Corporate Connectivity Quotes

In an era where businesses operate under the watchful eye of a globally connected and informed public, the ethical imperative has transcended mere compliance and become a critical determinant of long-term success.

Leadership is not just some empty formulas but establishing deep connection at soul levels through service, integrity, passion, perseverance and equanimity.

To whom is an international corporation answerable? Often they do not employ workers. They outsource manufacturing to places far away. If wages rise in one place, they can, almost instantly, transfer production to somewhere else. If a tax regime in one country becomes burdensome, they can relocate to another. To whom, then, are they accountable? By whom are they controllable? For whom are they responsible? To which group of people other than shareholders do they owe loyalty? The extreme mobility, not only of capital but also of manufacturing and servicing, is in danger of creating institutions that have power without responsibility, as well as a social class, the global elite, that has no organic connection with any group except itself.

As you get connection with the higher source, your creativity increases

Let me be brutally honest. Being an insider, I know exactly how these MBA guys think. And because I know who they really are, I have nothing but utter contempt for these professionals. Now you might think I am stereotyping and generalizing. Yes, I am, indeed. But get this thing straight. Only highly competitive people prepare for these entrance exams to these top-notch B-schools. Only those who have excessive cupidity for money, power and status, only such people enter these highly reputed management colleges. These people don’t have friends, instead, they have connections. It’s all about Moolah. It’s all about usefulness. You scratch my back, and I will scratch yours. You be my ladder, and I will be yours.

Mindfulness gives us the power to understand our deep connection with the trees, flowers, stars, sun and the moon.

Maybe I should let my faithful manservant answer the rest of your questions, since he seems to have all the answers." "I'm saving her time," Bodie replied. "She brings you a redhead, you'll give her grief. Look for women with class, Annabelle. That's most important. The sophisticated types who went to boarding schools and speak French. She has to be the real thing because he can spot a phony a mile away. And he likes them athletic." "Of course he does," she said dryly. "Athletic, domestic, gorgeous, brilliant, socially connected, and pathologically submissive. It'll be a snap." "You forgot hot." Heath smiled. "And defeatist thinking is for losers. If you want to be a success in this world, Annabelle, you need a positive attitude. Whatever the client wants, you get it for him. First rule of a successful business." "Uh-huh. What about career women?" "I don't see how that would work." "The kind of potential mate you're describing isn't going to be sitting around waiting for her prince to show up. She's heading a major corporation. In between those Victoria's Secret modeling gigs." He lifted an eyebrow. "Attitude, Annabelle. Attitude.

Still,” I said, “I am sorry. But I was desperate to rescue my sister.” “I understand,” the sagging dragon assured me. He explained, “I, too, had a sister, once.” The past tense didn't escape me. “What happened to her?” I asked, feeling we were connected, two of a kind after all, sharing similar personal tragedies. “I had to eat her,” the dragon said, “to keep her from stealing my gold.

If you want to see philosophy in action, pay a visit to a robo-rat laboratory. A robo-rat is a run-ofthe-mill rat with a twist: scientists have implanted electrodes into the sensory and reward areas in the rat’s brain. This enables the scientists to manoeuvre the rat by remote control. After short training sessions, researchers have managed not only to make the rats turn left or right, but also to climb ladders, sniff around garbage piles, and do things that rats normally dislike, such as jumping from great heights. Armies and corporations show keen interest in the robo-rats, hoping they could prove useful in many tasks and situations. For example, robo-rats could help detect survivors trapped under collapsed buildings, locate bombs and booby traps, and map underground tunnels and caves. Animal-welfare activists have voiced concern about the suffering such experiments inflict on the rats. Professor Sanjiv Talwar of the State University of New York, one of the leading robo-rat researchers, has dismissed these concerns, arguing that the rats actually enjoy the experiments. After all, explains Talwar, the rats ‘work for pleasure’ and when the electrodes stimulate the reward centre in their brain, ‘the rat feels Nirvana’. To the best of our understanding, the rat doesn’t feel that somebody else controls her, and she doesn’t feel that she is being coerced to do something against her will. When Professor Talwar presses the remote control, the rat wants to move to the left, which is why she moves to the left. When the professor presses another switch, the rat wants to climb a ladder, which is why she climbs the ladder. After all, the rat’s desires are nothing but a pattern of firing neurons. What does it matter whether the neurons are firing because they are stimulated by other neurons, or because they are stimulated by transplanted electrodes connected to Professor Talwar’s remote control? If you asked the rat about it, she might well have told you, ‘Sure I have free will! Look, I want to turn left – and I turn left. I want to climb a ladder – and I climb a ladder. Doesn’t that prove that I have free will?

We need to expose the motives of our political leaders, point out their connections to corporate power, show how huge profits are being made out of death and suffering.

Along with the mystical wonderment and sense of ecological responsibility that comes with the recognition of connectedness, more disturbing images come to mind. When applied to economics, connectedness seems to take the form of chain stores, multinational corporations, and international trade treaties which wipe out local enterprise and indigenous culture. When I think of it in the realm of religion, I envision smug missionaries who have done such a good job of convincing native people everywhere that their World-Maker is the same as God, and by this shoddy sleight of hand have been steadily impoverishing the world of the great fecundity and complex localism of belief systems that capture truths outside the Western canon. And I wonder—if everything's connected, does that mean that everything can be manipulated and controlled centrally by those who know how to pull strings at strategic places?

The cultural situation in America today (and indeed in all Western societies) is determined by the cultural earthquake of the nineteen-sixties, the consequences of which are very much in evidence. What began as a counter-culture only some thirty years ago has achieved dominance in elite culture and, from the bastions of the latter (in the educational system, the media, the higher reaches of the law, and key positions within government bureaucracy), has penetrated both popular culture and the corporate world. It is characterized by an amalgam of both sentiments and beliefs that cannot be easily catalogued, though terms like 'progressive,' 'emancipators or 'liberationist' serve to describe it. Intellectually, this new culture is legitimated by a number of loosely connected ideologies— leftover Marxism, feminism and other sexual identity doctrines, racial and ethnic separatism, various brands of therapeutic gospels and of environmentalism. An underlying theme is antagonism toward Western culture in general and American culture in particular. A prevailing spirit is one of intolerance and a grim orthodoxy, precisely caught in the phrase "political correctness.

Origins Of Cptsd How do traumatically abused and/or abandoned children develop Cptsd? While the origin of Cptsd is most often associated with extended periods of physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood, my observations convince me that ongoing verbal and emotional abuse also causes it. Many dysfunctional parents react contemptuously to a baby or toddler’s plaintive call for connection and attachment. Contempt is extremely traumatizing to a child, and at best, extremely noxious to an adult. Contempt is a toxic cocktail of verbal and emotional abuse, a deadly amalgam of denigration, rage and disgust. Rage creates fear, and disgust creates shame in the child in a way that soon teaches her to refrain from crying out, from ever asking for attention. Before long, the child gives up on seeking any kind of help or connection at all. The child’s bid for bonding and acceptance is thwarted, and she is left to suffer in the frightened despair of abandonment. Particularly abusive parents deepen the abandonment trauma by linking corporal punishment with contempt. Slaveholders and prison guards typically use contempt and scorn to destroy their victims’ self-esteem. Slaves, prisoners, and children, who are made to feel worthless and powerless devolve into learned helplessness and can be controlled with far less energy and attention. Cult leaders also use contempt to shrink their followers into absolute submission after luring them in with brief phases of fake unconditional love.

Brand loyalty—that nebulous emotional connection people have with certain companies, which turns them into defenders and advocates for corporations who don’t give a shit.

Of the world's 175 largest nation-states and private firms, 112 are corporations.

People love their devices—they telegraph wealth, fitness, virtue, the idea that they are so important and must be connected every moment. But I see them for what they are—the tools of corporations to keep you wanting, buying, unable to be present, shackled to their plans for you and your money. It’s a con, a scam, and the whole world has bought right into it.

It is important to this people to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes, and the use of those fortunes, both corporate and individual, in business.… No amount of charity in spending such fortunes in any way compensates for misconduct in making them.

[The Lord's Supper teaches that] Rituals are good, and they are instituted and used by God to 'connect' his people with him. We learn through ritual that the church is not just made up of individuals, but is a corporate body. It is not just about personal salvation, but a group of people, the people of God, who are bound to one another and to the faithful through the generations. (page 263)

Tech isn’t morally good or bad until it’s wielded by the corporations that fashion it for mass consumption. Apps and platforms can be designed to promote rich social connections; or, like cigarettes, they can be designed to addict. Today, unfortunately, many tech developments do promote addiction.

One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase “looking for life, destroying life,” Then he explained, “It’s an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies.” I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind, It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity, At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world’s errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the “erasing” of people, the “hiding away” of suffering. “My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.

Given how revocable and alterable these corporate-owned mediums are, we must consider, What would we do in the case of a major political event if social media were no longer at our disposal? And what about all the people we’re not connecting with in our own communities due to some people’s lack of social media use or the invisible constraints of corporate algorithms?

I agree not to be connected with, directly or indirectly, any other cases against the United States Radium Corporation, nor to render assistance to any persons in any actions against said Company, nor to furnish data or information to any such persons in matters against said Company.

The corporate world is also a manifestation of people’s disconnection from their heart, where people believe manipulation is the path to getting what they want and therefore the way to succeed. People often use the excuse that “everyone does it.” When a child learns at home that not everyone does it, things can start to change. The corporate world even celebrates the cutthroat approach of stepping over others, knifing them in the back, and scrambling to the top of the ladder at the expense of colleagues—behavior that reflects an inability to connect with and care for others.

Connections change too. Who's the capitalist, who's the proletarian. Who's on the right, who's on the left. The information revolution, stock options, floating assets, occupational restructuring, multinational corporations--what's good, what's bad. Boundaries between things are disappearing all the time.

Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars. If phone companies want to operate in the “free market,” then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we’ll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let’s hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public’s rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can.

No one can successfully tell me that material things cannot bring happiness. For as the spirit is medicine to the bones; so is the happiness of the bones a medicine to the spirit. Without a soul, the body is dust; but without a body, the soul cannot fulfil destiny. Neither one is more important than the other; both are equally important. One will last longer than the other, yes, but while we are on this Earth, both are equally important. Surely money itself cannot make one happy; but it is what one does with money that makes one happy! If you do not know what to do with it, then it will not bring you happiness! But if you know what to do with it; there is no reason why it cannot bring you happiness. People think I am a very spiritual person; yes, this is true; but I have not achieved it through denial of the flesh. I have a new vision. I take pleasure in the pleasures of this world and I seek fulfilment in the answers of the spirit. I find happiness in the material and the physical things of this nature and I find joy in the connections I have with what is divine. Do I imagine myself on top of a mountain, detached from all the things I want to buy and to own? Never. My spirituality is not one of negative righteousness; my spirituality is one of the rose. It is whole and it is above as it is below.

Putin isn’t a full-blown Fascist because he hasn’t felt the need. Instead, as prime minister and president, he has flipped through Stalin’s copy of the totalitarian playbook and underlined passages of interest to call on when convenient. Throughout his time in office, he has stockpiled power at the expense of provincial governors, the legislature, the courts, the private sector, and the press. A suspicious number of those who have found fault with him have later been jailed on dubious charges or murdered in circumstances never explained. Authority within Putin’s “vertical state”—including directorship of the national oil and gas companies—is concentrated among KGB alumni and other former security and intelligence officials. A network of state-run corporations and banks, many with shady connections offshore, furnish financial lubricants for pet projects and privileged friends. Rather than diversify as China has done, the state has more than doubled its share of the national economy since 2005.

Traditional corporations, particularly large-scale service and manufacturing businesses are organized for efficiency. Or consistency. But not joy. Joy comes from surprise and connection and humanity and transparency and new...If you fear special requests, if you staff with cogs, if you have to put it all in a manual, then the chances of amazing someone are really quite low. These organizations have people who will try to patch problems over after the fact, instead of motivated people eager to delight on the spot. The alternative, it seems, is to organize for joy. These are the companies that give their people the freedom (and the expectation) that they will create, connect and surprise. These are the organizations that embrace someone who make a difference, as opposed to searching the employee handbook for a rule that was violated.

Thomas Jefferson presumed on the basis of colonial experience that farming and democracy are intimately connected. Cultivation of land meets the needs of the farmer, the neighbors, and the community, and and keeps people independent from domineering centralized powers. In Jefferson's time, [George] was the king. In ours, it's multinational corporations.

To be in a position of being able to ignore the reality of what this system does and continues to do is to be wholly complicit in it. Is to benefit hugely from it. To be able to not think about how the winners in this game came by their vast stores of mineral wealth is to profit from that wealth. The long list of ransacked nations, installed dictators, insurgencies financed by corporate interests, jailed bodies, ruined land. Death, disease and pipelines. To be able to ignore the inequality in your own city is to prosper from that inequality.

The American poor are terrible at being welfare dependent. I wish they were better at it, just as I wish that we as a nation devoted the same amount of thoughtfulness, creativity, and tenacity to connecting poor families with programs that would alleviate their hunger and ease their hardships as multinational corporations devote to convincing us to buy their potato chips and car tires.

Plant seeds for your future by pursuing an interest or hobby outside of work. Connect the dots by pairing the skills and information you learn while investing in yourself with people in your network.

This was possibly the first time anyone had used the phrase "too cerebral" when describing Pinky's advertising. Because someone somewhere in the Pinky's marketing scheme had made the brilliant connection that sub sandwiches are vaguely phallic. And from that, all the penis-related Pinky sub campaigns were born. Like the commercial where you see the guy standing from the back, and then a woman in front of him, and she says, "Nine inches????" in this insane lusty voice, and then they pan to the side and show he's holding a Pinky sub right at groin height? It's the worst. It is literally the worst. I'm a cog in the world's dumbest corporate sandwich machine.

connecting. It’s a constant process of giving and receiving—of asking for and offering help. By putting people in contact with one another, by giving your time and expertise and sharing them freely, the pie gets bigger for everyone. This karma-tinged vision of how things work may sound naïve to those who have grown cynical of the business world. But while the power of generosity is not yet fully appreciated, or applied, in the halls of corporate America, its value in the world of networks is proven.

This was what the beautiful dead left behind when they moved out of the corporeal and into the hearts and minds of all humankind. This connection, this sense of sharing something wonderful, something beyond mere life, something that had endured and would endure.

We are dealing, then, with an absurdity that is not a quirk or an accident, but is fundamental to our character as people. The split between what we think and what we do is profound. It is not just possible, it is altogether to be expected, that our society would produce conservationists who invest in strip-mining companies, just as it must inevitably produce asthmatic executives whose industries pollute the air and vice-presidents of pesticide corporations whose children are dying of cancer. And these people will tell you that this is the way the "real world" works. The will pride themselves on their sacrifices for "our standard of living." They will call themselves "practical men" and "hardheaded realists." And they will have their justifications in abundance from intellectuals, college professors, clergymen, politicians. The viciousness of a mentality that can look complacently upon disease as "part of the cost" would be obvious to any child. But this is the "realism" of millions of modern adults. There is no use pretending that the contradiction between what we think or say and what we do is a limited phenomenon. There is no group of the extra-intelligent or extra-concerned or extra-virtuous that is exempt. I cannot think of any American whom I know or have heard of, who is not contributing in some way to destruction. The reason is simple: to live undestructively in an economy that is overwhelmingly destructive would require of any one of us, or of any small group of us, a great deal more work than we have yet been able to do. How could we divorce ourselves completely and yet responsibly from the technologies and powers that are destroying our planet? The answer is not yet thinkable, and it will not be thinkable for some time -- even though there are now groups and families and persons everywhere in the country who have begun the labor of thinking it. And so we are by no means divided, or readily divisible, into environmental saints and sinners. But there are legitimate distinctions that need to be made. These are distinctions of degree and of consciousness. Some people are less destructive than others, and some are more conscious of their destructiveness than others. For some, their involvement in pollution, soil depletion, strip-mining, deforestation, industrial and commercial waste is simply a "practical" compromise, a necessary "reality," the price of modern comfort and convenience. For others, this list of involvements is an agenda for thought and work that will produce remedies. People who thus set their lives against destruction have necessarily confronted in themselves the absurdity that they have recognized in their society. They have first observed the tendency of modern organizations to perform in opposition to their stated purposes. They have seen governments that exploit and oppress the people they are sworn to serve and protect, medical procedures that produce ill health, schools that preserve ignorance, methods of transportation that, as Ivan Illich says, have 'created more distances than they... bridge.' And they have seen that these public absurdities are, and can be, no more than the aggregate result of private absurdities; the corruption of community has its source in the corruption of character. This realization has become the typical moral crisis of our time. Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.

I agree not to be connected with, directly or indirectly, any other cases against the United States Radium Corporation, nor to render assistance to any persons in any actions against said Company, nor to furnish data or information to any such persons in matters against said Company.”37

Fifield’s connection to his congregation extended to their views on religion and politics too. In the apt words of one observer, Fifield was “one of the most theologically liberal and at the same time politically conservative ministers” of his era. He had no patience for fundamentalists who insisted upon a literal reading of Scripture. “The men who chronicled and canonized the Bible were subject to human error and limitation,” he believed, and therefore the text needed to be sifted and interpreted. Reading the holy book should be “like eating fish—we take the bones out to enjoy the meat. All parts are not of equal value.” Accordingly, Fifield dismissed the many passages in the New Testament about wealth and poverty and instead worked tirelessly to reconcile Christianity and capitalism. In his view, both systems rested on a basic belief that individuals would succeed or fail on their own merit.

Underground Airlines is a figure of speech: it's the root of a grand, extended metaphor, "pilots" and "stewards" and "baggage handlers" and "gate agents." Connecting flights and airport security. The Airlines flies on the ground, in package trucks and unmarked vans and stolen tractor-trailers. It flies in the illicit adjustment of numbers on packing slips, in the suborning of plantation guards and the bribing of border security agents, in the small arts of persuasion: by threat or cashier's check or blow job. The Airlines is orders placed by imaginary corporations for unneeded items to be shipped to such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time.

Like our other needs, meaning is an inherent expectation. Its denial has dire consequences. Far from a purely psychological need, our hormonees and nervous systems clock its presence or absence. As a medical study in 2020 found, the "presence [of] and search for meaning in life are important for health and well-being." Simply put, the more meaningful you find your life, the better your measures of mental and physical health are likely to be. It is itself a sign of the times that we even need such studies to confirm what our experience of life teaches. When do you feel happier, more fulfilled, more viscerally at ease: when you extend yourself to help and connect with others, or when you are focused on burnishing the importance of your little egoic self? We all know the answer, and yet somehow what we know doesn't always carry the day. Corporations are ingenious at exploiting people's needs without actually meeting them. Naomi Klein, in her book No Logo, made vividly clear how big business began in the 1980s to home in on people's natural desire to belong to something larger than themselves. Brand-aware companies such as Nike, Lululemon, and the Body Shop are marketing much more than products: they sell meaning, identification, and an almost religious sense of belonging through association with their brand. "That pressuposes a kind of emptiness and yearning in people," I suggested when I interviewed the prolific author and activist. "Yes," Klein replied. "They tap into a longing and a need for belonging, and they do it by exploiting the insight that just selling running shoes isn't enough. We humans want to be part of a transcendent project.

In 18th-century England this cronyism gave way to open economies in which anyone could sell anything to anyone, and their transactions were protected by the rule of law, property rights, enforceable contracts, and institutions like banks, corporations, and government agencies that run by fiduciary duties rather than personal connections.

Christians agree that when we sell and market, we need to show potential customers that a product “adds value” to their lives. That doesn’t mean it can give them a life. But because Christians have a deeper understanding of human well-being, we will often find ourselves swimming against the very strong currents of the corporate idols of our culture.

The separation of the individual from a corporeal relationship with the Soul is mirrored in the separation of the individual from nature. This is perhaps one of the most important spiritual and psychological poisons of modernity: the alienation of the individual from the wilderness of nature. The modern obsession with progress and technology has worked to effectively separate man from the unpredictable and uncontrollable milieu of the wilderness and the concomitant alienation of the Soul from the flesh. The modern mind worships the Techno-God and uses many methods to enforce the separation of the flesh from the Soul. Reconnecting to nature requires only concentrated periods spent in a natural environment instead of living a life entirely immersed in artificial environments Efforts should be made to spend significant time in nature to allow the Sacramental Vision to thrive and organically develop. Without a constant connection to nature, the primordial voice of the Soul will eventually fade into silence. Nature must become a constant companion.

Our leaders may proffer various explanations about protecting us from terrorism, but the fact is that these leaders are worshiping a monstrous deity. Through the Oligarchical Cartels, as well as Corporatism (such as the Rockefeller Corporations) and through the Queen of England personally, a deliberate depopulation policy is being enacted. They are using substances such as depleted uranium in various United States international conflicts which result in severe birth defects. This increases the death rate through various radiation induced diseases, causing the men and women to become infertile. The result is that the family is broken apart, and the species becomes weak. Therefore, reproduction is severely reduced.

…The corporation decided that a public execution of someone as damaged as me was bad press. He was sure that the Nigerian government may have done something to me, and they’d ordered the corporation to back off so they could retrieve their specimen. Anything but me being a living machine connection, simultaneously human and machine; the result of an abnormal amount of flesh to machine wiring, some random glitch caused by combination of violence inflicted on my body, and subsequent rage.” “They hate what it does, yet Ultimate Corp continues doing it. It’s something more than human, by Allah. It’s the beast, a djinn. Fire and air, insubstantial, but very real. Human beings created it, but they will never control it.

Time was minutely calculated everywhere in the vast plant so that top managers knew precisely what everyone was supposed to be doing at a given moment. Bell was struck, for instance, by how General Motors “divides the hour into ten six-minute periods…the worker is paid by the numbers of tenths of an hour he works.”27 This minute engineering of work time was connected to very long measures of time in the corporation as well. Seniority pay was finely tuned to the total number of hours a man or woman had worked for General Motors; a laborer could minutely calculate benefits of vacation time and sick leave. The micrometrics of time governed the lower echelons of white-collar offices as well as manual labor on the assembly line, in terms of promotion and benefits.

The rise of the modern corporation, in the late nineteenth century, was largely seen at the time as a matter of applying modern, bureaucratic techniques to the private sector—and these techniques were assumed to be required, when operating on a large scale, because they were more efficient than the networks of personal or informal connections that had dominated a world of small family firms.

As a corollary to the proposition that all institutions must be subordinated to the law of equal freedom, we cannot choose but admit the right of the citizen to adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry. If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state—to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying towards its support. It is self-evident that in so behaving he in no way trenches upon the liberty of others; for his position is a passive one; and whilst passive he cannot become an aggressor. It is equally selfevident that he cannot be compelled to continue one of a political corporation, without a breach of the moral law, seeing that citizenship involves payment of taxes; and the taking away of a man’s property against his will, is an infringement of his rights.

Aomame knew that he worked for a corporation connected with oil. He was a specialist on capital investment in a number of Middle Eastern countries. According to the information she had been given, he was one of the more capable men in the field. She could see it in the way he carried himself. He came from a good family, earned a sizable income, and drove a new Jaguar. After a pampered childhood, he had gone to study abroad, spoke good English and French, and exuded self-confidence. He was the type who could not bear to be told what to do, or to be criticized, especially if the criticism came from a woman. He had no difficulty bossing others around, though, and cracking a few of his wife’s ribs with a golf club was no problem at all. As far as he was concerned, the world revolved around him, and without him the earth didn’t move at all. He could become furious—violently angry—if anyone interfered with what he was doing or contradicted him in any way.

China’s state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation is building a $14 billion rail project to connect Mombasa to the capital city of Nairobi. Analysts say the time taken for goods to travel between the two cities will be reduced from thirty-six hours to eight hours, with a corresponding cut of 60 per cent in transport costs. There are even plans to link Nairobi up to South Sudan, and across to Uganda and Rwanda. Kenya intends, with Chinese help, to be the economic powerhouse of the eastern seaboard.

It’s very hard for us to believe that people who loved us would intentionally hurt us, so we feel the need to excuse their behavior. But repressing that pain just makes us more likely to hit our own children. If you were willing to reach deep inside and really feel again the hurt you felt when you were physically punished as a child, you would never consider inflicting that pain on your own child. And the pain does not end in childhood, even if we repress and deny it. The scientific consensus of hundreds of studies shows that corporal punishment during childhood is associated with negative behaviors in adults, even when the adult says that the spanking did not affect them badly. Even a few instances of being hit as a child are associated with more depressive symptoms as an adult. While most of us who were spanked “turned out okay,” it is clear that not being spanked would have helped us turn out to be healthier. I suspect that one contributing factor to the epidemic of anxiety and depression among adults in our culture is that so many of us grew up with parents who hurt us.

When one empathizes with another, the experience is an affirmation of her existence and a celebration of her life. Empathetic moments are the most intensively alive experiences we ever have. We feel super-alive because in the empathic act, which begins with being embodied, we “transcend” our physical confines and, for a brief period, live in a shared non-corporeal plane that is timeless and that connects us to the life that surrounds us. We are filled with life, our own and others, connected and embedded in the here and now reality that our relationships create.

They recognize the temptation that we individually and churches corporately face to live “above” our places, remaining essentially disconnected from the desires and disappointments of our closest neighbors. They write, “We think there is a deep connection between Adam and Eve’s calling to care for a specific place, and God’s instruction not to eat from the tree of knowledge. After all, grasping Godlike knowledge at the expense of relationship is a way of attempting to transcend your boundaries. It is a way of avoiding both your limitations and your responsibilities.”15

Having to remind your partner to do something doesn’t take that something off your list. It adds to it. And what’s more, reminding is often unfairly characterized as nagging. (Almost every man interviewed in connection with this project said nagging is what they hate most about being married, but they also admit that they wait for their wives to tell them what to do at home.) It’s not a partnership if only one of you is running the show, which means making the important distinction between delegating tasks and handing off ownership of a task. Ownership belongs to the person who first off remembers to plan, then plans, and then follows through on every aspect of executing the plan and completing the task without reminders. A survey conducted by Bright Horizons—an on-site corporate childcare provider—found that 86 percent of working mothers say they handle the majority of family and household responsibilities, “not just making appointments, but also driving to them and mentally calendaring who needs to be where, and when.” In order to save us from big-time burnout, we need our partners to be more than helpers who carry out instructions that we’ve taken time and energy to think through (and then who blame us when things fall through the cracks). We need our partners to take the lead by consistently picking up a task, or “card”—week after week—and completely taking it off our mental to-do list by doing every aspect of what the card requires. Otherwise we still worry about whether the task is being done as we would do it, or done fully, or done at all—which leaves us still shouldering the mental and emotional load for the “help” or the “favor” we had to ask for. But how do we get our partners to take that initiative and own every aspect of a household or childcare responsibility without being (nudge, nudge) told what to do? Or, to simply figure it out?

We inherit the spirit world from a time when our ancestors huddled in dark shelters at night and let their imaginations draw up creatures more or less like ourselves although lacking corporeal substance. But why should we care about angels when the season's first blackbirds spread their red-shouldered wings? Why should we seek treasures in Heaven when year after year the fiddlehead ferns unfurl their silver croziers along the brook? Why should we look for out-of-body experiences when it is our bodies that connect us through the five open windows of our senses to the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations of nature?

Only on how we are becoming more and more commercial with each project.  Corporations are driving it all with their friends in Washington beating their ‘in the interest of national security’ drums which means that anything connected to energy these days, especially the black liquid kind, is considered national security.  Most of our projects in the last few years have been soil and drilling samples thinly disguised as marine research which really means looking for new oil reserves for the conglomerates.”  He leaned back in his chair unable to hide his irritation.  “I’ll tell you this, corporations have become the puppet masters behind the government.

One might have thought that on learning of Quinta’s death—this woman the company doctors had professed was not going to die—the United States Radium Corporation might, at last, have softened. But one would be wrong. Berry did manage to win a settlement of $8,000 ($113,541) for Mae Canfield in the new year, but the company had a straitjacket clause attached. The only way they would pay his client any money, they said, was if Berry himself was incorporated into the deal. He was far too knowledgeable about their activities—and becoming far too skilled in court—to be left off a leash. And so Raymond Berry, legal champion, the pioneering attorney who had been the only lawyer to answer Grace’s call for help, found himself forced into signing his name to the following statement: “I agree not to be connected with, directly or indirectly, any other cases against the United States Radium Corporation, nor to render assistance to any persons in any actions against said Company, nor to furnish data or information to any such persons in matters against said Company.”37 Berry was gone. He had been a serious fighter against the firm, an irksome thorn in their side. But now, with surgical precision, they had plucked him out and banished him. They were two settlements down, but the United States Radium Corporation was winning the war.

However hyped the risk of germs may be, it is at least real. Some corporations go so far as to conjure threats where there are none. A television ad for Brita, the German manufacturer of water-filtration systems, starts with a close-up of a glass of water on a kitchen table. The sound of a flushing toilet is heard. A woman opens a door, enters the kitchen, sits at the table and drinks the water. The water in your toilet and the water in your faucet "come from the same source," the commercial concludes. Sharp-eyed viewers will also see a disclaimer a the start of the ad printed in tiny white letters: MUNICIPAL WATER IS TREATED FOR CONSUMPTION. This is effectively an admission that the shared origin of the water in the glass and the toilet is irrelevant and so the commercial makes no sense--at least not on a rational level. As a pitch aimed at Gut, however, it makes perfect sense. The danger of contaminated drinking water is as old as humanity, and the worst contaminant has always been feces. Our hardwired defense against contamination is disgust, an emotion that drives us to keep our distance from the contaminant. By linking the toilet and the drinking glass, the commercial connects feces to our home's drinking water and raises an ancient fear--a fear that can be eased with the purchase of one of the company's many fine products.

When politicians and pundits fume about long-term welfare addiction among the poor, or the social safety net functioning like “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency,” to quote former Republican congressman Paul Ryan, they are either deeply misinformed, or they are lying.[20] The American poor are terrible at being welfare dependent. I wish they were better at it, just as I wish that we as a nation devoted the same amount of thoughtfulness, creativity, and tenacity to connecting poor families with programs that would alleviate their hunger and ease their hardships as multinational corporations devote to convincing us to buy their potato chips and car tires.

Our actions and the problems they create are connected, all around the world. Goats in the Mongolian desert add to air pollution in California; throwing away a computer helps create an illegal economy that makes people sick in Ghana; a loophole in a treaty contributes to deforestation in the American South to generate electricity in England; our idea of the perfect carrot could mean that many others rot in the fields. We can’t pretend anymore that the things we do and wear and eat and use exist only for us, that they don’t have a wider impact beyond our individual lives, which also means that we’re all in this together. • A lack of transparency on the part of governments and corporations has meant that our actions have consequences we are unaware of (see above), and if we knew about them, we would be surprised and angry. (Now, maybe, you are.) • It’s important to understand your actions and larger social, cultural, industrial, and economic processes in context, because then you can better understand which specific policies and practices would make a difference, and what they would achieve. • Living in a way that honors your values is important, even if your personal habits aren’t going to fix everything. We need to remember what is at stake, and the small sacrifices we make may help us do that, if you need reminding. If we know what our sacrifices mean and why they might matter, we might be more willing to make them.

All that day we went about stunned – we, the small town of real people behind the corporate logo of a ringed blue planet spinning through starry space. In the studio's Corner Store, in small groups that met on the company streets and in a hundred offices, we pieced our own experiences together with what was coming to light in the media. The suspect: a deranged, 43-year-old drifter who two days earlier had allegedly killed three people in Albuquerque, NM. He had fled to California where for reasons unknown he had been trying to contact actor-producer Michael Landon on the day of the shootings. The employees he had approached had repeatedly turned him away, since Landon had no particular connection with our studio. But just after dark the man had come back to the main gate again. He had walked up to a young actress waiting for her ride after an audition, said "hello" to her and then stepped over to the guardhouse. "I heard a shot and looked up," a secretary who had been passing nearby told me. "I saw Jeren fall and heard him groan. And there was this guy in a gray jacket just standing over him, pointing down at him with a gun. Then he raised the gun and pointed it at the other guard and shot again, and I saw Armando fall out the other side of the guardhouse. For a split second – just because we're at a movie studio – I thought it must be a movie they were filming. But there weren't any lights or cameras, and I realized it was real, and I thought, ‘He's gonna come after us because we saw it!' So I ran. I felt I was running for my life.

They recognize the temptation that we individually and churches corporately face to live "above" our places, remaining essentially disconnected from the desires and disappointments of our closest neighbors. They write, "We think there is a deep connection between Adam and Eve's calling to care for a specific place, and God's instruction not to eat from the tree of knowledge. After all, grasping Godlike knowledge at the expense of relationship is a way of attempting to transcend your boundaries. It is a way of avoiding both your limitations and your responsibilities[...]" We cannot hurry the church's work of faithful presence, which is rooted in a particular place and committed to blessing a particular group of people. If Jesus has loved the world, the church must love its city.

When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, almost everything lost its footing. Houses were detached from their foundations, trees and shrubbery were uprooted, sign posts and vehicles floated down the rivers that became of the streets. But amidst the whipping winds and surging water, the oak tree held its ground. How? Instead of digging its roots deep and solitary into the earth, the oak tree grows its roots wide and interlocks with other oak trees in the surrounding area. And you can’t bring down a hundred oak trees bound beneath the soil! How do we survive the unnatural disasters of climate change, environmental injustice, over-policing, mass-imprisonment, militarization, economic inequality, corporate globalization, and displacement? We must connect in the underground, my people! In this way, we shall survive.

[...] The movement of the celestial bodies can be given as an example. It is not exactly circular, but elliptic; the ellipse constitutes as it were a first “specification” of the circle, by the splitting of the center into two poles or “foci” in the direction of one of the diameters which thereafter plays a special “axial” part, while at the same time all the other diameters are differentiated one from another in respect of their lengths. It may be added incidentally in this connection that, since the planets describe ellipses of which the sun occupies one of the foci, the question arises as to what the other focus corresponds to; as there is nothing corporeal actually there, there must be something belonging only to the subtle order; but that question cannot be further examined here, as it would be quite outside our subject.

Let’s define a Crapitalist: A well-connected friend of the powers that be who scores big bucks at taxpayer expense. From bagging millions in tax dollars for phony “green energy” companies that go bust, to vacuuming public coffers to build glitzy sports stadiums, to utilizing little-known tax credit loopholes to loot $1.5 billion a year for Hollywood movies—Crapitalists know how to use every trick to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense. Rather than playing and winning in the rough-and-tumble world of business competition, Crapitalists use government to rig the game in their favor and leave you and me—the taxpayers—holding the bill. These corporate sissies know their ideas suck, so they try to stack the deck to privatize their profits and socialize their losses. And there’s the rub: crony capitalism is socialism’s Trojan horse.

he reflects that violent pleasure or pain or passion does not cause merely such evils as one might expect, such as one suffers when one has been [c] sick or extravagant through desire, but the greatest and most extreme evil, though one does not reflect on this. What is that, Socrates? asked Cebes. That the soul of every man, when it feels violent pleasure or pain in connection with some object, inevitably believes at the same time {122} that what causes such feelings must be very clear and very true, which it is not. Such objects are mostly visible, are they not? Certainly. [d] And doesn’t such an experience tie the soul to the body most completely? How so? Because every pleasure or pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together. It makes the soul corporeal, so that it believes that truth is what the body says it is.

His words were echoed in the House of Lords by the former Prime Minister. William Pitt, Lord Chatham, came from a dynasty whose fortunes were made in India: his father, ‘Diamond Pitt’, brought back from his governorship of Madras the fortune that had made possible Pitt’s career. Pitt did not, however, like to be reminded of this, and now raised the alarm that the EIC was bringing its corrupt practices back from India and into the very benches of the Mother of Parliaments. ‘The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us,’ he declared at the despatch box, ‘and have brought with them not only Asiatic luxury, but, I fear, Asiatic principles of government. Without connections, without any natural interest in the soil, the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament by such a torrent of private corruptions as no private hereditary fortune could resist.’31

EAGLE The East direction is represented by eagle and condor, who bring vision, clarity, and foresight. Eagle perceives the entire panorama of life without becoming bogged down in its details. The energies of eagle assist us in finding the guiding vision of our lives. The eyes of condor see into the past and the future, helping to know where we come from, and who we are becoming. When I work with a client who is stuck in the traumas of the past, I help her to connect with the spirit of eagle or condor. As this energy infuses the healing space, my client is often able to attain new clarity and insight into her life. This is not an intellectual insight, but rather a call, faint at first, hardly consciously heard. Her possibilities beckon to her and propel her out of her grief and into her destiny. I believe that while everyone has a future, only certain people have a destiny. Having a destiny means living to your fullest human potential. You don’t need to become a famous politician or poet, but your destiny has to be endowed with meaning and purpose. You could be a street sweeper and be living a destiny. You could be the president of a large corporation and be living a life bereft of meaning. One can make oneself available to destiny, but it requires a great deal of courage to do so. Otherwise our destiny bypasses us, leaving us deprived of a fulfillment known by those who choose to take the road less traveled. Eagle allows us to rise above the mundane battles that occupy our lives and consume our energy and attention. Eagle gives us wings to soar above trivial day-to-day struggles into the high peaks close to Heaven. Eagle and condor represent the self-transcending principle in nature. Biologists have identified the self-transcending principle as one of the prime agendas of evolution. Living molecules seek to transcend their selfhood to become cells, then simple organisms, which then form tissues, then organs, and then evolve into complex beings such as humans and whales. Every transcending jump is inclusive of all of the levels beneath it. Cells are inclusive of molecules, yet transcend them; organs are inclusive of cells, yet go far beyond them; whales are inclusive of organs yet cannot be described by them, as the whole transcends the sum of its parts. The transcending principle represented by eagle states that problems at a certain level are best solved by going up one step. The problems of cells are best resolved by organs, while the needs of organs are best addressed by an organism such as a butterfly or a human. The same principle operates in our lives. Think of nested Russian dolls. Material needs are the tiny doll in the center. The larger emotional doll encompasses them, and both are contained within the outermost spiritual doll. In this way, we cannot satisfy emotional needs with material things, but we can satisfy them spiritually. When we go one step up, our emotional needs are addressed in the solution. We rise above our life dilemmas on the wings of eagle and see our lives in perspective.

A community is a place of self-definition. Any group of people meeting with the intention of connecting to the power within is a community. People who regroup under a different banner to take care of themselves are attracted to indigenous culture. In these new formations, people seek to explore what has frustrated, betrayed and constituted a deep wound in their hearts. What they are trying to do is restore their inner power, which has been tarnished. Because they are trying to fight the servitude in which corporate power holds them prisoner, they are redefining themselves. They are moving themselves away from the magnetic visibility of externalized power. But to regroup against the Machine is to get out of control. However, one must not only be aware of this moving away, one must also be prepared to go all the way. To leave behind society and culture, one has to be prepared to do battle in order to be who you want to be. Without a community you cannot be yourself. The community is where we draw the strength needed to effect changes inside of us.

The corporate system is interconnected and now share a common invested interest, the ability to control through business, the people. It is an inevitable path the parameters set will take the beast down following the easiest way to collective profits, to control the ones that provide them. It is also logical to protect your own, from ones that are shedding light through Art on the grey water they may have stepped into to reach their fullest profit potentials. It is the logical solution to what would be, just business. So the Matrix story albeit written to lift for all the ceiling of what is possible, has inevitably shined a light on the entire path that was chosen and the pre-chosen road ahead that collective corporations were on creating a separate state of politically connected elite and those seeking award through serving them. A natural progression of what was set in place from the beginning. The flaw was in the design of the collective corporate system, globally intertwined now, and immersed in politics, protecting its own, making the question real this time, how to balance the equation.

As we’ve seen, one of the most frequently pursued paths for achievement-minded college seniors is to spend several years advancing professionally and getting trained and paid by an investment bank, consulting firm, or law firm. Then, the thought process goes, they can set out to do something else with some exposure and experience under their belts. People are generally not making lifelong commitments to the field in their own minds. They’re “getting some skills” and making some connections before figuring out what they really want to do. I subscribed to a version of this mind-set when I graduated from Brown. In my case, I went to law school thinking I’d practice for a few years (and pay down my law school debt) before lining up another opportunity. It’s clear why this is such an attractive approach. There are some immensely constructive things about spending several years in professional services after graduating from college. Professional service firms are designed to train large groups of recruits annually, and they do so very successfully. After even just a year or two in a high-level bank or consulting firm, you emerge with a set of skills that can be applied in other contexts (financial modeling in Excel if you’re a financial analyst, PowerPoint and data organization and presentation if you’re a consultant, and editing and issue spotting if you’re a lawyer). This is very appealing to most any recent graduate who may not yet feel equipped with practical skills coming right out of college. Even more than the professional skill you gain, if you spend time at a bank, consultancy, or law firm, you will become excellent at producing world-class work. Every model, report, presentation, or contract needs to be sophisticated, well done, and error free, in large part because that’s one of the core value propositions of your organization. The people above you will push you to become more rigorous and disciplined, and your work product will improve across the board as a result. You’ll get used to dressing professionally, preparing for meetings, speaking appropriately, showing up on time, writing official correspondence, and so forth. You will be able to speak the corporate language. You’ll become accustomed to working very long hours doing detail-intensive work. These attributes are transferable to and helpful in many other contexts.

I am a graduate of Calcutta University and employed as an Assistant Inspector, Calcutta Corporation. I am also a writer and used to visit the College Street Coffee House where young writers of Calcutta generally assembled in the evening. Samir Roychoudhury is a personal friend of mine. I came to know the sponsors of Hungry Generation, namely Shakti Chattopadhyay, Malay Roychoudhury and others. Although I am not directly connected with the Hungry Generation I was interested in the literary movement. Some of the manifesto of the Hungry Generation contain advertisement of my literary work. In one of the publication my name was cited as editor. This was probably done with a motive to exploit my reputation as writer but since my prior consent was not taken I took exception. The present publication in question also came to my notice. As a poet myself I do not approve either the theme or the language of the poem of Malay Roychoudhury captioned প্রচণ্ড বৈদ্যুতিক ছুতার ; I have severed all connection with Hungry Generation. I had correspondence with Malay Roychoudhury who often sought my advise in literary matters. Sandipan Chattopadhyay ( alias Pashupati Chatterjee ) 15 March 1965

We hear all this talk about integrating the world economically, but there is an argument to be made for not integrating the world economically. Because what is corporate globalization? It isn't as if the entire world is intermeshed with each other. It's not like India and Thailand or India and Korea or India and Turkey are connected. It's more like America is the hub of this huge cultural and economic airline system. It's the nodal point. Everyone has to be connected through America, and to some extent Europe. When powers at the hub of the global economy decide that you have to be X or Y, then if you're part of that network, you have to do it. You don't have the independence of being nonaligned in some way, politically or culturally or economically. If America goes down, then everybody goes down. If tomorrow the United States decides that it wants these call center jobs back, then overnight this billion-dollar industry will collapse in India. It's important for countries to develop a certain degree of economic self-sufficiency. Just in a theoretical sense, it's important for everybody not to have their arms wrapped around each other or their fingers wrapped around each others' throats at all times, in all kinds of ways.

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The overwhelming favorites to dominate the race to become the so-called Information Superhighway were competing proprietary technologies from industry powerhouses such as Oracle and Microsoft. Their stories captured the imagination of the business press. This was not so illogical, since most companies didn’t even run TCP/IP (the software foundation for the Internet)—they ran proprietary networking protocols such as AppleTalk, NetBIOS, and SNA. As late as November 1995, Bill Gates wrote a book titled The Road Ahead, in which he predicted that the Information Superhighway—a network connecting all businesses and consumers in a world of frictionless commerce—would be the logical successor to the Internet and would rule the future. Gates later went back and changed references from the Information Superhighway to the Internet, but that was not his original vision. The implications of this proprietary vision were not good for business or for consumers. In the minds of visionaries like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, the corporations that owned the Information Superhighway would tax every transaction by charging a “vigorish,” as Microsoft’s then–chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold, referred to it. It’s difficult to overstate the momentum that the proprietary Information Superhighway carried. After Mosaic, even Marc and his cofounder, Jim Clark, originally planned a business for video distribution to run on top of the proprietary Information Superhighway, not the Internet. It wasn’t until deep into the planning process that they decided that by improving the browser to make it secure, more functional, and easier to use, they could make the Internet the network of the future. And that became the mission of Netscape—a mission that they would gloriously accomplish.

Found a startup society. This is simply an online community with aspirations of something greater. Anyone can found one, just like anyone can found a company or cryptocurrency.2 And the founder’s legitimacy comes from whether people opt to follow them. Organize it into a group capable of collective action. Given a sufficiently dedicated online community, the next step is to organize it into a network union. Unlike a social network, a network union has a purpose: it coordinates its members for their mutual benefit. And unlike a traditional union, a network union is not set up solely in opposition to a particular corporation, so it can take a variety of different collective actions.3 Unionization is a key step because it turns an otherwise ineffective online community into a group of people working together for a common cause. Build trust offline and a cryptoeconomy online. Begin holding in-person meetups in the physical world, of increasing scale and duration, while simultaneously building an internal economy using cryptocurrency. Crowdfund physical nodes. Once sufficient trust has been built and funds have been accumulated, start crowdfunding apartments, houses, and even towns to bring digital citizens into the physical world within real co-living communities. Digitally connect physical communities. Link these physical nodes together into a network archipelago, a set of digitally connected physical territories distributed around the world. Nodes of the network archipelago range from one-person apartments to in-person communities of arbitrary size. Physical access is granted by holding a web3 cryptopassport, and mixed reality is used to seamlessly link the online and offline worlds. Conduct an on-chain census. As the society scales, run a cryptographically auditable census to demonstrate the growing size of your population, income, and real-estate footprint. This is how a startup society proves traction in the face of skepticism. Gain diplomatic recognition. A startup society with sufficient scale should eventually be able to negotiate for diplomatic recognition from at least one pre-existing government, and from there gradually increased sovereignty, slowly becoming a true network state.

If my opinion that substance requires a true unity were founded only on a definition I had formulated in opposition to common usage, *then the dispute would be only one of words*. But besides the fact that most philosophers have taken the term in almost the same fashion, distinguishing between a unity in itself and an accidental unity, between substantial and accidental form, and between perfect and imperfect, natural and artificial mixtures, I take things to a much higher level, and setting aside the question of terminology, *I believe that where there are only beings by aggregation, there aren't any real beings*. For every being by aggregation presupposes beings endowed with real unity, because every being derives its reality only from the reality of those beings of which it is composed, so that it will not have any reality at all if each being of which it is composed is itself a being by aggregation, a being for which we must still seek further grounds for its reality, grounds which can never be found in this way, if we must always continue to seek for them. I agree, Sir, that there are only machines (that are often animated) in all of corporeal nature, but I do not agree that *there are only aggregates of substances, there must also be true substances from which all the aggregates result. We must, then, necessarily come down to the atoms of Epicurus and Cordemoy (which are things you reject along with me), or else we must admit that we do not find any reality in bodies; or finally, we must recognize some substances that have a true unity. I have already said in another letter that the composite made up of the diamonds of the Grand Duke and of the Great Mogul can be called a pair of diamonds, but this is only a being of reason. And when they are brought closer to one another, it would be a being of the imagination or perception, that is to say, a phenomenon. For contact, common motion, and participation in a common plan have no effect on substantial unity. It is true that there are sometimes more, sometimes fewer, grounds for supposing that several things constitute a single thing, in proportion to the extent to which these things are connected. But this serves only to abbreviate our thoughts and to represent the phenomena. It also seems that what constitutes the essence of a being by aggregation is only a mode (*maniére d'être*) of the things of which it is composed. For example, what constitutes the essence of an army is only a mode of the men who compose it. This mode therefore presupposes a substance whose essence is not a mode of substance. Every machine also presupposes some substance in the pieces of which it is made, and there is no plurality without true unities. To put it briefly, I hold this identical proposition, differentiated only by the emphasis, to be an axiom, namely, *that what is not truly* one *being is not truly one* being *either*. It has always been thought that one and being are reciprocal things. Being is one thing and beings are another; but the plural presupposes the singular, and where there is no being still less will there be several beings. What could be clearer? [[I therefore believed that I would be allowed to distinguish beings by aggregation from substances, since these beings have their unity in our mind only, a unity founded on the relations or modes [*modes*] of true substances. If a machine is one substance, a circle of men holding hands will also be one substance, and so will an army, and finally, so will every multitude of substances.]]." —from_Letters to Arnauld_

If my opinion that substance requires a true unity were founded only on a definition I had formulated in opposition to common usage, *then the dispute would be only one of words*. But besides the fact that most philosophers have taken the term in almost the same fashion, distinguishing between a unity in itself and an accidental unity, between substantial and accidental form, and between perfect and imperfect, natural and artificial mixtures, I take things to a much higher level, and setting aside the question of terminology, *I believe that where there are only beings by aggregation, there aren't any real beings*. For every being by aggregation presupposes beings endowed with real unity, because every being derives its reality only from the reality of those beings of which it is composed, so that it will not have any reality at all if each being of which it is composed is itself a being by aggregation, a being for which we must still seek further grounds for its reality, grounds which can never be found in this way, if we must always continue to seek for them. I agree, Sir, that there are only machines (that are often animated) in all of corporeal nature, but I do not agree that *there are only aggregates of substances, there must also be true substances from which all the aggregates result. We must, then, necessarily come down to the atoms of Epicurus and Cordemoy (which are things you reject along with me), or else we must admit that we do not find any reality in bodies; or finally, we must recognize some substances that have a true unity. I have already said in another letter that the composite made up of the diamonds of the Grand Duke and of the Great Mogul can be called a pair of diamonds, but this is only a being of reason. And when they are brought closer to one another, it would be a being of the imagination or perception, that is to say, a phenomenon. For contact, common motion, and participation in a common plan have no effect on substantial unity. It is true that there are sometimes more, sometimes fewer, grounds for supposing that several things constitute a single thing, in proportion to the extent to which these things are connected. But this serves only to abbreviate our thoughts and to represent the phenomena. It also seems that what constitutes the essence of a being by aggregation is only a mode (*maniére d'être*) of the things of which it is composed. For example, what constitutes the essence of an army is only a mode of the men who compose it. This mode therefore presupposes a substance whose essence is not a mode of substance. Every machine also presupposes some substance in the pieces of which it is made, and there is no plurality without true unities. To put it briefly, I hold this identical proposition, differentiated only by the emphasis, to be an axiom, namely, *that what is not truly* one *being is not truly one* being *either*. It has always been thought that one and being are reciprocal things. Being is one thing and beings are another; but the plural presupposes the singular, and where there is no being still less will there be several beings. What could be clearer? [[I therefore believed that I would be allowed to distinguish beings by aggregation from substances, since these beings have their unity in our mind only, a unity founded on the relations or modes [*modes*] of true substances. If a machine is one substance, a circle of men holding hands will also be one substance, and so will an army, and finally, so will every multitude of substances.]]." —from_Letters to Arnauld_

Notice I have not used the word vulnerable to describe Olson or McRaven. The concept of vulnerability has been made popular by the talented author Brené Brown. This has become a buzzword in corporate training as of late. But telling SEALs or any military operators to be vulnerable is like advising them to expose their back to the enemy. It makes far more sense to me that leaders be authentic—open to being wrong, open to other people’s ideas and perspectives, and courageous in connecting to their heart and connecting at a heart level with their teammates.

For Durkheim, the solution to the debilitating effects of industrial society lay not in the individual but in the group. While modern society has destroyed or spoiled the old bases of moral action—moral strictures, self-restraint, religion—a new one in the form of group solidarity has taken its place. The bourgeois family, the corporation, the trade union, the state—these form an ascending order of social organisms created by modern society, in which individuals can discover an organic connection to others and gratify their needs as sociable beings, rather than feeling alone and abandoned.

There’s another level at which attention operates, this has to do with leadership, I argue that leaders need three kinds of focus, to be really effective, the first is an inner focus, let me tell you about a case that’s actually from the annals of neurology, there was a corporate lawyer, who unfortunately had a small prefrontal brain tumour, it was discovered early, operated successfully, after the surgery though it was a very puzzling picture, because he was absolutely as smart as he had been before, a very high IQ, no problem with attention or memory, but he couldn’t do his job anymore, he couldn’t do any job, in fact he ended up out of work, his wife left him, he lost his home, he’s living in his brother spare bedroom and in despair he went to see a famous neurologist named Antonio Damasio. Damasio specialized in the circuitry between the prefrontal area which is where we consciously pay attention to what matters now, where we make decisions, where we learn and the emotional centers in the midbrain, particularly the amygdala, which is our radar for danger, it triggers our strong emotions. They had cut the connection between the prefrontal area and emotional centers and Damasio at first was puzzled, he realized that this fellow on every neurological test was perfectly fine but something was wrong, then he got a clue, he asked the lawyer when should we have our next appointment and he realized the lawyer could give him the rational pros and cons of every hour for the next two weeks, but he didn’t know which is best. And Damasio says when we’re making a decision any decision, when to have the next appointment, should I leave my job for another one, what strategy should we follow, going into the future, should I marry this fellow compared to all the other fellows, those are decisions that require we draw on our entire life experience and the circuitry that collects that life experience is very base brain, it’s very ancient in the brain, and it has no direct connection to the part of the brain that thinks in words, it has very rich connectivity to the gastro- intestinal tract, to the gut, so we get a gut feeling, feels right, doesn’t feel right. Damasio calls them somatic markers, it’s a language of the body and the ability to tune into this is extremely important because this is valuable data too - they did a study of Californian entrepreneurs and asked them “how do you make your decisions?”, these are people who built a business from nothing to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and they more or less said the same strategy “I am a voracious gatherer of information, I want to see the numbers, but if it doesn’t feel right, I won’t go ahead with the deal”. They’re tuning into the gut feeling. I know someone, I grew up in farm region of California, the Central Valley and my high school had a rival high school in the next town and I met someone who went to the other high school, he was not a good student, he almost failed, came close to not graduating high school, he went to a two-year college, a community college, found his way into film, which he loved and got into a film school, in film school his student project caught the eye of a director, who asked him to become an assistant and he did so well at that the director arranged for him to direct his own film, someone else’s script, he did so well at that they let him direct a script that he had written and that film did surprisingly well, so the studio that financed that film said if you want to do another one, we will back you. And he, however, hated the way the studio edited the film, he felt he was a creative artist and they had butchered his art. He said I am gonna do the film on my own, I’m gonna finance it myself, everyone in the film business that he knew said this is a huge mistake, you shouldn’t do this, but he went ahead, then he ran out of money, had to go to eleven banks before he could get a loan, he managed to finish the film, you may have seen

Leadership literature promotes envy with false promises. Casinos and lotteries encourage gambling with two messages: first, you, too, can win buckets of money, and, second, this is only possible if you gamble. Most gamblers and lottery ticket consumers do not win but lose. The truth is: “You can be a loser too.”12 When leadership books dwell on five-star generals, corporation executives, metropolis mayors, and megachurch CEOs, the implicit promise is like gambling: you can only win if you enter the game, and you, too, might hit the big time. But the majority of people, no matter how talented, motivated, and connected, will never be generals, executives, mayors, or megachurch pastors.

While Lord Acton was correct in claiming that “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” (Lord Acton), the reverse is also true. Absolute impotence corrupts absolutely. When we feel that our lives count for little; when our apathy leads to stagnation in a form of work which produces only a paycheck and an emptiness in the soul; when we are surrounded by governments and corporations whose power far exceeds anything of which we are capable; and when we find ourselves lost in a sea of “faceless Others” (W.H. Auden) we cannot connect with, impact, or reach out to, first impotence and then anger and rage, seem to be the result.

With Cloud Computing, it is no longer a question of If, but rather When and How. Offering the transformative power of connected systems, cloud computing technologies - cloud systems - enable alignment of the digital transformation and cybersecurity ambitions with the corporate strategy of an enterprise.

Traditionally, charisma was associated with religious and political leaders, not CEOs or school principals. This began to change in the mid-1980s. The tipping point was the appearance of two books in 1985: Warren Bennis and Bert Nanus’s Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge and Bernard Bass’s influential Transformational Leadership: Industrial, Military, and Educational Impact. These authors broke with tradition and argued that charismatic (now “transformational”) leadership can be learned and practiced in settings ranging from schools to corporations to art museums. The transformational leader, they argued, unlocks human energy by creating a vision of a different reality and connecting that vision to people’s values and needs. These works were followed by a raft of books and articles in a similar vein: The Leadership Challenge: How to Get Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations (1987), The Transformational Leader: The Key to Global Competitiveness

Why shouldn’t the State, the Commonwealth, be in charge of everything? Why should unelected, unaccountable private elites run the country? How can a nation be a democracy if it is controlled by private banks, private corporations, private markets, and the private super rich? What connection do any of these have to democracy and the power of the people? The ancient Athenians invented democracy precisely to stop rule by oligarchs. Now capitalism has subverted democracy and given the power straight back to the oligarchs. Democracy, thanks to capitalism, has become meaningless, a farce.

The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation. Together, these disconnections add up to a condition of critical ill health, which we suffer in common -- not just with each other, but with all other creatures. Our economy is based upon this disease. Its aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to see them to us at the highest profit. It fragments the Creation and sets the fragments into conflict with one another. For the relief of the suffering that comes of this fragmentation and conflict, our economy proposes, not health, but vast "cures" that further centralize power and increase profits... Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health -- and create profitable diseases and dependencies -- by failing to see the direction connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. And such a solution, unlike the typical industrial solution, does not cause new problems.

He goes on to hammer at a refrain we’ve heard before: “Revolutionary leaders are not often present to hear their children’s first words; their wives must also share in their sacrifice if the revolution is to reach its goal; their friends are to be found only among their comrades in the revolution. For them there is no life outside the revolution.”’ Let’s try a little exercise in logic here—the logic to which Campbell’s hero must be dead. Substitute the words “religious” and “religion” for “revolutionary” and “revolution” in the above quotation, and notice that it still makes unsettingly familiar sense. Now substitute the words “corporate” and “corporation.” Now “military.” Now “national” and “nation.” Now “tribal” and “tribe.” Now “professional” and “‘profession.” It works terrifyingly well. (Revealingly, it does not work when the words “‘feminist‘‘ and ‘“‘feminism” are substituted, precisely because of the integrative nature of female experience.) Most women will instantly connect what most men will not: that it’s a rare man in any walk of life in any culture who’s present to hear his child’s first words; that the institution of “wife” itself, in spirit and legal contract, demands sacrifice to the husband’s goal; that friendships, domicile, lifestyle, are determined and circumscribed by his career, work, politics, or calling, whether humble or exalted. Guevara is not just describing the revolution. He is describing the institutions of religion, business, war, the State, and the family. He is describing the patriarchy.

The impact of personality was overridden by whether the employees at the company perceived social norms that favored speaking up. If a company were interested in getting people to speak up, they'd be better off putting their energy into cultivating new norms rather than selecting gregarious employees.

Another way to foster a sense of belonging for employees is to form teams that are encouraged to engage in collective problem-solving. This affords regular opportunities for all members of the teams to express their views and contribute their talents. But leaders of these teams should establish the norm that colleagues treat each other with respect, making room for everyone in discussions and listening thoughtfully to one another. As we saw with high-status students leading the way in establishing an antibullying norm in schools, managers, as the highest-status member of a team, can set powerful norms. A key goal is foster what leadership scholar Amy Edmonson calls psychological safety, which she describes as "the belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. People feel able to speak up when needed--with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns--without being shut down in a gratuitous way. Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able, even obligated, to be candid." No matter how ingenious or talented individual team members are, if the climate does not foster the psychological safety people need to express themselves, they are likely to hold back on valuable input.

Republicans too have seen the influence of money from China. Since 2015, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell has been Senate majority leader and the most powerful man in Washington after the president. Once a hardliner, in the 1990s he became a noted China dove (although in 2019, in a likely instance of ‘big help with a little badmouth’, he voiced support for Hong Kong protesters37). In 1993 he married the daughter of one of his donors, Chinese-American businessman James Chao. Elaine Chao went on to serve as secretary of labor under President George W. Bush and in 2017 was sworn in as President Trump’s transportation secretary. She wasted no time organising a trip to China that included meetings between members of her family and Chinese government officials, a plan that was spiked only when the State Department raised ethical concerns.38 James Chao has excellent guanxi—connections—in China, including his classmate Jiang Zemin, the powerful former president of China. Chao became rich through his shipping company, Foremost Group, which flourished due to its close association with the state-owned behemoth the China State Shipbuilding Corporation. McConnell, after his marriage to Chao’s daughter, was courted by the highest CCP leaders, and his in-laws were soon doing deals with Chinese government corporations.

Segment of Throat Center. Includes jaws, lower face and mouth. Positive aspects: All forms of energetic expression originate from the lower segments and are allowed to pass freely and fully. Lots of creative ideas and good communication skills, with their expressions unblocked. Can express how you feel, what you want and how you want things to be.  Flexibility of voice, singing, shouting, laughing, moaning, facing, giggling. Negative: It can be restricted, even pushed back as much as water in a hose. We can swallow our power and pride, we can stifle our expression, we can "choke" our own words. By muffling self-expression in accordance with the wishes of our parents we may have learnt this. Physical Negative Aspects. Problems regarding exhaustion, digestion and weight. Tension of neck and head in the shoulders and the back. Very common colds, sore throats and infections. Center segment of visualization. 3rd Eye, 6th Chakra. Concentration, the mind and will's strong powers.  Imagination, intuition, and perceptions that determine how you and the world around you see yourself. Your eyes are deep self-reflection. The subconscious mind gets imprinted with visions and symbols.  Positive aspects: Clarity, vitality, sparkle, insight and the intimacy opportunity.  Strong connection with one's self and inner guide. Spiritual open-mindedness.  You are approaching a sacred sense.  Negotiating. Achievement compulsive.  Controlling behavior, denying reality, repetitive thinking and internal dialogues.  Forgetting. One hides the partially closed eyes behind them. A tired, lifeless low-energy quality or partial commitment to a passionless cause; lack of direction. A distracted focus that represents a failed purpose. Physical negative aspects: problems with eyes and vision, headaches. Crown Center or (brow segment). Once you unlock, you feel the soul's seat and the world door; cosmic harmony. A vision, or purpose, and inner knowledge, shine forth.  To fully realize its potential, this center needs energy from the breath and other centers. A continuous passage from the head to the toe. Aspects which are positive.  Beyond this corporeal world into unbridled states of ecstasy.  Link of something that is visible and invisible. Extremely clear. A deep sense of wholeness. Negative scores. Undeveloped sense of wholeness and a fundamental confidence. So much logic and analysis. Constantly active and distrustful of one's intuitive powers. Physical negative aspects: Unbalanced hemispheres in the brain. Thyroid, parathyroid, genital, and muscle ailments.

We practice this same abstract thinking in our relation with the rest of the world. We write checks to end human trafficking but lack concern for how our demand for cheap, disposable clothing generates a larger system of exploitation. We forget that hunger in Africa has any connection to the history of Western colonialism from which we in the West have significantly benefited. We are oblivious to the need for corporate responsibility to address colonial abuses in the previous centuries. We are able to abstract our justice efforts from the material reality of the history of injustice in the relationship between the Western colonizers and the colonized who still suffer the ill effects of a colonial history.

Purpose and human connections constitute the very heart of business. And I believe they should be at the heart of the necessary and urgent refoundation of business now under way. Capitalism as we have known it for the past few decades is in crisis. More and more people hold the system responsible for social fractures and environmental degradation. Employees, customers, and even shareholders expect much more from corporations than a blind pursuit of profit. Disengagement at work is a global epidemic.

Well,” said Lydia to the camera, “a revealment that could spell potential disaster for the Goliath Corporation and—” Her producer was gesticulating wildly for her not to connect “Tyrant” with “Kaine” live on air. “—an as-yet-unnamed tyrant.

You, too, can have your own little slice of paradise; all you have to do is destroy that paradise in the process. This kind of banal desire, and the greed that sold it, has been Florida’s true destruction. Developers pitted man versus nature, not as it had been before as a struggle for survival out in a harsh and remote wilderness, but as a struggle to uphold a false hierarchy of creation. Humans are more important than animals, they said. The soil is ours to scourge and conquer. Marketing has convinced us that trivial luxuries are more important than the natural world, as if we are not part of the natural world ourselves, as if our consumption is not a bid against our own interests, one in favor of concrete and routine against the unwieldy and awe-inspiring, monotony against biodiversity, pesticides against night music, the greed of a few against life itself on our planet. Dozens of species go extinct every day, with perhaps a million more under threat of extinction within our lifetime. Corporate greed tells us this doesn’t merit our attention. If you feel bad, cut back on your own, because it’s certainly not their fault. Such PR sleight of hand shifts the blame, feeds our guilt, inflames our anxiety, convinces us to consume more and more, until we give up caring, if we ever cared at all. Without thinking, we have become numb to the quiet collapse going on around us. Everything is connected. A species dying is a piece of our world dying. If the world dies, we die, too.

To use a metaphor, it is as if the stream of corporate globalized culture flows toward self-centeredness. If we swim eagerly with the current, we are likely to develop exaggerated and unhealthy forms of narcissism. And we actually have to swim against the current to locate wider, wilder, and more connected versions of ourselves. This is one of the key points of this book: It is the larger culture, our society, that is breeding us to be narcissistic, and this is a problem. Not only does it cause us to be more self-centered, but it also causes us to not care as deeply for the welfare of others. A

His Information presets had very little to tell him during his rural detour, except the occasional comment about the type of tree sliding by or when the road was constructed, and the rush of exposition in the airport comes as a shock, especially on such little sleep. Ken quickly learns, and completely fails to absorb, a great deal about the politicking involved in the airport’s initial construction and the decision on its location, as well as which airlines serve it and since when and to which connections, and its place in various ranking schemes (official associations, user-generated, statistically based), while bypassing reams on the sourcing of materials, the architecture firm, and the history of the land below it. Along the way, ads—flat and projected, still and animated—crowd his vision, all of them translated and most of them annotated by his Information: he learns that the company trying to sell him whiskey is a subsidiary of Coca-Cola (not surprising, since they are part of the corporate government that owns this airport) and sees the annual statement summary for a firm offering wealth management. Not having any wealth to speak of, he ignores both the ad and the background Information discrediting it.

What rationalism from d’Alembert to Dawkins is loath to acknowledge is that human rationality is a corporeal one. We think as we do roughly because of the kind of bodies we have, as Thomas Aquinas noted. Reason is authentically rational only when it is rooted in what lies beyond itself. It must find its home in what is other than reason, which is not to say in what is inimical to it. Any form of reason which grasps itself purely in terms of ideas, and then fumbles for some less cerebral way in which to connect with the sensory world, is debilitated from the outset.

There is the bureaucratic crawl and there is the entrepreneurial leap. But there is also the deal of the fixer, the coup of the promoter, the maneuver of the clique. Words like entrepreneur and bureaucrat are no more adequate to convey the realities of the higher corporate career than of the appropriation of great fortunes. They are, as we have noted in connection with the very rich, middle-class words, and retain the limitations of middle-class perspectives.