ones among them, especially in our day—hate not even the wicked ones. Remember them in your prayers thus: Save, O Lord, all those who have none to pray for them, save too all those who will not pray. And add: it is not in pride that I make this prayer, O Lord, for I am lower than all men... Love God’s people, let not strangers draw away the flock, for if you slumber in your slothfulness and disdainful pride, or worse still, in covetousness, they will come from all sides and draw away your flock. Expound the Gospel to the people unceasingly... be not extortionate... Do not love gold and silver, do not hoard them... Have faith. Cling to the banner and raise it on high.

Nobody ever talked about what a struggle this all was. I could see why women used to die in childbirth. They didn't catch some kind of microbe, or even hemorrhage. They just gave up. They knew that if they didn't die, they'd be going through it again the next year, and the next. I couldn't understand how a woman might just stop trying, like a tired swimmer, let her head go under, the water fill her lungs. I slowly massaged Yvonne's neck, her shoulders, I wouldn't let her go under. She sucked ice through threadbare white terry. If my mother were here, she'd have made Melinda meek cough up the drugs, sure enough. "Mamacita, ay," Yvonne wailed. I didn't know why she would call her mother. She hated her mother. She hadn't seen her in six years, since the day she locked Yvonne and her brother and sisters in their apartment in Burbank to go out and party, and never came back. Yvonne said she let her boyfriends run a train on her when she was eleven. I didn't even know what that meant. Gang bang, she said. And still she called out, Mama. It wasn't just Yvonne. All down the ward, they called for their mothers. ... I held onto Yvonne's hands, and I imagined my mother, seventeen years ago, giving birth to me. Did she call for her mother?...I thought of her mother, the one picture I had, the little I knew. Karin Thorvald, who may or may not have been a distant relation of King Olaf of Norway, classical actress and drunk, who could recite Shakespeare by heart while feeding the chickens and who drowned in the cow pond when my mother was thirteen. I couldn't imagine her calling out for anyone. But then I realized, they didn't mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers and purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women in barstools. Not those women with their complaints and their magazines, controlling women, women who asked, what's in it for me? Not the women who watched TV while they made dinner, women who dyed their hair blond behind closed doors trying to look twenty-three. They didn't mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they'd never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition, get used to it. They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for is when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us. Yvonne was sitting up, holding her breath, eyes bulging out. It was the thing she should not do. "Breathe," I said in her ear. "Please, Yvonne, try." She tried to breathe, a couple of shallow inhalations, but it hurt too much. She flopped back on the narrow bed, too tired to go on. All she could do was grip my hand and cry. And I thought of the way the baby was linked to her, as she was linked to her mother, and her mother, all the way back, insider and inside, knit into a chain of disaster that brought her to this bed, this day. And not only her. I wondered what my own inheritance was going to be. "I wish I was dead," Yvonne said into the pillowcase with the flowers I'd brought from home. The baby came four hours later. A girl, born 5:32 PM.

IN THE PAST, when dying was typically a more precipitous process, we did not have to think about a question like this. Though some diseases and conditions had a drawn-out natural history—tuberculosis is the classic example—without the intervention of modern medicine, with its scans to diagnose problems early and its treatments to extend life, the interval between recognizing that you had a life-threatening ailment and dying was commonly a matter of days or weeks. Consider how our presidents died before the modern era. George Washington developed a throat infection at home on December 13, 1799, that killed him by the next evening. John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson all succumbed to strokes and died within two days. Rutherford Hayes had a heart attack and died three days later. Others did have a longer course: James Monroe and Andrew Jackson died from progressive and far longer-lasting (and highly dreaded) tubercular consumption. Ulysses Grant’s oral cancer took a year to kill him. But, as end-of-life researcher Joanne Lynn has observed, people generally experienced life-threatening illness the way they experienced bad weather—as something that struck with little warning. And you either got through it or you didn’t.

It is reported by Diogenes Laertius (VI, 37) that one day, after observing a child drinking out of his hand, Diogenes threw away the cup from his wallet, saying, "A child has given me a lesson in plainness of living." Again, according to Diogenes Laertius (VI, 40), as Diogenes was leaving the public baths, some­ body asked him whether there were many men bathing, to which he answered that there were few people but a large crowd of bathers. In the example of the child, we have a specific behavioral response­ Diogenes throws away his own cup--and a succinct statement: "A child has given me a lesson in plainness of living." In the second example, we have a terse double reply: Few people were at the baths, but there was a large crowd of bathers. What do we learn from both examples? Plenty indeed, in fact more than we could learn from a treatise on the uselessness of most human inventions and practices, and on the brutal fact, recognized by the Cynics, that most people appear to be human but are not, that is, that most people deceive us into the belief that they are intelligent and decent, while in reality they are nothing but camouflaged rascals and ruffians, and are not therefore truly human. In the first example, Diogenes indicts much of what goes by the name of civilization, and in the second he condemns in no uncertain terms the condition in which most human beings live.

The psychology of the naturalistic drama, in which the characters are interpreted as social phenomena, has its origin in this urge which the spectator feels to identify himself with his social compeers. Now, however much objective truth there may be in such an interpretation of the characters in a play, it leads, when raised to the status of an exclusive principle, to a falsification of the facts. The assumption that men and women are merely social beings results in just as arbitrary a picture of experience as the view according to which every person is a unique and incomparable individual. Both conceptions lead to a stylization and romanticizing of reality. On the other hand, however, there is no doubt that the conception of man held in any particular epoch is socially conditioned and that the choice as to whether man is portrayed in the main as an autonomous personality or as the representative of a class depends in every age on the social approach and political aims of those who happen to be the upholders of culture. When a public wishes to see social origins and class characteristics emphasized in the human portraiture, that is always a sign that that society has become class-conscious, no matter whether the public in question is aristocratic or middle-class. In this context the question whether the aristocrat is only an aristocrat and the bourgeois only a bourgeois is absolutely unimportant.

Not only does it matter politically how we rank the vices, but freedom demands that as a matter of liberal policy we must learn to endure enormous differences in the relative importance that various individuals and groups attach to the vices. There is a vast gulf between the seven deadly sins, with their emphasis on pride and self-indulgence, and putting cruelty first. These choice are not casual or due merely to the variety of our purely personal dispositions and emotional inclinations. These different ranking orders are parts of very dissimilar systems of values. Some may be extremely old, for the structure of beliefs does not alter nearly as quickly as the more tangible conditions of life. In fact, they do not die at all; they just accumulate one on top of the other. Europe has always had a tradition of traditions, as our demographic and religious history makes amply clear. It is no use looking back to some imaginary classical or medieval utopia of moral and political unanimity, not to mention the horror of planning one for the future. Thinking about the vices has, indeed, the effect of showing precisely to what extent ours is a culture of many subcultures, of layer upon layer of ancient religious and class rituals, ethnic inheritance of sensibility and manners, and ideological residues whose original purpose has by now been utterly forgotten. With this in view, liberal democracy becomes more a recipe for survival than a project for the perfectibility of mankind.

The future is now quite uncertain; everyone lives for today, a state of mind in which the game of graft and swindle is played with ease — that is, it is only "for today" that they allow themselves to be bribed and bought, while tomorrow and tomorrow’s virtue they reserve to themselves! It is a well-known fact that individuals, being truly things apart, care more for the moment than their opposites the gregarious do, because they consider themselves as unpredictable as the future; likewise, they readily take up with the violent, because the crowd could neither understand nor condone the actions to which they dare have recourse — but the tyrant or Caesar understands that the individual has a right even to his excesses, and has an interest in advocating a bolder private morality, and even in lending it a hand. For what he thinks of himself, and what he wants others to think of him, is what Napoleon in his classical manner at one time declared: "I have the right to answer any complaint against me with an eternal “this is what I am”. I stand aloof from the whole world and accept conditions from no one. I want submission even to my fancies and regard it as a matter of course that I indulge myself in this or that diversion." Napoleon once spoke thus to his wife, who had reasons to question her husband’s fidelity. It is during the most corrupt times that these apples ripen and fall, by which I mean the individuals who bear the seeds of the future, the intellectual pioneers and founders of causes and federations. Corruption is only an ugly word for the autumn of a people.

Tanya Latty and Madeleine Beekman of the University of Sydney were studying the way slime molds handled tough choices. A tough choice for a slime mold looks something like this: On one side of the petri dish is three grams of oats. On the other side is five grams of oats, but with an ultraviolet light trained on it. You put a slime mold in the center of the dish. What does it do? Under those conditions, they found, the slime mold chooses each option about half the time; the extra food just about balances out the unpleasantness of the UV light. If you were a classical economist of the kind Daniel Ellsberg worked with at RAND, you’d say that the smaller pile of oats in the dark and the bigger pile under the light have the same amount of utility for the slime mold, which is therefore ambivalent between them. Replace the five grams with ten grams, though, and the balance is broken; the slime mold goes for the new double-size pile every time, light or no light. Experiments like this teach us about the slime mold’s priorities and how it makes decisions when those priorities conflict. And they make the slime mold look like a pretty reasonable character. But then something strange happened. The experimenters tried putting the slime mold in a petri dish with three options: the three grams of oats in the dark (3-dark), the five grams of oats in the light (5-light), and a single gram of oats in the dark (1-dark). You might predict that the slime mold would almost never go for 1-dark; the 3-dark pile has more oats in it and is just as dark, so it’s clearly superior. And indeed, the slime mold just about never picks 1-dark. You might also guess that, since the slime mold found 3-dark and 5-light equally attractive before, it would continue to do so in the new context. In the economist’s terms, the presence of the new option shouldn’t change the fact that 3-dark and 5-light have equal utility. But no: when 1-dark is available, the slime mold actually changes its preferences, choosing 3-dark more than three times as often as it does 5-light!

The concentrated structure of musical form, based on dramatic climaxes, gradually breaks up in romanticism and gives way again to the cumulative composition of the older music. Sonata form falls to pieces and is replaced more and more often by other, less severe and less schematically moulded forms—by small-scale lyrical and descriptive genres, such as the Fantasy and the Rhapsody, the Arabesque and the Étude, the Intermezzo and the Impromptu, the Improvisation and the Variation. Even extensive works are often made up of such miniature forms, which no longer constitute, from the structural point of view, the acts of a drama, but the scenes of a revue. A classical sonata or symphony was the world in parvo: a microcosm. A succession of musical pictures, such as Schumann’s Carnaval or Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage, is like a painter’s sketch-book; it may contain magnificent lyrical-impressionistic details, but it abandons the attempt to create a total impression and an organic unity from the very beginning. [...] This change of form is accompanied by the literary inclinations of the composers and their bias towards programme music. The intermingling of forms also makes itself felt in music and is expressed most conspicuously in the fact that the romantic composers are often very gifted and important writers. In the painting and poetry of the period the disintegration of form does not proceed anything like so quickly, nor is it so far-reaching as in music. The explanation of the difference is partly that the cyclical ‘medieval’ structure had long since been overcome in the other arts, whereas it remained predominant in music until the middle of the eighteenth century, and only began to yield to formal unity after the death of Bach. In music it was therefore much easier to revert to it than, for example, in painting where it was completely out of date. The romantics’ historical interest in old music and the revival of Bach’s prestige had, however, only a subordinate part in the dissolution of strict sonata form, the real reason is to be sought in a change of taste which was in essentials sociologically conditioned.

Numbers express quantities. In the submissions to my online survey, however, respondents frequently attributed qualities to them. Noticeably, colors. The number that was most commonly described as having its own color was four (52 votes), which most respondents (17) said was blue. Seven was next (28 votes), which most respondents (9) said was green, and in third place came five (27 votes), which most respondents (9) said was red. Seeing colors in numbers is a manifestation of synesthesia, a condition in which certain concepts can trigger incongruous responses, and which is thought to be the result of atypical connections being made between parts of the brain. In the survey, numbers were also labeled “warm,” “crisp,” “chagrined,” “peaceful,” “overconfident,” “juicy,” “quiet” and “raw.” Taken individually, the descriptions are absurd, yet together they paint a surprisingly coherent picture of number personalities. Below is a list of the numbers from one to thirteen, together with words used to describe them taken from the survey responses. One Independent, strong, honest, brave, straightforward, pioneering, lonely. Two Cautious, wise, pretty, fragile, open, sympathetic, quiet, clean, flexible. Three Dynamic, warm, friendly, extrovert, opulent, soft, relaxed, pretentious. Four Laid-back, rogue, solid, reliable, versatile, down-to-earth, personable. Five Balanced, central, cute, fat, dominant but not too much so, happy. Six Upbeat, sexy, supple, soft, strong, brave, genuine, courageous, humble. Seven Magical, unalterable, intelligent, awkward, overconfident, masculine. Eight Soft, feminine, kind, sensible, fat, solid, sensual, huggable, capable. Nine Quiet, unobtrusive, deadly, genderless, professional, soft, forgiving. Ten Practical, logical, tidy, reassuring, honest, sturdy, innocent, sober. Eleven Duplicitous, onomatopoeic, noble, wise, homey, bold, sturdy, sleek. Twelve Malleable, heroic, imperial, oaken, easygoing, nonconfrontational. Thirteen Gawky, transitional, creative, honest, enigmatic, unliked, dark horse. You don’t need to be a Hollywood screenwriter to spot that Mr. One would make a great romantic hero, and Miss Two a classic leading lady. The list is nonsensical, yet it makes sense. The association of one with male characteristics, and two with female ones, also remains deeply ingrained.

It seems the primary breeding group for what might, in the widest possible sense of the word, be understood as an opposition in the post-totalitarian system is living within the truth. The confrontation between these opposition forces and the powers that be, of course, will obviously take a form essentially different from that typical of an open society or a classical dictatorship. Initially, this confrontation does not take place on the level of real, institutionalized, quantifiable power which relies on the various instruments of power, but on a different level altogether: the level of human consciousness and conscience, the existential level. The effective range of this special power cannot be measured in terms of disciples, voters, or soldiers, because it lies spread out in the fifth column of social consciousness, in the hidden aims of life, in human beings' repressed longing for dignity and fundamental rights, for the realization of their real social and political interests. Its power, therefore does not reside in the strength of definable political or social groups, but chiefly in the strength of a potential, which is hidden throughout the whole of society, including the official power structures of that society. Therefore this power does not rely on soldiers of its own, but on the soldiers of the enemy as it were—that is to say, on everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment (in theory, at least) by the force of truth (or who, out of an instinctive desire to protect their position, may at least adapt to that force). It is a bacteriological weapon, so to speak, utilized when conditions are ripe by a single civilian to disarm an entire division. This power does not participate in any direct struggle for power; rather, it makes its influence felt in the obscure arena of being itself. The hidden movements it gives rise to there, however, can issue forth (when, where, under what circumstances, and to what extent are difficult to predict) in something visible: a real political act or event, a social movement, a sudden explosion of civil unrest, a sharp conflict inside an apparently monolithic power structure, or simply an irrepressible transformation in the social and intellectual climate. And since all genuine problems and matters of critical importance are hidden beneath a think crust of lies, it is never quite clear when the proverbial last straw will fall, or what that straw will be. This, too, is why the regime prosecutes, almost as a reflex action preventatively, even the most modest attempts to live within the truth.

Classical liberalism has been reproached with being too obstinate and not ready enough to compromise. It was because of its inflexibility that it was defeated in its struggle with the nascent anticapitalist parties of all kinds. If it had realized, as these other parties did, the importance of compromise and concession to popular slogans in winning the favor of the masses, it would have been able to preserve at least some of its influence. But it has never bothered to build for itself a party organization and a party machine as the anticapitalist parties have done. It has never attached any importance to political tactics in electoral campaigns and parliamentary proceedings. It has never gone in for scheming opportunism or political bargaining. This unyielding doctrinairism necessarily brought about the decline of liberalism. The factual assertions contained in these statements are entirely in accordance with the truth, but to believe that they constitute a reproach against liberalism is to reveal a complete misunderstanding of its essential spirit. The ultimate and most profound of the fundamental insights of liberal thought is that it is ideas that constitute the foundation on which the whole edifice of human social cooperation is Liberalism: A Socio-Economic Exposition constructed and sustained and that a lasting social structure cannot be built on the basis of false and mistaken ideas. Nothing can serve as a substitute for an ideology that enhances human life by fostering social cooperation—least of all lies, whether they be called "tactics," "diplomacy," or "compromise." If men will not, from a recognition of social necessity, voluntarily do what must be done if society is to be maintained and general well-being advanced, no one can lead them to the right path by any cunning stratagem or artifice. If they err and go astray, then one must endeavor to enlighten them by instruction. But if they cannot be enlightened, if they persist in error, then nothing can be done to prevent catastrophe. All the tricks and lies of demagogic politicians may well be suited to promote the cause of those who, whether in good faith or bad, work for the destruction of society. But the cause of social progress, the cause of the further development and intensification of social bonds, cannot be advanced by lies and demagogy. No power on earth, no crafty stratagem or clever deception could succeed in duping mankind into accepting a social doctrine that it not only does not acknowledge, but openly spurns. The only way open to anyone who wishes to lead the world back to liberalism is to convince his fellow citizens of the necessity of adopting the liberal program. This work of enlightenment is the sole task that the liberal can and must perform in order to avert as much as lies within his power the destruction toward which society is rapidly heading today. There is no place here for concessions to any of the favorite or customary prejudices and errors. In regard to questions that will decide whether or not society is to continue to exist at all, whether millions of people are to prosper or perish, there is no room for compromise either from weakness or from misplaced deference for the sensibilities of others. If liberal principles once again are allowed to guide the policies of great nations, if a revolution in public opinion could once more give capitalism free rein, the world will be able gradually to raise itself from the condition into which the policies of the combined anticapitalist factions have plunged it. There is no other way out of the political and social chaos of the present age.