Common Factors Quotes

We should free ourselves from the narrowness of being related only to those familiar to us, either by the fact that they are blood relations or, in a larger sense, that we eat the same food, speak the same language, and have the same “ common sense.” Knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society, race or culture and penetrate to the depth of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human. True compassion and knowledge of man has been largely underrated as a revolutionary factor in the development of man, just as art has been. It is a noteworthy phenomenon that in the development of capitalism and its ethics, compassion (or mercy) ceases to be a virtue.

I have always been interested in witchcraft and superstition, but have never had much traffic with ghosts, so I began asking people everywhere what they thought about such things, and I began to find out that there was one common factor - most people have never seen a ghost, and never want or expect to, but almost everyone will admit that sometimes they have a sneaking feeling that they just possibly could meet a ghost if they weren't careful - if they were to turn a corner too suddenly, perhaps, or open their eyes too soon when they wake up at night, or go into a dark room without hesitating first.

This principle - that your spouse should be capable of becoming your best friend - is a game changer when you address the question of compatibility in a prospective spouse. If you think of marriage largely in terms of erotic love, then compatibility means sexual chemistry and appeal. If you think of marriage largely as a way to move into the kind of social status in life you desire, then compatibility means being part of the desired social class, and perhaps common tastes and aspirations for lifestyle. The problem with these factors is that they are not durable. Physical attractiveness will wane, no matter how hard you work to delay its departure. And socio-economic status unfortunately can change almost overnight. When people think they have found compatibility based on these things, they often make the painful discovery that they have built their relationship on unstable ground. A woman 'lets herself go' or a man loses his job, and the compatibility foundation falls apart.

I am that which knows or is aware of all experience, but I am not myself an experience. I am aware of thoughts but am not myself a thought; I am aware of feelings and sensations but am not myself a feeling or sensation; I am aware of perceptions but am not myself a perception. Whatever the content of experience, I know or am aware of it. Thus, knowing or being aware is the essential element in all knowledge, the common factor in all experience.

While many theories were put forth, there was one common factor that researchers recognized in all great performers: they practiced so hard and intensely that it hurt.

In February, the overcast sky isn’t gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It’s a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you’re inside, the snow clings to you psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely.

Never praise or blame people on common grounds; look to their judgements exclusively. Because that is the determining factor, which makes everyone's actions either good or bad.

It is a common belief that we breathe with our lungs alone, but in point of fact, the work of breathing is done by the whole body. The lungs play a passive role in the respiratory process. Their expansion is produced by an enlargement, mostly downward, of the thoracic cavity and they collapse when that cavity is reduced. Proper breathing involves the muscles of the head, neck, thorax, and abdomen. It can be shown that chronic tension in any part of the body's musculature interferes with the natural respiratory movements. Breathing is a rhythmic activity. Normally a person at rest makes approximately 16 to 17 respiratory incursions a minute. The rate is higher in infants and in states of excitation. It is lower in sleep and in depressed persons. The depth of the respiratory wave is another factor which varies with emotional states. Breathing becomes shallow when we are frightened or anxious. It deepens with relaxation, pleasure and sleep. But above all, it is the quality of the respiratory movements that determines whether breathing is pleasurable or not. With each breath a wave can be seen to ascend and descend through the body. The inspiratory wave begins deep in the abdomen with a backward movement of the pelvis. This allows the belly to expand outward. The wave then moves upward as the rest of the body expands. The head moves very slightly forward to suck in the air while the nostrils dilate or the mouth opens. The expiratory wave begins in the upper part of the body and moves downward: the head drops back, the chest and abdomen collapse, and the pelvis rocks forward. Breathing easily and fully is one of the basic pleasures of being alive. The pleasure is clearly experienced at the end of expiration when the descending wave fills the pelvis with a delicious sensation. In adults this sensation has a sexual quality, though it does not induce any genital feeling. The slight backward and forward movements of the pelvis, similar to the sexual movements, add to the pleasure. Though the rhythm of breathing is pronounced in the pelvic area, it is at the same time experienced by the total body as a feeling of fluidity, softness, lightness and excitement. The importance of breathing need hardly be stressed. It provides the oxygen for the metabolic processes; literally it supports the fires of life. But breath as "pneuma" is also the spirit or soul. We live in an ocean of air like fish in a body of water. By our breathing we are attuned to our atmosphere. If we inhibit our breathing we isolate ourselves from the medium in which we exist. In all Oriental and mystic philosophies, the breath holds the secret to the highest bliss. That is why breathing is the dominant factor in the practice of Yoga.

The most common myth about money is that having more will make me more secure. It won’t. Wealth can be lost instantly through a variety of uncontrollable factors. Real security can only be found in that which can never be taken from you — your relationship with God.

The most transformative and resilient leaders that I’ve worked with over the course of my career have three things in common: First, they recognize the central role that relationships and story play in culture and strategy, and they stay curious about their own emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Second, they understand and stay curious about how emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are connected in the people they lead, and how those factors affect relationships and perception. And, third, they have the ability and willingness to lean in to discomfort and vulnerability.

they look at their prospective spouse’s faith as simply one more factor that makes him or her compatible, like common interests and hobbies. But that is not what spiritual friendship is. It is eagerly helping one another know, serve, love, and resemble God in deeper and deeper ways.

Dissociation -the common factor in all types of post-traumatic syndromes- is facilitated by violation of boundaries by relational omission and intrusion as represented by distinct effects and consequences of childhood neglect and abuse.

Some simply love you others love to hate you. Consolation is that 'Love' is the common factor.

The common factor in all our experiences is wakeful consciousness which turns what happens into an experience or a meaningful reality.

These lecture provide material for the consideration of common factors, in theory and in development, from the viewpoint of the idea of surrender to the Divine Will, reviewing some aspects of the interplay between Christians and Moslems, and introducing material from and about Sufis.

The Soviet Union came apart along ethnic lines. The most important factor in this breakup was the disinclination of Slavic Ukraine to continue under a regime dominated by Slavic Russia. Yugoslavia came apart also, beginning with a brutal clash between Serbia and Croatia, here again 'nations' with only the smallest differences in genealogy; with, indeed, practically a common language. Ethnic conflict does not require great differences; small will do.

Yes: we have arrived at our common thread, the underpinning factor that lets us answer our tangled questions about causes and treatments, symptoms and overlaps. Mental disorders—all of them—are metabolic disorders of the brain.

Historian Peter Vronsky hypothesizes that while several factors must align to make a murderer (genetics and frontal lobe injuries being two common ones), World War II was responsible for this golden age of serial killers a generation later.

In short, honesty is more than a moral principle. It is also a major economic factor. While government can do little to create honesty directly, in various ways it can indirectly either support or undermine the traditions on which honest conduct is based. This it can do by what it teaches in its schools, by the examples set by public officials, or by the laws that it passes. These laws can create incentives toward either moral or immoral conduct. Where laws create a situation in which the only way to avoid ruinous losses is by violating the law, the government is in effect reducing public respect for laws in general, as well as rewarding specific dishonest behavior.

He then expounded a remarkable theory, which had occurred to him while he was playing the clarinet during one of the power cuts that the French electricity board arranges at regular intervals. Electricity, he said, is a matter of science and logic. Classical music is a matter of art and logic. Vous voyez? Already one sees a common factor. And when you listen to the disciplined and logical progression of some of Mozart's work, the conclusion is inescapable: Mozart would have made a formidable electrician.

Cancer researchers knew that X-rays, soot, cigarette smoke, and asbestos represented vastly more common risk factors for human cancers.

Man is a result of both his inherited instincts and his education. Among the miners and the seamen, their common occupations and their every-day contact with one another create a feeling of solidarity, while the surrounding dangers maintain courage and pluck. In the cities, on the contrary, the absence of common interest nurtures indifference, while courage and pluck, which seldom find their opportunities, disappear, or take another direction. Moreover,

I’m actually not very good at anything in particular. I’m not really very smart. People don’t know it right away, but eventually they sort it out. Sometimes I think: No wait I’m lying, all the time I think: Everyone else is right about me. I am the common factor, aren’t I? So that must mean everyone else is right.

So let’s consider other factors or qualities that ought to—but generally don’t—count for much in making a male a “real” man, factors that many men keep in the shadows: vulnerability, empathy, emotional transparency and literacy, the capacity for relational intimacy—all qualities more commonly associated with being female than male.

Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation; thus the progress of historical studies is often a danger for national identity . . . The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things’. Ernest Renan

Each being is, exactly as you are, the sole centre of a Universe in no wise identical with, or even assimilable to, your own. The impersonal Universe of Nature is only an abstraction, approximately true, of the factors which it is convenient to regard as common to all. The Universe of another is therefore necessarily unknown to, and unknowable by, you; but it induces currents of energy in yours by determining in part your reactions. Use men and women, therefore, with the absolute respect due to inviolable standards of measurement; verify your own observations by comparison with similar judgements made by them; and, studying the methods which determine their failure or success, acquire for yourself the wit and skill required to cope with your own problems.

A black boy brought Wilson's gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: 'Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love...' His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he has his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog's eyes, a setter's eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.

Arrogance was one of the key factors that kept the white left so factionalized. I felt that instead of fighting against a common enemy, they wasted time quarreling with each other about who has the right line. Although i respected the work and political positions of many groups on the left, i felt it was necessary for Black people to come together and organize our own structures and our own politcal party... I felt, and still feel, that it is necessary for Black revolutionaries to come together, analyze our history, our present condition, and to define ourselves and our struggle.

The New York power failure was not the first time the Hell's Angels have confounded the forces of decency and got off scot-free. They are incredibly devious. Law enforcement officials have compared their guile to that of the snipe, a wily beast that many have seen but few have ever trapped. This is because the snipe has the ability to transform himself, when facing capture, into something entirely different. The only other animals capable of this are the werewolf and the Hell's Angel, which have many traits in common. The physical resemblance is obvious, but far more important is the transmogrification factor, the strange ability to alter their own physical structure, and hence "disappear." The Hell's Angels are very close-mouthed about this, but it is a well-known fact among public officials. ... About halfway through our talk I got a strong whiff of the transmogrification factor, but I was hardly prepared for the mayor's special fillip on it. There were plenty of Hell's Angels at the riot, "but they escaped, " he explained, "behind a wall of fire." While he elaborated on this I checked my calendar to make sure I hadn't lost track of the days. If it was Sunday, perhaps he had just come back from church in a high, biblical state of mind. At any moment I expected to hear that the Angels had driven their motorcycles straight into the sea, which had rolled back to let them pass. But no, it wasn't like that. The mayor was not loath to give details of the escape; he wanted law enforcement agencies everywhere to be warned of the Angels' methods. Knowledge is power, he opined.

While this neurobiology is mighty impressive, the brain is not where a behavior 'begins'. It's merely the final common pathway by which all the factors in the chapters to come converge and create behavior.

Had Martha Foley returned William [James Sidis]'s passion as Margaret [Engemann] did Norbert [Wiener]'s, perhaps the two prodigies would have had more in common in the long run. ... In the life of a prodigy, perhaps more than in the average life, a marriage or a requited love is the greatest single factor that can heal the old childhood wounds. William and Norbert's response to their childhood and teenage rejections and humiliations was to retreat into the painless world of ideas, where successes and satisfactions abounded. A successful love affair could be the key to reentry into the world of feeling, bridging the gap between the cerebral and the emotional lives.

High performance teams have six characteristics that allow them to consistently achieve exceptional levels of results: Common Purpose Crystal Clear Roles Accepted Leadership Effective Processes Solid Relationships Excellent Communication

The industrialized Order hasn’t simply enabled us to increase the total calories grown by a factor of seven since 1945; it has enabled vast swaths of the planet to have large populations when geography alone wouldn’t previously support them. Populations in North Africa are up by over a factor of five since 1950, Iran over six, while Saudi Arabia and Yemen have increased by over a factor of ten. Bulk food shipments originating a continent (or more) away are now a commonality.

It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian 'chinanto/mnigs' which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan 'tzjin-anthony-ks' which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds. What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.

One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation

leaders that I’ve worked with over the course of my career have three things in common: First, they recognize the central role that relationships and story play in culture and strategy, and they stay curious about their own emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Second, they understand and stay curious about how emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are connected in the people they lead, and how those factors affect relationships and perception. And, third, they have the ability and willingness to lean in to discomfort and vulnerability.

These two developments throw light on what is perhaps the most fundamental difference between the Renaissance and all previous periods of art. We have repeatedly seen that there were these circumstances which could compel the artist to make a distinction between the "technical" proportions and the "objective;" the influence of organic movement, the influence of perspective foreshortening, and the regard for the visual impression of the beholder. These three factors of variation have one thing in common: they all presuppose the artistic recognition of subjectivity. Organic movement introduces into the calculus of artistic composition the subjective will and the subjective emotions of the thing represented; foreshortening the subjective visual experience of the artist; and those "eurhythmic" adjustments which alter that which is right in favor of what seems right, the subjective visual experience of a potential beholder. And it is the Renaissance which, for the first time, not only affirms but formally legitimizes and rationalizes these three forms of subjectivity.

In the early months of World War II, San Francisco's Fill-more district, or the Western Addition, experienced a visible revolution. On the surface it appeared to be totally peaceful and almost a refutation of the term “revolution.” The Yakamoto Sea Food Market quietly became Sammy's Shoe Shine Parlor and Smoke Shop. Yashigira's Hardware metamorphosed into La Salon de Beauté owned by Miss Clorinda Jackson. The Japanese shops which sold products to Nisei customers were taken over by enterprising Negro businessmen, and in less than a year became permanent homes away from home for the newly arrived Southern Blacks. Where the odors of tempura, raw fish and cha had dominated, the aroma of chitlings, greens and ham hocks now prevailed. The Asian population dwindled before my eyes. I was unable to tell the Japanese from the Chinese and as yet found no real difference in the national origin of such sounds as Ching and Chan or Moto and Kano. As the Japanese disappeared, soundlessly and without protest, the Negroes entered with their loud jukeboxes, their just-released animosities and the relief of escape from Southern bonds. The Japanese area became San Francisco's Harlem in a matter of months. A person unaware of all the factors that make up oppression might have expected sympathy or even support from the Negro newcomers for the dislodged Japanese. Especially in view of the fact that they (the Blacks) had themselves undergone concentration-camp living for centuries in slavery's plantations and later in sharecroppers' cabins. But the sensations of common relationship were missing. The Black newcomer had been recruited on the desiccated farm lands of Georgia and Mississippi by war-plant labor scouts. The chance to live in two-or three-story apartment buildings (which became instant slums), and to earn two-and even three-figured weekly checks, was blinding. For the first time he could think of himself as a Boss, a Spender. He was able to pay other people to work for him, i.e. the dry cleaners, taxi drivers, waitresses, etc. The shipyards and ammunition plants brought to booming life by the war let him know that he was needed and even appreciated. A completely alien yet very pleasant position for him to experience. Who could expect this man to share his new and dizzying importance with concern for a race that he had never known to exist? Another reason for his indifference to the Japanese removal was more subtle but was more profoundly felt. The Japanese were not whitefolks. Their eyes, language and customs belied the white skin and proved to their dark successors that since they didn't have to be feared, neither did they have to be considered. All this was decided unconsciously.

Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders. Eating disorders are complex, but what they all seem to have in common is the ability to distract women from the memories, sensations, and experience of the sexual abuse through starving, bingeing, purging, or exercising. They keep the focus on food, body image, weight, fat, calories, diets, miles, and other factors that women focus on during the course of an eating disorder. These disorders also have the ability to numb a woman from the overwhelming emotions resulting from the sexual abuse — especially loss of control, terror, and shame about her body. Women often have a combination of eating disorders in in their history. Some women are anorexic during one period of their life, bulimic during another, and compulsive eaters at yet another stage.

What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise. What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extra-ordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from it’s well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as God, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal feeling. But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation. He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called…. The original meaning of “to have a vocation” is “to be addressed by a voice.” The clearest examples of this are to be found in the avowals of the Old Testament prophets. That it is not just a quaint old-fashioned way of speaking is proved by the confessions of historical personalities such as Goethe and Napolean, to mention only two familiar examples, who made no secret of their feeling of vocation.

Fellow-feeling. . .is the most important factor in producing a healthy political and social life. Neither our national nor our local civic life can be what it should be unless it is marked by the fellow-feeling, the mutual kindness, the mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests, which arise when men take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate together for a common object. A very large share of the rancor of political and social strife arises either from sheer misunderstanding by one section, or by one class, of another, or else from the fact that the two sections, or two classes, are so cut off from each other that neither appreciates the other’s passions, prejudices, and, indeed, point of view, while they are both entirely ignorant of their community of feeling as regards the essentials of manhood and humanity.

The evidence cited here represents only an infinitesimally small fraction of the total number of interactions operating every moment in our bodies. Clearly, the common belief that we can investigate the effects of a single nutrient or drug, unmindful of the potential modifications by other chemical factors, is foolhardy. This evidence should also make us extremely hesitant to “mega-dose” on nutrients isolated from whole foods. Our bodies have evolved to eat whole foods, and can therefore deal with the combinations and interactions of nutrients contained in those foods.

Asking how astronauts go to the bathroom is one of the most common questions put during NASA or space museum outreach sessions. To cope with the curiosity, for a while the agency posted a video that featured a fully-clothed volunteer showing exactly how it was done: with a mirror, sometimes. Young is often asked about it. "Interest from the public is strange. Women don't care. They think, they worked it out and that's that. Men have an almost unhealthy interest. Children are interested in the poop factor." What everybody should actually be interested in is the drinking pee factor.

It was women’s individual experiences of victimization that produced our widespread moral and political opposition to it. And at the same time, there was something about the hashtag itself—its design, and the ways of thinking that it affirms and solidifies—that both erased the variety of women’s experiences and made it seem as if the crux of feminism was this articulation of vulnerability itself. A hashtag is specifically designed to remove a statement from context and to position it as part of an enormous singular thought. A woman participating in one of these hashtags becomes visible at an inherently predictable moment of male aggression: the time her boss jumped her, or the night a stranger followed her home. The rest of her life, which is usually far less predictable, remains unseen. Even as women have attempted to use #YesAllWomen and #MeToo to regain control of a narrative, these hashtags have at least partially reified the thing they’re trying to eradicate: the way that womanhood can feel like a story of loss of control. They have made feminist solidarity and shared vulnerability seem inextricable, as if we were incapable of building solidarity around anything else. What we have in common is obviously essential, but it’s the differences between women’s stories—the factors that allow some to survive, and force others under—that illuminate the vectors that lead to a better world. And, because there is no room or requirement in a tweet to add a disclaimer about individual experience, and because hashtags subtly equate disconnected statements in a way that can’t be controlled by those speaking, it has been even easier for #MeToo critics to claim that women must themselves think that going on a bad date is the same as being violently raped.

Milk consumption has already been identified as an aggravating factor in the acne “epidemic” among adolescents, and preliminary successes have been reported with reduced milk consumption. It is even more important that excessive milk consumption can promote diseases commonly associated with a Western lifestyle

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides adduces a change in language as a major factor in Athens’s descent from dysfunctional democracy through demagoguery into tyranny and anarchy: people began to define things in any way they pleased, he says, and the “normally accepted meaning of words” broke down. In his account of the Catiline crisis in republican Rome, Sallust has Cato the Younger identify the misuse of language—specifically the scission of word and meaning—as the underlying cause of the threat to the state. Society, Cato says, has lost the “vera vocabula rerum,” literally, the “true names of things.”18 In seventeenth-century England, Thomas Hobbes lived through a civil war he believed had been caused in significant measure by a war of words about religion—spread through the pervasive pamphleteering that printing had made possible—that had fatally weakened the linguistic common ground on which an ordered state depends.

Ask any number of people to describe a moment of “perfect” happiness. Some will talk about moments of deep peace experienced in a harmonious natural setting, of a forest dappled in sunshine, of a mountain summit looking out across a vast horizon, of the shores of a tranquil lake, of a night walk through snow under a starry sky, and so on. Others will refer to a long-awaited event: an exam they’ve aced, a sporting victory, meeting someone they’ve longed to meet, the birth of a child. Still others will speak of a moment of peaceful intimacy with their family or a loved one, or of having made someone else happy. The common factor to all of these experiences would seem to be the momentary disappearance of inner conflicts. The person feels in harmony with the world and with herself. Someone enjoying such an experience, such as walking through a serene wilderness, has no particular expectations beyond the simple act of walking. She simply is, here and now, free and open. For just a few moments, thoughts of the past are suppressed, the mind is not burdened with plans for the future, and the present moment is liberated from all mental constructs. This moment of respite, from which all sense of emotional urgency has vanished, is experienced as one of profound peace.

Avoid succumbing to the gambler’s fallacy or the base rate fallacy. Anecdotal evidence and correlations you see in data are good hypothesis generators, but correlation does not imply causation—you still need to rely on well-designed experiments to draw strong conclusions. Look for tried-and-true experimental designs, such as randomized controlled experiments or A/B testing, that show statistical significance. The normal distribution is particularly useful in experimental analysis due to the central limit theorem. Recall that in a normal distribution, about 68 percent of values fall within one standard deviation, and 95 percent within two. Any isolated experiment can result in a false positive or a false negative and can also be biased by myriad factors, most commonly selection bias, response bias, and survivorship bias. Replication increases confidence in results, so start by looking for a systematic review and/or meta-analysis when researching an area.

I concluded that I didn’t have to find an optimum solution to Pronto’s difficulties, just a reasonable one. Trying to find an optimum solution in business is a waste of time: the factors in the equation are changing all the time. But you’ve got to have something to hang your hat on. The one core value that I chose was our high compensation policies, which I had put in place from the very start in 1958. This may sound like a strange way for polarizing a business, but I did not want to destroy the faith that Pronto Markets’ then-handful of employees had in me and in our common future. After all, they had just ponied up half the equity money needed to buy out Rexall.

Wealth acquired by creating value for society is not equivalent to wealth that comes from economic rents. For example, a very important factor in the increasing inequality of wealth in many countries has been the increase in real estate prices.48 But the owner of a building, unlike the inventor of a new treatment for cancer, does not create value for society.

According to Indian crop ecologist Vandana Shiva, humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history. After recent precipitous changes, three-quarters of all human food now comes from just eight species, with the field quickly narrowing down to genetically modified corn, soy, and canola. If woodpeckers and pandas enjoy celebrity status on the endangered-species list (dubious though such fame may be), food crops are the forgotten commoners. We're losing them as fast as we're losing rain forests. An enormous factor in this loss has been the new idea of plant varieties as patentable properties, rather than God's gifts to humanity or whatever the arrangement was previously felt to be, for all of prior history.

It is the cultures of the great world religions which have shaped the course of civilization, and these possess a kind of supercultural position. (...) The three great religions of the East - Confucianism, Brahmanism and Buddhism - and the three world religions in the West - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - have been the great unifying factors in the civilization of the world. They are, as it were, the spiritual highways, which have led mankind through history from remote antiquity down to modern times. (...) In the past all these world religions with the exception of Judaism have been what I have termed supercultures - common forms of faith and moral order which embraced and united large numbers of previously existing cultures with their own languages and histories.

A person unaware of all the factors that make up oppression might have expected sympathy or even support from the Negro newcomers for the dislodged Japanese. Especially in view of the fact that they (the Blacks) had themselves undergone concentration-camp living for centuries in slavery's plantations and later in sharecroppers' cabins. But the sensations of common relationship were missing.

shocking conclusion. It suggested that there appears to be one common pathway to all mental illnesses. Caspi and Moffitt called it the p-factor, in which the p stands for general psychopathology. They argued that this factor appears to predict a person’s liability to develop a mental disorder, to have more than one disorder, to have a chronic disorder, and it can even predict the severity of symptoms. This p-factor is common to hundreds of different psychiatric symptoms and every psychiatric diagnosis. Subsequent research using different sets of people and different methods confirmed the existence of this p-factor.25 However, this research was not designed to tell us what the p-factor is. It only suggests that it exists—that there is an unidentified variable that plays a role in all mental disorders.

While religious and financial manias might seem to have little in common, the underlying forces that give them rise are identical: the desire to improve one’s well-being in this life or the next. And the factors that amplify the contagion of financial and religious mass delusions are also similar: the hardwired human propensity to imitate, to fabricate and consume compelling narratives, and to seek status.

Aside from what I feel to be the intrinsic interest of questions that are so fundamental and deep, I would, in this connection, call attention to the general problem of fragmentation of human consciousness, which is discussed in chapter 1. It is proposed there that the widespread and pervasive distinctions between people (race, nation, family, profession, etc., etc.), which are now preventing mankind from working together for the common good, and indeed, even for survival, have one of the key factors of their origin in a kind of thought that treats things as inherently divided, disconnected, and ‘broken up’ into yet smaller constituent parts. Each part is considered to be essentially independent and self-existent. When man thinks of himself in this way, he will inevitably tend to defend the needs of his own ‘Ego’ against those of the others; or, if he identifies with a group of people of the same kind, he will defend this group in a similar way. He cannot seriously think of mankind as the basic reality, whose claims come first. Even if he does try to consider the needs of mankind he tends to regard humanity as separate from nature, and so on. What I am proposing here is that man’s general way of thinking of the totality, i.e. his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.

Take friendships, for instance. I can think of a lot of cases where the two people have nothing in common. I think there’s a definite reason for every friendship just as there’s a reason why certain atoms unite and others don’t—certain missing factors in one, or certain present factors in the other—what do you think? I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.

One might object that [debt peonage] was just assumed to be in the nature of things: like the imposition of tribute on conquered populations, it might have been resented, but it wasn’t considered a moral issue, a matter of right and wrong. Some things just happen. This has been the most common attitude of peasants to such phenomena throughout human history. What’s striking about the historical record is that in the case of debt crises, this was not how many reacted. Many actually did become indignant. So many, in fact, that most of our contemporary language of social justice, our way of speaking of human bondage and emancipation, continues to echo ancient arguments about debt. It’s particularly striking because so many other things do seem to have been accepted as simply in the nature of things. One does not see a similar outcry against caste systems, for example, or for that matter, the institution of slavery. Surely slaves and untouchables often experienced at least equal horrors. No doubt many protested their condition. Why was it that the debtors’ protests seemed to carry such greater moral weight? Why were debtors so much more effective in winning the ear of priests, prophets, officials, and social reformers? Why was it that officials like Nehemiah were willing to give such sympathetic consideration to their complaints, to inveigh, to summon great assemblies? Some have suggested practical reasons: debt crises destroyed the free peasantry, and it was free peasants who were drafted into ancient armies to fight in wars. Rulers thus had a vested interest in maintaining their recruitment base. No doubt this was a factor; clearly, it wasn’t the only one. There is no reason to believe that Nehemiah, for instance, in his anger at the usurers, was primarily concerned with his ability to levy troops for the Persian king. It had to be something deeper. What makes debt different is that it is premised on an assumption of equality. To be a slave, or lower caste, is to be intrinsically inferior. These are relations of unadulterated hierarchy. In the case of debt, we are talking about two individuals who begin as equal parties to a contract. Legally, at least as far as the contract is concerned, they are the same.

compiling the information on the number of years of education for over four hundred thousand people of European ancestry whose genomes have been surveyed in the course of various disease studies, Daniel Benjamin and colleagues identified seventy-four genetic variations each of which has overwhelming evidence of being more common in people with more years of education than in people with fewer years even after controlling for such possibly confounding factors as heterogeneity in the study population.25

Unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are common themes in the American culture today. Folks sometimes mistake my meaning when I say, “You have the freedom of choice and the ability to create your best life”, because they all too often rush to drop everything that is weighing them down. They quit the job, ditch the unhappy marriage, cut out negative friends and family, get out of Dodge, etc. I do not advocate such hastiness; in fact, I believe that rash decision-making leads to more problems further down the road. Another unsatisfying job manifests; another unhappy relationship results. These people want a new environment, yet the same negative energy always seems to occupy it. This is because transformation is all about the internal shift, not the external. Any blame placed on outside sources for our unhappiness will forever perpetuate that unhappiness. Pointing the finger is giving away your power of choice and the ability to create our best life. We choose: “That person is making me unhappy” vs. “I make myself happy.” When you are in unhappy times of lack and feelings of separation – great! Sit there and be with it. Find ways to be content with little. Find ways to be happy with your Self. As we reflect on the lives of mystics past and present, it is not the things they possess or the relationships they share that bring them enlightenment – their light is within. The same light can bring us unwavering happiness (joy). Love, Peace, Joy – these three things all come from within and have an unwavering flame – life source – that is not dependent on the conditions of the outside world. This knowing is the power and wisdom that the mystics teach us that we are all capable of achieving. When I say, “You have the freedom of choice and the ability to create your best life”, I am not referring to external conditions; I am referring to the choice you have to look inward and discover the ability to transform the lead of the soul into gold. Transformation is an inner journey of the soul. Why? Because, as we mentioned above, wherever we go, ourselves go with us. Thus, quitting the job, dumping relationships, etc. will not make us happy because we have forgotten the key factor that makes or breaks our happiness: ourselves. When we find, create, and maintain peace, joy, and love within ourselves, we then gain the ability to embrace the external world with the same emotions, perspective, and vibration. This ability is a form of enlightenment. It is the modern man’s enlightenment that transforms an unsatisfying life into one of fulfillment.

There are only 24 hours in a day. The average man has to sleep about 8 hours. And work for 8 hours. That leaves 8 hours to run some errands, drive to and from work, eat, and have some spare time. And in that little bit of spare time, a man has to figure out how to get the one thing he likes more than anything else: sex. So when a man has to choose whether or not he will hang out with a female and spend any time, money or attention on her, the question of whether the resources he spent will result in sex plays a very big factor. If your male "friend" chooses to spend his time and money on you, it's because he thinks there is a chance it might pay off in sex at some point. If he hangs out with you instead of with some other female, it's because he thinks you are his best bet to getting sex. The more likely there will be sex, the more willing he is to spend his little bit of free time with you. If he thinks his chances of having sex are higher with a different female, he will spent more time, money and attention on her. That's just common sense, and using his limited resources wisely.

The contemporary progressive mantra considers it laudable to argue that different races, cultures, or religions possess distinct ways of knowing. However, not too long ago, the idea that people of different races or classes possessed distinct ways of thinking and reasoning, was reserved for racists and other miscreants. Ludwig von Mises, a leading figure of the Austrian School of Economics and a staunch defender of classical liberalism, coined the term polylogism to capture this exact folly. Mises differentiated between Marxian polylogism and racial polylogism. In the former case, an individual’s method of thinking was determined by his social class while in the latter case, race was the guiding factor. Mises was well aware of the illogical nature of this premise when he remarked: “A consistent supporter of polylogism would have to maintain that ideas are correct because their author is a member of the right class, nation, or race. But consistency is not one of their virtues. Thus the Marxians are prepared to assign the epithet ‘proletarian thinker’ to everybody whose doctrines they approve.

The main factor which determines success or failure in human life is the acquisition of certain powers, for Happiness is just the exercise or putting forth of these in actual living, everything else is secondary and subordinate. These powers arise from the due development of certain natural aptitudes which belong (in various degrees) to human nature as such and therefore to all normal human beings. In their developed form they are known as virtues (the Greek means simply "goodnesses," "perfections," "excellences," or "fitnesses"), some of them are physical, but others are psychical, and among the latter some, and these distinctively or peculiarly human, are "rational," i e, presuppose the possession and exercise of mind or intelligence. These last fall into two groups, which Aristotle distinguishes as Goodnesses of Intellect and Goodnesses of Character. They have in common that they all excite in us admiration and praise of their possessors, and that they are not natural endowments, but acquired characteristics But they differ in important ways. (1) the former are excellences or developed powers of the reason as such—of that in us which sees and formulates laws, rules, regularities systems, and is content in the vision of them, while the latter involve a submission or obedience to such rules of something in us which is in itself capricious and irregular, but capable of regulation, viz our instincts and feelings, (2) the former are acquired by study and instruction, the latter by discipline. The latter constitute "character," each of them as a "moral virtue" (literally "a goodness of character"), and upon them primarily depends the realisation of happiness.

every emotion that supposedly differentiates romance can be found in other emotional settings. Sensitivity, attachment, and caring are part of any healthy relationship. People who are polyamorous have multiple romantic partners without the desire for exclusivity. Infatuation might be the factor that aligns most closely with widespread ideas of what romantic love feels like, yet it's common to idealize a new acquaintance or feel possessive when a best friend becomes close with someone else, and romantic love doesn't automatically turn platonic once early energy wears off.

Remember what you said about physics not applying to people?"        "Umm. Vaguely."        "Well, I'm not sure you're right," he said as he took a bite. "Take friendships, for instance. I can think of a lot of cases where the two people have nothing in common. I think there's a definite reason for every friendship just as there's a reason why certain atoms unite and others don't—certain missing factors in one, or certain present factors in the other—what do you think? I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.

We need to develop within our children and young people the capacity to respect the cultures and beliefs of the different groups that make up our society; and we need to develop the resolve to treat each other justly. Secondly, we must eliminate, so far as any society can, the under-achievement of many of our children and young people from all sections of the community. We need to raise the performance of all pupils and to tackle the obstacles to higher achievement which are common to all. But we also need to tackle those special factors which additionally may contribute to the under-achievement of many members of our ethnic minorities.

What conditions are usually necessary for outgroups to be mistreated? Activation of a social identity leads to such negative outcomes after two conditions are met. First, ingroup members must believe that a common set of norms and values apply to both themselves and to members of the outgroup. Second, the ingroup must see its values as the only acceptable values, so that their values overwhelm those of the outgroup and are the ones that should guide both themselves and the outgroup. The combination of these two factors leads the ingroup to perceive members of the outgroup as deviant, morally inferior, and a potential threat to ingroup values.

In a remarkable letter to the director of the Vatican Observatory, John Paul II wrote: The church does not propose that science should become religion or religion science. On the contrary, unity always presupposes the diversity and integrity of its elements. Each of these members should become not less itself but more itself in a dynamic interchange, for a unity in which one of the elements is reduced to the other is destructive, false in its promises of harmony, and ruinous of the integrity of its components. We are asked to become one. We are not asked to become each other. . . . Unity involves the drive of the human mind towards understanding and the desire of the human spirit for love. When human beings seek to understand the multiplicities that surround them, when they seek to make sense of experience, they do so by bringing many factors into a common vision. Understanding is achieved when many data are unified by a common structure. The one illuminates the many: it makes sense of the whole. . . . We move towards unity as we move towards meaning in our lives. Unity is also the consequence of love. If love is genuine, it moves not towards the assimilation of the other but towards union with the other. Human community begins in desire when that union has not been achieved, and it is completed in joy when those who have been apart are now united.10

Our deeply-rooted beliefs about the wholesomeness of milk and dairy products should be re-considered under careful, scientific evaluation. Given the tumor promotor effect of IGF-1, patients with tumorous disease should restrict consumption of milk and milk protein. The same applies to patients with coronary heart disease and with a family history of neurodegenerative disease. Milk consumption has already been identified as an aggravating factor in the acne “epidemic” among adolescents, and preliminary successes have been reported with reduced milk consumption. It is even more important that excessive milk consumption can promote diseases commonly associated with a Western lifestyle

Another misnomer concerned the relationship between audience size and advertising rates. One common interpretation propounded that programs with higher ratings produced higher revenues - a logical fallacy insofar as it flagrantly disregarded crucial influencing factors (notably, content and demographics). In 1994, to cite one illustrative example, Seinfeld commanded $390,000 for a 30-second spot - $40,000 more than Home Improvement - despite attracting fewer overall viewers. Its ability to draw more young viewers (often defined as the ‘highly desirable’ 18-49 demographic) instead made all the difference. In sum, as industry experts realized, advertisers bought ‘demos’ before they did households.

In each of the following chapters, dealing in turn with policing and repression, culture and propaganda, religion and education, the economy, society and everyday life, racial policy and antisemitism, and foreign policy, the overriding imperative of preparing Germany and its people for a major war emerges clearly as the common thread. But that imperative was neither rational in itself, nor followed in a coherent way. In one area after another, the contradictions and inner irrationalities of the regime emerge; the Nazi's headlong rush to war contained the seeds of the Third Reich's eventual destruction. How and why this should be so is one of the major questions that run through this book and binds its separate parts together. So do many further questions: about the extent to which the Third Reich won over the German people; the manner in which it worked; the degree to which Hitler, rather than broader systematic factors inherent in the structure of the Third Reich as a whole, drove policy onward; the possibilities of opposition, resistence, and dissent or even non-conformity to the dictates of National Socialism under a dictatorship that claimed the total allegiance of all its citizens; the nature of the Third Reich's relationship with modernity; the ways in which its policies in different areas resembled, or differed from, those pursued elsewhere in Europe and beyond during the 1930s; and much more besides.

The traits can be sorted into four different categories, or “factors.” The interpersonal factor includes the traits of superficiality, grandiosity, and deceitfulness. The affective factor includes lack of remorse, lack of empathy, and refusal to accept responsibility for one’s actions. The behavioral factor includes impulsivity, lack of goals, and unreliability. And the antisocial factor includes hotheadedness, a history of juvenile delinquency, and a criminal record. Antisocial personality disorder is related to psychopathy but is much more common and is a measure of outward disruptive behavior rather than an underlying personality problem. Psychopathy scores are actually a better predictor of criminal recidivism, severity, and premeditation

Political economist and sociologist Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self. One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves. In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind—whether you are a believer or not—has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values. An anthropological and ethical vacuum may well follow on the heels of neuroscientific findings. This is a dangerous situation. One potential scenario is that long before neuroscientists and philosophers have settled any of the perennial issues—for example, the nature of the self, the freedom of the will, the relationship between mind and brain, or what makes a person a person—a vulgar materialism might take hold. More and more people will start telling themselves: “I don’t understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio- robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I’ve seen through the game.

Its visionaries are driven by a new and very different set of values. This work reminds us that the contemporary museum, long revered as an elite sanctuary, now beckons as a new commons: a town square, a venue for community building, even an agent of change. A major factor in this is the influence of social media—especially Instagram—with its effect of sidestepping gatekeepers and fostering ardent fandom, debate, cross-pollination, societal change, and a new kind of citizenship. The result has been a great opening, a time of schism and volatility, a feeling of dams bursting everywhere. Everyone felt they had a stake in whatever the future might hold. The art of these decades has shown us that the world didn’t begin long ago, but rather that each of us creates the world anew every day.

Dangerousness A fairly common perception is that people with mental illness are disproportionately involved in violent crime. This is true in one respect but not in another. A small subset of people with mental illness, those who are actively experiencing serious psychotic symptoms, are more violent than the general population. Research suggests several factors associated with this group’s violent behavior, including drug and alcohol abuse, noncompliance with medication requirements, and biological or biochemical disorders.[8] In general, however, “violent and criminal acts directly attributable to mental illness account for a very small proportion of all such acts in the United States. Most persons with mental illness are not criminals, and of those who are, most are not violent.” [9]

Historian Peter Vronsky hypothesizes that while several factors must align to make a murderer (genetics and frontal lobe injuries being two common ones), World War II was responsible for this golden age of serial killers a generation later. Specifically, according to Vronsky, while all American soldiers who fought in WWII were trained to kill, a small contingent used the cover of state-sanctioned violence to also rape, torture, and collect human body parts as trophies. Though most returning GIs successfully reintegrated into society, some brought the brutality of war into their homes, abusing their families behind closed doors. That abuse, occurring as it did in a culture openly promoting war, created the fertile ground from which the first major crop of American serial killers would spring.

You cannot observe anything you take yourself as. A man, says the Work, before he can shift from where he is internally, must divide himself into two—an observing side and an observed side. That is, he must make his subjectivity objective. He must take himself as the object to observe. But if he remains entirely unconscious of his attitudes, how can he observe them? The most of what self-observation we can do is made useless by subsequent self-justifying. "A man", said Mr. Ouspensky, "who always justifies what he observes in himself cannot become objective to himself." That is understandable, if you reflect. But how can one observe something that is, so to speak, unobservable? One's attitudes are oneself. One takes them as oneself. No—one does not know anything about them. One does not say: "These attitudes I have acquired are me." On the contrary, one does not say anything. They are what you take for granted as you. If one could say: "These attitudes are me"—then it would mean that one has begun to become a little aware of them. That is, these attitudes would begin to be objective to you—to things in yourself that Observing 'I' can observe. But if you remain in inner darkness, how can you proceed? Well, I will end this short commentary by saying that although it is impossible to observe ingrained and fixed attitudes directly, one can begin after some time to notice the results of them. For example, you may begin to wonder why you always grunt like that when someone asks you to do something useless. You may say to yourself after a time- "I wonder why I always think that thing useless." The answer is: "Probably because of some fixed attitude that you are entirely unaware of." In this way one is led down to the fact of the existence of these attitudes in oneself. If such a merciful thing has happened to you— that is, if the Work has given you internal help—you will realize that behind this attitude, that you begin at last to become conscious of, dwells secretly this intractable factor common to us all. Remember that you cannot work on yourself unless you begin to wonder why you say what you say and do what you do and behave as you behave and feel what you feel and think what you think. To take yourself for granted, to imagine you are always right, to ascribe to yourself all that you do ascribe to yourself—all that form of sheer imagination will prevent you from seeing what esotericism means, what the Gospels mean, and what you mean.

the causes of poverty as put forth in the Bible are remarkably balanced. The Bible gives us a matrix of causes. One factor is oppression, which includes a judicial system weighted in favor of the powerful (Leviticus 19:15), or loans with excessive interest (Exodus 22:25-27), or unjustly low wages (Jeremiah 22:13; James 5:1-6). Ultimately, however, the prophets blame the rich when extremes of wealth and poverty in society appear (Amos 5:11-12; Ezekiel 22:29; Micah 2:2; Isaiah 5:8). As we have seen, a great deal of the Mosaic legislation was designed to keep the ordinary disparities between the wealthy and the poor from becoming aggravated and extreme. Therefore, whenever great disparities arose, the prophets assumed that to some degree it was the result of selfish individualism rather than concern with the common good.

Some historical revisionists have also attempted to diminish the role of God and religion in our nation’s past. A careful examination of the records, however, makes it quite clear that religion was a very important factor in the development of our nation. In 1831 when Alexis de Tocqueville came to America to try to unravel the secrets to the success of a fledgling nation that was already competing with the powers of Europe on virtually every level, he discovered that we had a fantastic public educational system that rendered anyone who had finished the second grade completely literate. He was more astonished to discover that the Bible was an important tool used to teach moral principles in our public schools. No particular religious denomination was revered, but rather commonly accepted biblical truths became the backbone of our social structure.

Trump doesn’t happen in a country where things are going well. People give in to their baser instincts when they lose faith in the future. The pessimism and anger necessary for this situation has been building for a generation, and not all on one side. A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago. A lot of those were in rust-belt states that proved critical to his election. What happened there? Trump also polled 2–1 among veterans, despite his own horrific record of deferments and his insulting of every vet from John McCain to Humayun Khan. Was it possible that his rhetoric about ending “our current policy of regime change” resonated with recently returned vets? The data said yes. It may not have been decisive, but it likely was one of many factors. It was also common sense, because this was one of his main themes on the campaign trail—Trump clearly smelled those veteran votes. The Trump phenomenon was also about a political and media taboo: class. When the liberal arts grads who mostly populate the media think about class, we tend to think in terms of the heroic worker, or whatever Marx-inspired cliché they taught us in college. Because of this, most pundits scoff at class, because when they look at Trump crowds, they don’t see Norma Rae or Matewan. Instead, they see Married with Children, a bunch of tacky mall-goers who gobble up crap movies and, incidentally, hate the noble political press. Our take on Trump voters was closer to Orwell than Marx: “In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much.” Beyond the utility that calling everything racism had for both party establishments, it was good for that other sector, the news media.

One of the worst things that was done to us during the year of COVID was the purposeful attempt to divide us and further isolate us from one another. One of the very few mitigating factors of mass trauma is the sense that we are all in it together. In times of war, for example, suicide rates go down because there is a sense of common purpose. Members of the Trump administration made that impossible not because they were incompetent but because they thought it was a winning strategy. Promoting divisiveness among us suited their purposes, just as setting up a false dichotomy between the pandemic and the economy did. In real time it could be hard to gauge how cynical and cruel this ploy was, but in retrospect the extent of the deliberate sabotage is breathtaking. It’s hard to grapple with what was taken from us and even harder to fathom the depth of depravity required to do the taking.

I do not believe that one can maintain a situation in which a man toils and works a whole year, only to get a ludicrous salary, and another just sits down in a leather seat and gets enormous sums for it. This is a condition unworthy of man. [-] After all, there are two worlds which confront each other. And they are right when they say: “We can never reconcile ourselves to the National Socialist world.” For how could a narrow-minded capitalist possibly declare his agreement with my principles? It would be easier for the devil to go to church and take holy water. [-] This is the first state in our German history which, as a matter of principle, eliminated all social prejudice in the assignment of social positions, and this not only in civilian life. I myself am the best proof of that. I am not even an advocate; just think of what this means! And still I am your Fuhrer! [-] What was it that I asked of the outside world Nothing but the right of Germans to unite, and second, that what was taken away from them be restored. I asked for nothing which might have implied a loss for another people. How often have I offered my hand to them Immediately after my rise to power. For what does armament mean? It gobbles up so much manpower. And especially I who regard work as the decisive factor, I had wished to employ German manpower for other plans. And, my Volksgenossen, I believe it became common knowledge that I have plans of some substance, beautiful and great plans for my Volk. I have the ambition to make the German Volk rich, the German lands beautiful. I wish the standard of living of the individual to increase. I wish us to develop the most beautiful and best culture. I wish theater to be an enjoyment affordable for the entire Volk and not only for the upper ten thousand as in England. Beyond this, I wish the entirety of German culture to benefit the Volk. These were enormous plans which we possessed, and for their realization I needed manpower. Armament just takes men away. I made proposals to restrict armament. But all they did was laugh at me. [-] For it was quite clear: what was I before the World War? An unknown, nameless man. What was I during the War? A small, common soldier. I bore no responsibility for the World War. But who are the folk who lead England once again today The very same people who were already agitating before the World War. It is the same Churchill, who was already the vilest warmonger in the World War, and the late Chamberlain who agitated just as much then. And the whole audience (Korona) that belongs there, and naturally that people which always believes that with the trumpets of Jericho it can destroy the peoples: these are the old specters which have arisen once more! Adolf Hitler – speech to the workers of a Berlin December 10, 1940

In the absence of any evidence that Polly, Annie, and Kate had ever engaged in common prostitution, many have taken to claiming that these women participated in 'casual prostitution,' a blanket term cast over the ambiguities of the women's lives that is steeped in moral judgement. It ascribes guilt by association: because a woman was poor and an alcoholic, because she left her children, because she had committed adultery, because she had children out of wedlock, because she lived in a lodging house, because she was out late at night, because she was no longer attractive, because she didn't have a settled home, because she begged, because she slept rough, because she broken all the rules of what it meant to be feminine. This line of reasoning also explains why Polly, Annie, and Katie's homelessness was entirely overlooked as a factor in their murders; a 'houseless creature' and a 'prostitute' by their moral failings were one and the same." (p. 291)

The members of the board were very sage, deep, philosophical men; and when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse, they found out at once, what ordinary folk would never have discovered - the poor people like it! It was a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes; a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all year round; a brick and mortar elysium where it was all play and no work. "Oho!" said the board, looking very knowing; "we are the fellows to set this to rights; we'll stop it all in no time." So, they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they) of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or a quick one out of it. With this view, they contracted with the waterworks to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and issued three meals of thin gruel per day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays. They made a great many other wise and humane regulations, having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary to repeat; undertook to divorce poor married people, in consequence of the great expense of a suit in Doctor's Commons; and, instead of compelling a man to support his family, as they had theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor! There is no saying how many applicants for relief under these two heads, might have started up in all classes of society, if it had not been coupled with the workhouse; but the board were long-headed men, and had provided for this difficulty. The relief was inseparable from the workhouse and the gruel; and that frightened people. For the first six months after Oliver Twist was removed, the system was in full operation. It was rather expensive at first, in consequence to the increase in the undertaker's bill, and the necessity of taking in the clothes of all the paupers, which fluttered loosely on their wasted, shrunken forms, after a week or two's gruel.

Page 50: It is a common misconception that psychological measurements of human abilities are generally more prone to error or inaccuracy than are physical measurements. In most psychological research, and especially in psychometrics, this kind of measurement error is practically negligible. If need be, and with proper care, the error variance can usually be made vanishingly small. In my laboratory, for example, we have been able to measure such variables as memory span, flicker-fusion frequency (a sensory threshold), and reaction time (RT) with reliability coefficients greater than .99 (that is, less than 1 percent of the variance in RT is due to errors of measurement). The reliability coefficients for multi-item tests of more complex mental processes, such as measured by typical IQ tests, are generally about .90 to .95. This is higher than the reliability of people's height and weight measured in a doctor's office! The reliability coefficients of blood pressure measurements, blood cholesterol level, and diagnosis based on chest X-rays are typically around .

I have had so many Dwellings, Nat, that I know these Streets as well as a strowling Beggar: I was born in this Nest of Death and Contagion and now, as they say, I have learned to feather it. When first I was with Sir Chris. I found lodgings in Phenix Street off Hogg Lane, close by St Giles and Tottenham Fields, and then in later times I was lodged at the corner of Queen Street and Thames Street, next to the Blew Posts in Cheapside. (It is still there, said Nat stirring up from his Seat, I have passed it!) In the time before the Fire, Nat, most of the buildings in London were made of timber and plaister, and stones were so cheap that a man might have a cart-load of them for six-pence or seven-pence; but now, like the Aegyptians, we are all for Stone. (And Nat broke in, I am for Stone!) The common sort of People gawp at the prodigious Rate of Building and exclaim to each other London is now another City or that House was not there Yesterday or the Situacion of the Streets is quite Changd (I contemn them when they say such things! Nat adds). But this Capital City of the World of Affliction is still the Capitol of Darknesse, or the Dungeon of Man's Desires: still in the Centre are no proper Streets nor Houses but a Wilderness of dirty rotten Sheds, allways tumbling or takeing Fire, with winding crooked passages, lakes of Mire and rills of stinking Mud, as befits the smokey grove of Moloch. (I have heard of that Gentleman, says Nat all a quiver). It is true that in what we call the Out-parts there are numberless ranges of new Buildings: in my old Black-Eagle Street, Nat, tenements have been rais'd and where my Mother and Father stared without understanding at their Destroyer (Death! he cryed) new-built Chambers swarm with life. But what a Chaos and Confusion is there: meer fields of Grass give way to crooked Passages and quiet Lanes to smoking Factors, and these new Houses, commonly built by the London workmen, are often burning and frequently tumbling down (I saw one, says he, I saw one tumbling!). Thus London grows more Monstrous, Straggling and out of all Shape: in this Hive of Noise and Ignorance, Nat, we are tyed to the World as to a sensible Carcasse and as we cross the stinking Body we call out What News? or What's a clock? And thus do I pass my Days a stranger to mankind. I'll not be a Stander-by, but you will not see me pass among them in the World. (You will disquiet your self, Master, says Nat coming towards me). And what a World is it, of Tricking and Bartering, Buying and Selling, Borrowing and Lending, Paying and Receiving; when I walk among the Piss and Sir-reverence of the Streets I hear, Money makes the old Wife trot, Money makes the Mare to go (and Nat adds, What Words won't do, Gold will). What is their God but shineing Dirt and to sing its Devotions come the Westminster-Hall-whores, the Charing-cross whores, the Whitehall whores, the Channel-row whores, the Strand whores, the Fleet Street whores, the Temple-bar whores; and they are followed in the same Catch by the Riband weavers, the Silver-lace makers, the Upholsterers, the Cabinet-makers, Watermen, Carmen, Porters, Plaisterers, Lightemen, Footmen, Shopkeepers, Journey-men... and my Voice grew faint through the Curtain of my Pain.

Saint John Paul II wrote, “when its concepts and conclusions can be integrated into the wider human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value.”7 Religion, too, develops best when its doctrines are not abstract and fixed in an ancient past but integrated into the wider stream of life. Albert Einstein once said that “science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind.”8 So too, John Paul II wrote: “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”9 Teilhard de Chardin saw that dialogue alone between the disciplines is insufficient; what we need is a new synthesis of science and religion, drawing insights from each discipline into a new unity. In a remarkable letter to the director of the Vatican Observatory, John Paul II wrote: The church does not propose that science should become religion or religion science. On the contrary, unity always presupposes the diversity and integrity of its elements. Each of these members should become not less itself but more itself in a dynamic interchange, for a unity in which one of the elements is reduced to the other is destructive, false in its promises of harmony, and ruinous of the integrity of its components. We are asked to become one. We are not asked to become each other. . . . Unity involves the drive of the human mind towards understanding and the desire of the human spirit for love. When human beings seek to understand the multiplicities that surround them, when they seek to make sense of experience, they do so by bringing many factors into a common vision. Understanding is achieved when many data are unified by a common structure. The one illuminates the many: it makes sense of the whole. . . . We move towards unity as we move towards meaning in our lives. Unity is also the consequence of love. If love is genuine, it moves not towards the assimilation of the other but towards union with the other. Human community begins in desire when that union has not been achieved, and it is completed in joy when those who have been apart are now united.10 The words of the late pope highlight the core of catholicity: consciousness of belonging to a whole and unity as a consequence of love.

The communists believe that they have found the path to deliverance from our evils. According to them, man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbour; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. The ownership of private wealth gives the individual power, and with it the temptation to ill-treat his neighbour; while the man who is excluded from possession is bound to rebel in hostility against his oppressor. If private property were abolished, all wealth held in common, and everyone allowed to share in the enjoyment of it, ill-will and hostility would disappear among men. Since everyone’s needs would be satisfied, no one would have any reason to regard another as his enemy; all would willingly undertake the work that was necessary.I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child). If we do away with personal rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike and the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal footing. If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature, will follow it there.

There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant-a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying. Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.

In my experience, the basis of almost all psychological problems is an unsatisfactory relation to one's urge to individuality. And the healing process often involves an acceptance of what is commonly called selfish, power-seeking or autoerotic. The majority of patients in psychotherapy need to learn how to be more effectively selfsh and more effective in the use of their own personal power; they need to accept responsibility for the fact of being centers of power and effectiveness. So-called selfish or egocentric behavior which expresses itself in demands made on others is not effective conscious self-centeredness or conscious individuality. We demand from others only what we fail to give ourselves. If we have insufficient self-love or self-prestige, our need expresses itself unconsciously by coercive tactics toward others. And often the coercion occurs under the guise of virtue, love, or altruism. Such unconscious selfishness is ineffectual and destructive to oneself and others. It fails to achieve its purpose because it is blind, without awareness of itself. What is required is not the extirpation of selfishness, which is impossible but rather that it be wedded to consciousness and thus becomes effective. All the facts of biology and psychology teach us that every individual unit of life is self-centered to the core. The only varying factor is the degree of consciousness which accompanies that fact.

We have learned from Ludwig von Mises how to respond to the socialists’ evasion (immunization) strategy. As long as the defining characteristic— the essence—of socialism, i.e., the absence of the private ownership of the factors of production, remains in place, no reform will be of any help. The idea of a socialist economy is a contradictio in adjecto, and the claim that socialism represents a higher, more efficient mode of social production is absurd. In order to reach one’s own ends efficiently and without waste within the framework of an exchange economy based on division of labor, it is necessary that one engage in monetary calculation (cost-accounting). Everywhere outside the system of a primitive self-sufficient single household economy, monetary calculation is the sole tool of rational and efficient action. Only by being able to compare inputs and outputs arithmetically in terms of a common medium of exchange (money) can a person determine whether his actions are successful or not. In distinct contrast, socialism means to have no economy, no economizing, at all, because under these conditions monetary calculation and cost-accounting is impossible by definition. If no private property in the factors of production exists, then no prices for any production factor exist; hence, it is impossible to determine whether or not they are employed economically. Accordingly, socialism is not a higher mode of production but rather economic chaos and regression to primitivism.

Taking the leap is just the first step. Then you must cross the desert. And make no mistake — that journey will be hell.” “Will it be worth it?” he asked. “You tell me,” the old man responded. “How worthy is your goal? And how big is your why?” “I can’t imagine anything better,” he affirmed. “Then yes, it will be worth it. You see, everyone who stands at the edge of this cliff sees something different on the other side. What you see on the other side is your particular goal, and that is unique to you. “But there’s a reason why you have not achieved that goal yet — you are not worthy of it. You have not become who you need to become to deserve it. “As you cross the desert to your promised land, you will endure tests and trials specific to you and your goal. If you persist, those test and trials will transform you into who you need to be to be worthy of your goal. “You can’t achieve your highest, noblest goals as the same person you are today. To get from where you are to where you want to be you have to change who you are. “And that is why no one can escape that journey — it is what transforms you into a person worthy of your goal. The bad news is that that journey is hell. The good news is that you get to pick your hell.” “Pick my hell?” he asked. “What do you mean?” “Because of your natural gifts and interests, your inborn passion and purpose, there are some hells that are more tolerable to you than others. “For example, some men can endure hard physical labor because their purpose lies in such fields as construction or mechanics, while other men could not even dream of enduring that hell. “I’ve met people who knew they were born to be writers. Their desert to cross, their hell to endure was writing every day for years without being paid or being recognized and appreciated. But in spite of their hell, they were happy because they were writing. Though they still had to earn their way to the valley of their ultimate goal, they were doing what they were born to do. “Ever read the book Getting Rich Your Own Way by Scrully Blotnick?” He shook his head. “That book reveals the results on a two-decade study performed by Mr. Blotnick and his team of researchers on 1,500 people representing a cross-section of middle-class America. Throughout the study, they lost almost a third of participants due to deaths, moves, or other factors. “Of the 1,057 that remained, 83 had become millionaires. They interviewed each millionaire to identify the common threads they shared. They found five specific commonalities, including that 1) they were persistent, 2), they were patient, and 3) they were willing to handle both the ‘nobler and the pettier’ aspects of their job. “In other words, they were able to endure their particular hell because they were in the right field, they had chosen the right career that coincided with their gifts, passions, and purpose. “Here is the inescapable reality: No matter what you pick as your greatest goal, achieving it will stretch you in ways you can’t imagine right now. You will have to get out of your comfort zone. You will have to become a different person than you are right now to become worthy of your goal. You must cross that hellacious desert to get to your awe-inspiring goal. “But I get to pick my hell?” he asked. “You get to pick your hell.

The Company We Keep So now we have seen that our cells are in relationship with our thoughts, feelings, and each other. How do they factor into our relationships with others? Listening and communicating clearly play an important part in healthy relationships. Can relationships play an essential role in our own health? More than fifty years ago there was a seminal finding when the social and health habits of more than 4,500 men and women were followed for a period of ten years. This epidemiological study led researchers to a groundbreaking discovery: people who had few or no social contacts died earlier than those who lived richer social lives. Social connections, we learned, had a profound influence on physical health.9 Further evidence for this fascinating finding came from the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Epidemiologists were interested in Roseto because of its extremely low rate of coronary artery disease and death caused by heart disease compared to the rest of the United States. What were the town’s residents doing differently that protected them from the number one killer in the United States? On close examination, it seemed to defy common sense: health nuts, these townspeople were not. They didn’t get much exercise, many were overweight, they smoked, and they relished high-fat diets. They had all the risk factors for heart disease. Their health secret, effective despite questionable lifestyle choices, turned out to be strong communal, cultural, and familial ties. A few years later, as the younger generation started leaving town, they faced a rude awakening. Even when they had improved their health behaviors—stopped smoking, started exercising, changed their diets—their rate of heart disease rose dramatically. Why? Because they had lost the extraordinarily close connection they enjoyed with neighbors and family.10 From studies such as these, we learn that social isolation is almost as great a precursor of heart disease as elevated cholesterol or smoking. People connection is as important as cellular connections. Since the initial large population studies, scientists in the field of psychoneuroimmunology have demonstrated that having a support system helps in recovery from illness, prevention of viral infections, and maintaining healthier hearts.11 For example, in the 1990s researchers began laboratory studies with healthy volunteers to uncover biological links to social and psychological behavior. Infected experimentally with cold viruses, volunteers were kept in isolation and monitored for symptoms and evidence of infection. All showed immunological evidence of a viral infection, yet only some developed symptoms of a cold. Guess which ones got sick: those who reported the most stress and the fewest social interactions in their “real life” outside the lab setting.12 We Share the Single Cell’s Fate Community is part of our healing network, all the way down to the level of our cells. A single cell left alone in a petri dish will not survive. In fact, cells actually program themselves to die if they are isolated! Neurons in the developing brain that fail to connect to other cells also program themselves to die—more evidence of the life-saving need for connection; no cell thrives alone. What we see in the microcosm is reflected in the larger organism: just as our cells need to stay connected to stay alive, we, too, need regular contact with family, friends, and community. Personal relationships nourish our cells,

No one acts in a void. We all take cues from cultural norms, shaped by the law. For the law affects our ideas of what is reasonable and appropriate. It does so by what it prohibits--you might think less of drinking if it were banned, or more of marijuana use if it were allowed--but also by what it approves. . . . Revisionists agree that it matters what California or the United States calls a marriage, because this affects how Californians or Americans come to think of marriage. Prominent Oxford philosopher Joseph Raz, no friend of the conjugal view, agrees: "[O]ne thing can be said with certainty [about recent changes in marriage law]. They will not be confined to adding new options to the familiar heterosexual monogamous family. They will change the character of that family. If these changes take root in our culture then the familiar marriage relations will disappear. They will not disappear suddenly. Rather they will be transformed into a somewhat different social form, which responds to the fact that it is one of several forms of bonding, and that bonding itself is much more easily and commonly dissoluble. All these factors are already working their way into the constitutive conventions which determine what is appropriate and expected within a conventional marriage and transforming its significance." Redefining civil marriage would change its meaning for everyone. Legally wedded opposite-sex unions would increasingly be defined by what they had in common with same-sex relationships. This wouldn't just shift opinion polls and tax burdens. Marriage, the human good, would be harder to achieve. For you can realize marriage only by choosing it, for which you need at least a rough, intuitive idea of what it really is. By warping people's view of marriage, revisionist policy would make them less able to realize this basic way of thriving--much as a man confused about what friendship requires will have trouble being a friend. . . . Redefining marriage will also harm the material interests of couples and children. As more people absorb the new law's lesson that marriage is fundamentally about emotions, marriages will increasingly take on emotion's tyrannical inconstancy. Because there is no reason that emotional unions--any more than the emotions that define them, or friendships generally--should be permanent or limited to two, these norms of marriage would make less sense. People would thus feel less bound to live by them whenever they simply preferred to live otherwise. . . . As we document below, even leading revisionists now argue that if sexual complementarity is optional, so are permanence and exclusivity. This is not because the slope from same-sex unions to expressly temporary and polyamorous ones is slippery, but because most revisionist arguments level the ground between them: If marriage is primarily about emotional union, why privilege two-person unions, or permanently committed ones? What is it about emotional union, valuable as it can be, that requires these limits? As these norms weaken, so will the emotional and material security that marriage gives spouses. Because children fare best on most indicators of health and well-being when reared by their wedded biological parents, the same erosion of marital norms would adversely affect children's health, education, and general formation. The poorest and most vulnerable among us would likely be hit the hardest. And the state would balloon: to adjudicate breakup and custody issues, to meet the needs of spouses and children affected by divorce, and to contain and feebly correct the challenges these children face.

Neo-Darwinism and Mutations In order to find a solution, Darwinists advanced the "Modern Synthetic Theory," or as it is more commonly known, Neo-Darwinism, at the end of the 1930s. Neo- Darwinism added mutations, which are distortions formed in the genes of living beings due to such external factors as radiation or replication errors, as the "cause of favorable variations" in addition to natural mutation. Today, the model that stands for evolution in the world is Neo-Darwinism. The theory maintains that millions of living beings formed as a result of a process whereby numerous complex organs of these organisms (e.g., ears, eyes, lungs, and wings) underwent "mutations," that is, genetic disorders. Yet, there is an outright scientific fact that totally undermines this theory: Mutations do not cause living beings to develop; on the contrary, they are always harmful. The reason for this is very simple: DNA has a very complex structure, and random effects can only harm it. The American geneticist B. G. Ranganathan explains this as follows: First, genuine mutations are very rare in nature. Secondly, most mutations are harmful since they are random, rather than orderly changes in the structure of genes; any random change in a highly ordered system will be for the worse, not for the better. For example, if an earthquake were to shake a highly ordered structure such as a building, there would be a random change in the framework of the building which, in all probability, would not be an improvement. Not surprisingly, no mutation example, which is useful, that is, which is observed to develop the genetic code, has been observed so far. All mutations have proved to be harmful. It was understood that mutation, which is presented as an "evolutionary mechanism," is actually a genetic occurrence that harms living things, and leaves them disabled. (The most common effect of mutation on human beings is cancer.) Of course, a destructive mechanism cannot be an "evolutionary mechanism." Natural selection, on the other hand, "can do nothing by itself," as Darwin also accepted. This fact shows us that there is no "evolutionary mechanism" in nature. Since no evolutionary mechanism exists, no such any imaginary process called "evolution" could have taken place.

But it went wrong,” he said. “Three hundred years ago, it all went wrong. Some people reckon the philosophers’ Guild of the Torre degli Angeli, the Tower of the Angels, in the city we have just left, they’re the ones to blame. Others say it was a judgment on us for some great sin, though I never heard any agreement about what that sin was. But suddenly out of nowhere there came the Specters, and we’ve been haunted ever since. You’ve seen what they do. Now imagine what it is to live in a world with Specters in it. How can we prosper, when we can’t rely on anything continuing as it is? At any moment a father might be taken, or a mother, and the family fall apart; a merchant might be taken, and his enterprise fail, and all his clerks and factors lose their employment; and how can lovers trust their vows? All the trust and all the virtue fell out of our world when the Specters came.” “Who are these philosophers?” said Serafina. “And where is this tower you speak of?” “In the city we left—Cittàgazze. The city of magpies. You know why it’s called that? Because magpies steal, and that’s all we can do now. We create nothing, we have built nothing for hundreds of years, all we can do is steal from other worlds. Oh, yes, we know about other worlds. Those philosophers in the Torre degli Angeli discovered all we need to know about that subject. They have a spell which, if you say it, lets you walk through a door that isn’t there, and find yourself in another world. Some say it’s not a spell but a key that can open even where there isn’t a lock. Who knows? Whatever it is, it let the Specters in. And the philosophers use it still, I understand. They pass into other worlds and steal from them and bring back what they find. Gold and jewels, of course, but other things too, like ideas, or sacks of corn, or pencils. They are the source of all our wealth,” he said bitterly, “that Guild of thieves.” “Why don’t the Specters harm children?” asked Ruta Skadi. “That is the greatest mystery of all. In the innocence of children there’s some power that repels the Specters of Indifference. But it’s more than that. Children simply don’t see them, though we can’t understand why. We never have. But Specter-orphans are common, as you can imagine—children whose parents have been taken; they gather in bands and roam the country, and sometimes they hire themselves out to adults to look for food and supplies in a Specter-ridden area, and sometimes they simply drift about and scavenge. “So that is our world. Oh, we managed to live with this curse. They’re true parasites: they won’t kill their host, though they drain most of the life out of him.

Gandhian nonviolence as interpreted in Næss: 1. The character of the means used in a group struggle determines the character of the results. 2. In a group struggle you can keep the goal-directed motivation and the ability to work effectively for the realization of the goal stronger than the destructive, violent tendencies, and the tendencies to passivity, despondency, or destruction, only by making a constructive program part of your campaign and by giving all phases of your struggle, as far as possible a positive character. 3. Short-term violence contradicts long-term universal reduction of violence. 4. You can give a struggle a constructive character only if you conceive of it and carry it out as a struggle in favour of living beings and certain values, thus eventually fighting antagonisms, not antagonists. 5. It increases your understanding of the conflict, of the participants, and of your own motivation, to live together with the participants, especially with those for whom you primarily fight. The most adequate form for living together is that of jointly doing constructive work. 6. If you live together with those for whom you primarily struggle and do constructive work with them, this will create a natural basis for trust and confidence in you. 7. All human (and non-human) beings have long-term interests in common. 8. Cooperation on common goals reduces the chance that the actions and attitudes of the participants in the conflict will become violent. 9. You invite violence from your opponent by humiliating or provoking him. 10. Thorough understanding of the relevant facts and factors increases the chance of a nonviolent realization of the goals of your campaign. 11. Incompleteness and distortion in your description of your case and the plans for your struggle reduce the chance of a nonviolent realization of your goals 12. Secrecy reduce the chance of a nonviolent realization of your goals. 13. You are less likely to take a violent attitude, the better you make clear to yourself the essential points in your cause and your struggle. 14. Your opponent is less likely to use violent means the better he understands your conduct and your case. 15. There is a strong disposition in every opponent such that wholehearted, intelligent, strong, and persistent appeal in favour of a good cause is able ultimately to convince him. 16. Mistrust stems from misjudgement, especially of the disposition of your opponent to answer trust with trust, mistrust with mistrust. 17. The tendency to misjudge and misunderstand your opponent and his case in an unfavourable direction increases his and your tendency to resort to violence. 18. You win conclusively when you turn your opponent into a believer and supporter of your case.

Page 141: Group Polarization Patterns Political anger and demands for privileges are, of course, not limited to the less privileged. Indeed, even when demands are made in the name of less privileged racial or ethnic groups, often it is the more privileged members of such groups who make the demands and who benefit from policies designed to meet such demands. These demands may erupt suddenly in the wake of the creation (or sharp enlargement) of a newly educated class which sees its path to coveted middle-class professions blocked by competition of other groups--as in India, French Canada, or Lithuania, for example. * * * A rapid expansion of education is thus a factor in producing inter-group conflict, especially where the education is of a kind which produces diplomas rather than skills that have significant economic value in the marketplace. Education of a sort useful only for being a clerk, bureaucrat, school teacher--jobs whose numbers are relatively fixed in the short run and politically determined in the long run--tend to increase politicized inter-group strife. Yet newly emerging groups, whether in their own countries or abroad, tend to specialize precisely in such undemanding fields. Malay students, for example, have tended to specialize in Malay studies and Islamic studies, which provide them with no skills with which compete with the Chinese in the marketplace, either as businessmen, independent professionals, or technicians. Blacks and Hispanics in the United States follow a very similar pattern of specializing disproportionately in easier fields which offer less in the way of marketable skills. Such groups then have little choice but to turn to the government, not just for jobs but also for group preferences to be imposed in the market place, and for symbolic recognition in various forms. *** While economic interests are sometimes significant in explaining political decisions, they are by no means universally valid explanations. Educated elites from less advanced groups may have ample economic incentives to promote polarization and preferential treatment policies, but the real question is why the uneducated masses from such groups give them the political support without which they would be impotent. Indeed, it is often the less educated masses who unleash the mob violence from which their elite compatriots ultimately benefit--as in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, or parts of India, Africa, or the United States, where such violence has led to group preference policies in employment, educational institutions, and elsewhere. The common denominator in these highly disparate societies seems to be not only resentment of other groups' success but also fear of an inability to compete with them, combined with a painful embarrassment at being so visibly "under-represented"--or missing entirely—in prestigious occupations and institutions. To remedy this within apolitically relevant time horizon requires not simply increased opportunities but earmarked benefits directly given on a racial or ethnic basis.

In opting for large scale, Korean state planners got much of what they bargained for. Korean companies today compete globally with the Americans and Japanese in highly capital-intensive sectors like semiconductors, aerospace, consumer electronics, and automobiles, where they are far ahead of most Taiwanese or Hong Kong companies. Unlike Southeast Asia, the Koreans have moved into these sectors not primarily through joint ventures where the foreign partner has provided a turnkey assembly plant but through their own indigenous organizations. So successful have the Koreans been that many Japanese companies feel relentlessly dogged by Korean competitors in areas like semiconductors and steel. The chief advantage that large-scale chaebol organizations would appear to provide is the ability of the group to enter new industries and to ramp up to efficient production quickly through the exploitation of economies of scope.70 Does this mean, then, that cultural factors like social capital and spontaneous sociability are not, in the end, all that important, since a state can intervene to fill the gap left by culture? The answer is no, for several reasons. In the first place, not every state is culturally competent to run as effective an industrial policy as Korea is. The massive subsidies and benefits handed out to Korean corporations over the years could instead have led to enormous abuse, corruption, and misallocation of investment funds. Had President Park and his economic bureaucrats been subject to political pressures to do what was expedient rather than what they believed was economically beneficial, if they had not been as export oriented, or if they had simply been more consumption oriented and corrupt, Korea today would probably look much more like the Philippines. The Korean economic and political scene was in fact closer to that of the Philippines under Syngman Rhee in the 1950s. Park Chung Hee, for all his faults, led a disciplined and spartan personal lifestyle and had a clear vision of where he wanted the country to go economically. He played favorites and tolerated a considerable degree of corruption, but all within reasonable bounds by the standards of other developing countries. He did not waste money personally and kept the business elite from putting their resources into Swiss villas and long vacations on the Riviera.71 Park was a dictator who established a nasty authoritarian political system, but as an economic leader he did much better. The same power over the economy in different hands could have led to disaster. There are other economic drawbacks to state promotion of large-scale industry. The most common critique made by market-oriented economists is that because the investment was government rather than market driven, South Korea has acquired a series of white elephant industries such as shipbuilding, petrochemicals, and heavy manufacturing. In an age that rewards downsizing and nimbleness, the Koreans have created a series of centralized and inflexible corporations that will gradually lose their low-wage competitive edge. Some cite Taiwan’s somewhat higher overall rate of economic growth in the postwar period as evidence of the superior efficiency of a smaller, more competitive industrial structure.

In temperament the Second Men were curiously different from the earlier species. The same factors were present, but in different proportions, and in far greater subordination to the considered will of the individual. Sexual vigour had returned. But sexual interest was strangely altered. Around the ancient core of delight in physical and mental contact with the opposite sex there now appeared a kind of innately sublimated, and no less poignant, appreciation of the unique physical and mental forms of all kinds of live things. It is difficult for less ample natures to imagine this expansion of the innate sexual interest; for to them it is not apparent that the lusty admiration which at first directs itself solely on the opposite sex is the appropriate attitude to all the beauties of flesh and spirit in beast and bird and plant. Parental interest also was strong in the new species, but it too was universalized. It had become a strong innate interest in, and a devotion to, all beings that were conceived as in need of help. In the earlier species this passionate spontaneous altruism occurred only in exceptional persons. In the new species, however, all normal men and women experienced altruism as a passion. And yet at the same time primitive parenthood had become tempered to a less possessive and more objective love, which among the First Men was less common than they themselves were pleased to believe. Assertiveness had also greatly changed. Formerly very much of a man's energy had been devoted to the assertion of himself as a private individual over against other individuals; and very much of his generosity had been at bottom selfish. But in the Second Men this competitive self-assertion, this championship of the most intimately known animal against all others, was greatly tempered. Formerly the major enterprises of society would never have been carried through had they not been able to annex to themselves the egoism of their champions. But in the Second Men the parts were reversed. Few individuals could ever trouble to exert themselves to the last ounce for merely private ends, save when those ends borrowed interest or import from some public enterprise. It was only his vision of a world-wide community of persons, and of his own function therein, that could rouse the fighting spirit in a man. Thus it was inwardly, rather than in outward physical characters, that the Second Men differed from the First. And in nothing did they differ more than in their native aptitude for cosmopolitanism. They had their tribes and nations. War was not quite unknown amongst them. But even in primitive times a man's most serious loyalty was directed toward the race as a whole; and wars were so hampered by impulses of kindliness toward the enemy that they were apt to degenerate into rather violent athletic contests, leading to an orgy of fraternization. It would not be true to say that the strongest interest of these beings was social. They were never prone to exalt the abstraction called the state, or the nation, or even the world-commonwealth. For their most characteristic factor was not mere gregariousness but something novel, namely an innate interest in personality, both in the actual diversity of persons and in the ideal of personal development. They had a remarkable power of vividly intuiting their fellows as unique persons with special needs. Individuals of the earlier species had suffered from an almost insurmountable spiritual isolation from one another. Not even lovers, and scarcely even the geniuses with special insight into personality, ever had anything like accurate vision of one another. But the Second Men, more intensely and accurately self-conscious, were also more intensely and accurately conscious of one another. This they achieved by no unique faculty, but solely by a more ready interest in each other, a finer insight, and a more active imagination.