Elite Daily Quotes

It takes discipline to focus only on high-value targets instead of giving in to the temptation of the low-hanging fruit life serves up daily.

Power to the people' can only be put into practice when the power exercised by social elites is dissolved into the people. Each individual can then take control of his daily life. If 'Power to the people' means nothing more than power to the 'leaders' of the people, then the people remain an undifferentiated, manipulatable mass, as powerless after the revolution as they were before. In the last analysis, the people can never have power until they disappear as a 'people.

Breathing is free medicine, and the daily practice of breath control leads to optimal health and

When this happens, as it is today, then, to quote Eric Hoffer, “When freedom destroys order, the yearning for order will destroy freedom.” At that point the words left or right will make no difference. They are only two roads to the same end. There is no difference between authoritarian government from the right or the left: the results are the same. An elite, an authoritarianism as such, will gradually force form on society so that it will not go on to chaos. And most people will accept it - from the desire for personal peace and affluence, from apathy, and from the yearning for order to assure the functioning of some political system, business, and the affairs of daily life. That is just what Rome did with Caesar Augustus

most cherished desires of present-day Westerners are shaped by romantic, nationalist, capitalist and humanist myths that have been around for centuries. Friends giving advice often tell each other, ‘Follow your heart.’ But the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day, and the very recommendation to ‘follow your heart’ was implanted in our minds by a combination of nineteenth-century Romantic myths and twentieth-century consumerist myths. The Coca-Cola Company, for example, has marketed Diet Coke around the world under the slogan ‘Diet Coke. Do what feels good.’ Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order. Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this. A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia. People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life’. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better. 18. The Great Pyramid of Giza. The kind of thing rich people in ancient Egypt did with their money. Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded. The tourism industry does not sell flight tickets and hotel bedrooms. It sells experiences. Paris is not a city, nor India a country – they are both experiences, the consumption of which is supposed to widen our horizons, fulfil our human potential, and make us happier. Consequently, when the relationship between a millionaire and his wife is going through a rocky patch, he takes her on an expensive trip to Paris. The trip is not a reflection of some independent desire, but rather of an ardent belief in the myths of romantic consumerism. A wealthy man in ancient Egypt would never have dreamed of solving a relationship crisis by taking his wife on holiday to Babylon. Instead, he might have built for her the sumptuous tomb she had always wanted. Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They may take the form, for example, of a suburban cottage with a swimming pool and an evergreen lawn, or a gleaming penthouse with an enviable view. Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.

Cono knew that all three of his tormentors would know the anthem by heart from their childhood years. They had sung it daily to belong to the elite of their country, wearing around their necks the red ties of the Communist Party Youth Brigade, which had formed their beings and all that they would be and would ever believe, even as communism became a ghost and the party a web of corruption.

Perhaps this is what a state actually is: a combination of exceptional violence and the creation of a complex social machine, all ostensibly devoted to acts of care and devotion. There is obviously a paradox here. Caring labour is in a way the very opposite of mechanical labour: it is about recognizing and understanding the unique qualities, needs and peculiarities of the cared-for – whether child, adult, animal or plant – in order to provide what they require to flourish. Caring labour is distinguished by its particularity. If those institutions we today refer to as ‘states’ really do have any common features, one must certainly be a tendency to displace this caring impulse on to abstractions; today this is usually ‘the nation’, however broadly or narrowly defined. Perhaps this is why it’s so easy for us to see ancient Egypt as a prototype for the modern state: here too, popular devotion was diverted on to grand abstractions, in this case the ruler and the elite dead. This process is what made it possible for the whole arrangement to be imagined, simultaneously, as a family and as a machine, in which everyone (except of course the king) was ultimately interchangeable. From the seasonal work of tomb-building to the daily servicing of the ruler’s body (recall again how the first royal inscriptions are found on combs and make-up palettes), most of human activity was directed upwards, either towards tending rulers (living and dead) or assisting them with their own task of feeding and caring for the gods.

There are three groups of people. There are the rich who are never satisfied because their wealth is never enough for them—these citizens are totally useless for the city. Then there are the poor who, because their daily bread is never enough, are dangerous because they are deceived by the tongues of crooked politicians and by their own envy and so they aim the arrows of their hatred towards the rich. And then, between these two, there is a third. This one is between them. It’s there to keep the order, it’s there to keep the city safe. —EURIPIDES, Suppliants

They control Europe under the attractive and falsely uniting banner of the “European Union”, the Middle East under the convenient banner of “fighting terrorism”, Africa and South America under the false and misleading banners of “democracy and development”, and many other banners under which the most hideous crimes are daily committed against humanity. Indeed, a closer examination reveals that all these banners are just different logos for one and the same goal, which is to ensure that the overwhelming—and overwhelmed—majority of people are imprisoned, disabled, and deprived of their fair share of bread, sun, and dignity.

WAY OF THE SEAL DRILL Making Variety a Habit Make a list of all the routines in your daily and weekly life. What time do you wake? Do you brush your teeth before or after taking a shower? Do you check your e-mail before brushing your teeth? What ritual patterns of thought can you detect? We are good self-deceivers, so why don’t you ask your best friend or spouse what your routine habits and thoughts are? Armed with the list, make a parallel list of ways you will break these routines. Get up at a different time every day. Take a different route to work. Do not check e-mail first thing, but only twice a day. Fast for a day or do a juice cleanse. Make a new routine out of shaking things up. This will forge new pathways in your brain, help you to avoid blind spots and rutted thinking, and spice up your life in general. You can easily apply this drill at a team level, also.

It remains to be asked why today it is the image of the woman of the "Golden Age" [the Abbasid dynasty] - a "slave" who intrigues in the corridors of power when she loses hope of seducing - who symbolizes the Muslim eternal female, while the memory of Umm Salama, A'isha, and Sukayna awakens no response and seems strangely distant and unreal. The answer without doubt is to be found in the time-mirror wherein the Muslim looks at himself to foresee his future. The image of "his" woman will change when he feels the pressing need to root his future in a liberating memory. Perhaps the woman should help him do this through daily pressure for equality, thereby bringing him into a fabulous present. And the present is always fabulous, because there everything is possible - even the end of always looking to the past and the beginning of confidence, of enjoying in harmony the moment that we have.

threat condition state. Although Sheepdogs operate in “yellow,” they’re prepared to escalate to “orange” or “red” in a moment’s notice. Though the warrior trains for violence and can withstand the psychological impact of violence, he/ she abhors violence. Identifying and diffusing a threat is the largest segment of the Unbeatable Mind warrior training. Only when all else fails will the warrior engage in a violence to end the threat. When this happens, he/he terrifies their opponent with an offensive mind. Exercise Think about a violent and vicious animal - wolverine, lion, or bear. Sit in silence and begin your breath control. Count backwards from 100. At 50, invoke the image and psychological energy of your chosen animal. Feel the animal’s ferocious attack energy. Feel the animal’s emotions as it seeks to protect its offspring. Imagine yourself fighting a violent criminal with the same psychic animal. Now, practice turning this energy on and off, like a light switch. Repeat this exercise daily for a month. This will cultivate an offensive mind-set and provide an enormous amount of psychological energy to be used in the event of a violent encounter.

We had heard rumours of what people referred to as a ‘phantom accounting system’, also called zappers and phantom ware. This phenomenon was unheard of in South Africa at the time. The more formal term used to describe this kind of criminal financial-management software is a ‘sales-suppression system’. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in which South Africa has observer status, issued a guide on these systems in 2013.10 On the surface, the technology seems like a supposedly normal accounting system, used mainly by retailers. It has all the expected features: it records stock, sales, invoices, receipts and taxes. It can print daily, weekly and monthly accounting records. Yet the software has a feature that can blank out certain sales and receipts. You can set it to suppress, for instance, every fourth sale, or random sales of a particular value, whichever you prefer. The effect is that, on paper, your stock, sales and receipts would balance for tax purposes. All you would have to do is click on a secret place on the screen, or type a particular code on the keyboard, and the unrecorded sales and receipts would reflect. One would then be able to take this money out of the company’s takings for the day, week or month, and people would be none the wiser.

If Marx had no time for the state, it was partly because he viewed it as a kind of alienated power. It was as though this august entity had confiscated the abilities of men and women to determine their own existence, and was now doing so on their behalf. It also had the impudence to call this process ‘‘democracy.’’ Marx himself began his career as a radical democrat and ended up as a revolutionary one, as he came to realize just how much transformation genuine democracy would entail; and it is as a democrat that he challenges the state’s sublime authority. He is too wholehearted a believer in popular sovereignty to rest content with the pale shadow of it known as parliamentary democracy. He is not in principle opposed to parliaments, any more than was Lenin. But he saw democracy as too precious to be entrusted to parliaments alone. It had to be local, popular and spread across all the institutions of civil society. It had to extend to economic as well as political life. It had to mean actual self-government, not government entrusted to a political elite. The state Marx approved of was the rule of citizens over themselves, not of a minority over a majority. The state, Marx considered, had come adrift from civil society. There was a blatant contradiction between the two. We were, for example, abstractly equal as citizens within the state, but dramatically unequal in everyday social existence. That social existence was riven with conflicts, but the state projected an image of it as seamlessly whole. The state saw itself as shaping society from above, but was in fact a product of it. Society did not stem from the state; instead, the state was a parasite on society. The whole setup was topsy-turvy. As one commentator puts it, ‘‘Democracy and capitalism have been turned upside down’’—meaning that instead of political institutions regulating capitalism, capitalism regulated them. The speaker is Robert Reich, a former U.S. labour secretary, who is not generally suspected of being a Marxist. Marx’s aim was to close this gap between state and society, politics and everyday life, by dissolving the former into the latter. And this is what he called democracy. Men and women had to reclaim in their daily lives the powers that the state had appropriated from them. Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it. It is hard to see why so many defenders of democracy should find this vision objectionable.

For abolitionists, who advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves, and free-soilers, who simply opposed the spread of slavery into the western territories, the existence of such a group proved the destructive effect of slavery on social morals and human industry and the inordinate economic power of the planter elite. It also served as an implicit warning of the disastrous consequences of the spread of slavery into nonslaveholding regions and its debilitating effect on the work ethic of otherwise stalwart white farmers. For slave-holders, particularly those at the apex of southern society, the idleness of rural working-class whites justified the “peculiar institution” and made clear the need for a planter-led economic and social hierarchy. Planter D. R. Hundley wrote, for example, that “poor whites” were “the laziest two-legged animals that walk erect on the face of the earth . . . [and exhibited] a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief.” To abolitionists and proslavery ideologues alike, therefore, southern poor whites utterly lacked industry, intelligence, social propriety, and honor, the essential ingredients for political and social equality and thus should not be trusted with political decision-making.7 Northern and southern middle- to upper-class commentators perceived this class of people as so utterly degraded that they challenged their assertion of “whiteness,” the one claim southern working-class whites had to political equality, “normative” status, and social superiority to free and enslaved blacks. Like Byrd and the author of “The Carolina Sand-Hillers,” journalists and travel writers repeatedly compared “poor whites” unfavorably to other supposedly inferior people of color, be they enslaved blacks, Indians, or even Mexican peasants. Through a variety of arguments, including genetic inferiority, excessive interbreeding with “nonwhites,” and environmental factors, such as the destructive influences of the southern climate, rampant disease, and a woefully inadequate diet, these writers asserted that “poor whites” were neither truly “white” nor clearly “nonwhite” but instead, a separate “‘Cracker’ race” in all ways so debased that they had no capacity for social advancement. This attitude is clear in an 1866 article from the Boston Daily Advertiser that proclaimed that this social class had reached depths of “[s]uch filthy poverty, such foul ignorance, such idiotic imbecility” that they could never be truly civilized. “[T]ime and effort will lead the negro up to intelligent manhood,” the author concluded, “but I almost doubt if it will be possible to ever lift this ‘white trash’ into respectability.”8 Contempt for working-class whites was almost as strong among African Americans as among middle-class and elite whites. Enslaved African Americans invented derogatory terms containing explicit versions of “whiteness” such as “(poor) white trash” and “poor buckra” (a derivative form of the West African word for “white man”). Although relations between slaves and non-elite southern whites were complex, many slaves deeply resented the role of poor whites as overseers and patrol riders and adopted their owners’ view that elite southern planters were socially and morally superior. Many also believed that blacks, enslaved and free, formed a middle layer of social respectability between the planter aristocracy at the top of the social system and the “poor whites” at the bottom. The construction of a “poor white” and “white trash” social and cultural category thus allowed black slaves to carve out a space of social superiority, as well as permitted the white planter elite to justify enormous economic and social inequality among whites in a supposedly democratic society.9

He came to bind up the brokenhearted—no matter what broke the heart. He came to open the eyes of the blind—no matter what veiled their vision. part ii BENEFITS AND OBSTACLES You have examined the rule of the four kings of Isaiah's day and compared the reign of the King of kings. You may already be recognizing the symptoms of captivity in your life. Now we are ready to begin the core of our journey. In the following chapters you will get to know your birthright. God intends five benefits to be the daily experience of every child of God. They are not prizes for an elite few believers. He wants you to live and breathe each of these blessings. Since many Christians today obviously are not living in the five benefits, we will also consider five primary obstacles. These are hindrances that keep us from the birthright God intends. I hope you have been working on hiding God's Word in your heart. And because the five benefits are so important to our journey, I want to ask you to begin to memorize them also: To know God and believe Him To glorify God To find satisfaction in God To experience God's peace To enjoy God's presence Five obstacles block our access to the benefits God wants for us: Unbelief, which hinders knowing God Pride, which prevents us from glorifying

As a self-confessed Pre-Raphaelite - a term that by the 1880s was interchangeable with ‘Aesthete’ - Constance was carrying a torch whose flame had ben lit in the 1850s by a group of women associated with the founding Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters. Women such as Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris, the wives respectively of the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet, designer and socialist William Morris, had modelled for the Pre-Raphaelite artists, wearing loose, flowing gowns. But it was not just their depiction on canvas that sparked a new fashion among an intellectual elite. Off canvas these women also establised new liberties for women that some twenty years later were still only just being taken up by a wider female population. They pioneered new kinds of dresses, with sleeves either sewn on at the shoulder, rather than below it, or puffed and loose. While the rest of the female Victorian populace had to go about with their arms pinned to their bodies in tight, unmoving sheaths, the Pre-Raphaelite women could move their arms freely, to paint or pose or simply be comfortable. The Pre-Raphaelite girls also did away with the huge, bell-shaped crinoline skirts, held out by hoops and cages strapped on to the female undercarriage. They dispensed with tight corsets that pinched waists into hourglasses, as well as the bonnets and intricate hairstyles that added layer upon layer to a lady’s daily toilette. Their ‘Aesthetic’ dress, as it became known, was more than just a fashion; it was a statement. In seeking comfort for women it also spoke of a desire for liberation that went beyond physical ease. It was also a statement about female creative expression, which in itself was aligned to broader feminist issues. The original Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood lived unconventionally with artists, worked at their own artistic projects and became famous in the process. Those women who were Aesthetic dress in their wake tended to believe that women should have the right to a career and ultimately be enfranchised with the vote. […] And so Constance, with ‘her ugly dresses’, her schooling and her college friends, was already in some small degree a young woman going her own way. Moving away from the middle-class conventions of the past, where women were schooled by governesses at home, would dress in a particular manner and be chaperoned, Constance was already modern.

consider a young Tunisian man pushing a wooden handcart loaded with fruits and vegetables down a dusty road to a market in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When the man was three, his father died. He supports his family by borrowing money to fill his cart, hoping to earn enough selling the produce to pay off the debt and have a little left over. It’s the same grind every day. But this morning, the police approach the man and say they’re going to take his scales because he has violated some regulation. He knows it’s a lie. They’re shaking him down. But he has no money. A policewoman slaps him and insults his dead father. They take his scales and his cart. The man goes to a town office to complain. He is told the official is busy in a meeting. Humiliated, furious, powerless, the man leaves. He returns with fuel. Outside the town office he douses himself, lights a match, and burns. Only the conclusion of this story is unusual. There are countless poor street vendors in Tunisia and across the Arab world. Police corruption is rife, and humiliations like those inflicted on this man are a daily occurrence. They matter to no one aside from the police and their victims. But this particular humiliation, on December 17, 2010, caused Mohamed Bouazizi, aged twenty-six, to set himself on fire, and Bouazizi’s self-immolation sparked protests. The police responded with typical brutality. The protests spread. Hoping to assuage the public, the dictator of Tunisia, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, visited Bouazizi in the hospital. Bouazizi died on January 4, 2011. The unrest grew. On January 14, Ben Ali fled to a cushy exile in Saudi Arabia, ending his twenty-three-year kleptocracy. The Arab world watched, stunned. Then protests erupted in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. After three decades in power, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was driven from office. Elsewhere, protests swelled into rebellions, rebellions into civil wars. This was the Arab Spring—and it started with one poor man, no different from countless others, being harassed by police, as so many have been, before and since, with no apparent ripple effects. It is one thing to look backward and sketch a narrative arc, as I did here, connecting Mohamed Bouazizi to all the events that flowed out of his lonely protest. Tom Friedman, like many elite pundits, is skilled at that sort of reconstruction, particularly in the Middle East, which he knows so well, having made his name in journalism as a New York Times correspondent in Lebanon. But could even Tom Friedman, if he had been present that fatal morning, have peered into the future and foreseen the self-immolation, the unrest, the toppling of the Tunisian dictator, and all that followed? Of course not. No one could. Maybe, given how much Friedman knew about the region, he would have mused that poverty and unemployment were high, the number of desperate young people was growing, corruption was rampant, repression was relentless, and therefore Tunisia and other Arab countries were powder kegs waiting to blow. But an observer could have drawn exactly the same conclusion the year before. And the year before that. Indeed, you could have said that about Tunisia, Egypt, and several other countries for decades. They may have been powder kegs but they never blew—until December 17, 2010, when the police pushed that one poor man too far.

The warning signs had been there since the crash of 2008, but after the initial shock, nothing had been done to correct the problem. Banks had been trading over $7 trillion in risky derivatives daily, as well as fixing interest rates and making bets on the rigged games. There was an ever-growing gap between the elite and all the rest of the people which had continued to develop even after the 2008 crash.

Consider this data on the distribution of wealth: • Since 2015, the richest 1 percent has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet owns.11 • Eight men own the same amount of wealth as do the poorest half of the world. • The incomes of the poorest 10 percent of people increased by less than three dollars a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1 percent increased 182 times as much. • In Bloomberg’s daily ranking of the world’s five hundred richest people, the world’s wealthiest three (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos), all white American men, have total net worths of $85 billion, $79 billion, and $73 billion, respectively.12 By comparison, the 2015 gross domestic product of Sri Lanka was $82 billion; Luxembourg $58 billion; and Iceland, $16 billion.13 • Of the world’s ten richest people, nine are white men.14 • In 2015–2016, the world’s ten biggest corporations together had revenue greater than that of the government revenues of 180 countries combined. • In the US, over the last thirty years, the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50 percent has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1 percent have grown by 300 percent. The call to Make America Great Again worked powerfully in service of the racial manipulation of white people, diverting blame away from the white elite and toward various peoples of color—for example, undocumented workers, immigrants, and the Chinese—for the current conditions of the white working class.

Awash in gadgets and conveniences that were once unimaginable even within their own lifetimes, Americans (and many other Westerners, if we are to be fair about it) have become almost childlike in their refusal to learn enough to govern themselves or to guide the policies that affect their lives. This is a collapse of functional citizenship, and it enables a cascade of other baleful consequences. In the absence of informed citizens, for example, more knowledgeable administrative and intellectual elites do in fact take over the daily direction of the state and society.

To maximize pleasure and to minimize pain - in that order - were characteristic Enlightenment concerns. This generally more receptive attitude toward good feeling and pleasure would have significant long-term consequences. It is a critical difference separating Enlightenment views on happiness from those of the ancients. There is another, however, of equal importance: that of ambition and scale. Although the philosophers of the principal classical schools sought valiantly to minimize the role of chance as a determinant of human happiness, they were never in a position to abolish it entirely. Neither, for that matter, were the philosophers of the eighteenth century, who, like men and women at all times, were forced to grapple with apparently random upheavals and terrible reversals of forture. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 is an awful case in point. Striking on All Saints' Day while the majority of Lisbon's inhabitants were attending mass, the earthquake was followed by a tidal wave and terrible fires that destroyed much of the city and took the lives of tens of thousands of men and women. 'Quel triste jeu de hasard que le jeu de la vie humaine,' Voltaire was moved to reflect shortly thereafter: 'What a sad game of chance is this game of human life.' He was not alone in reexamining his more sanguine assumptions of earlier in the century, doubting the natural harmony of the universe and the possibilities of 'paradise on earth'; the catastrophe provoked widespread reflection on the apparent 'fatality of evil' and the random occurrence of senseless suffering. It was shortly thereafter that Voltaire produced his dark masterpiece, Candide, which mocks the pretension that this is the best of all possible worlds. And yet, in many ways, the incredulity expressed by educated Europeans in the earthquake's aftermath is a more interesting index of received assumptions, for it demonstrates the degree to which such random disasters were becoming, if not less common, at least less expected. Their power to shock was magnified accordingly, but only because the predictability and security of daily existence were increasing, along with the ability to control the consequences of unforeseen disaster. When the Enlightened Marquis of Pombal, the First Minister of Portugal, set about rebuilding Lisbon after the earthquake, he paid great attention to modern principles of architecture and central planning to help ensure that if such a calamity were to strike again, the effects would be less severe. To this day, the rebuilt Lisbon of Pombal stands as an embodiment of Enlightened ideas. Thus, although eighteenth-century minds did not - and could not - succeed in mastering the random occurrences of the universe, they could - and did - conceive of exerting much greater control over nature and human affairs. Encouraged by the examples of Newtonian physics, they dreamed of understanding not only the laws of the physical universe but the moral and human laws as well, hoping one day to lay out with precision what the Italian scholar Giambattista Vico described as a 'new science' of society and man. It was in the eighteenth century, accordingly, that the human and social sciences were born, and so it is hardly surprising that observers turned their attention to studying happiness in similar terms. Whereas classical sages had aimed to cultivate a rarified ethical elite - attempting to bring happiness to a select circle of disciples, or at most to the active citizens of the polis - Enlightenment visionaries dreamed of bringing happiness to entire societies and even to humanity as a whole.

Consider this data on the distribution of wealth: • Since 2015, the richest 1 percent has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet owns.11 • Eight men own the same amount of wealth as do the poorest half of the world. • The incomes of the poorest 10 percent of people increased by less than three dollars a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1 percent increased 182 times as much. • In Bloomberg’s daily ranking of the world’s five hundred richest people, the world’s wealthiest three (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos), all white American men, have total net worths of $85 billion, $79 billion, and $73 billion, respectively.12 By comparison, the 2015 gross domestic product of Sri Lanka was $82 billion; Luxembourg $58 billion; and Iceland, $16 billion.13 • Of the world’s ten richest people, nine are white men.14 • In 2015–2016, the world’s ten biggest corporations together had revenue greater than that of the government revenues of 180 countries combined. • In the US, over the last thirty years, the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50 percent has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1 percent have grown by 300 percent. The call to Make America Great Again worked powerfully in service of the racial manipulation of white people, diverting blame away from the white elite and toward various peoples of color—for example, undocumented workers, immigrants, and the Chinese—for the current conditions of the white working class. The

The things she worried about on a daily basis included but were not limited to: Children starving in Africa. Chemicals in her daughter’s food and drinking water. Corruption in Washington, everywhere you looked. The poor, who no one even talked about anymore. Rape in the Congo, which didn’t seem to be going away, despite so much talk. Rape at elite American colleges, which wasn’t going away either. Plastic. Oil in the Gulf. Beer commercials, in which men were always portrayed as dolts who thought exclusively about football, and women as insufferable nags who only cared about shopping. The evils of the Internet. Sweatshops, and, in the same vein, where exactly everything in their life came from—their meat, their clothes, their shoes, their cell phones. The polar bears. The Kardashians. China. The poisonous effects of Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the seemingly limitless pornography online. The gun-control laws that would likely never come, despite the five minutes everyone spent demanding them whenever a child or a politician got shot. The cancer various members of her family would eventually get, from smoking, microwaves, sunlight, deodorant, and all the other vices that made life that much more convenient and/or bearable. Throughout each day, the world’s ills ran through her head, sprinkled in with thoughts about what she should make for dinner, and when she was due for a cleaning at the dentist, and whether they should have another baby sometime soon. She wondered if everyone was like this, or if most people were able to tune it all out, the way her sister seemed to. Even Dan didn’t care all that much about the parts of the world that were invisible to him. But Kate couldn’t forget.

As three-time Olympic ski jumper Andreas Küttel puts it, “Nature . . . gives me absolutely a lot of energy on a daily basis but also for special occasions it gives you calmness.” The ability of natural spaces to help us de-stress is reinforced by former Irish rugby union player Rosie Foley, who enthuses, “The emotions are just pure relaxation and just that lovely feeling of this is where I’m supposed to be!

high modernism ought to appeal greatly to the classes and strata who have most to gain—in status, power, and wealth—from its worldview. And indeed it is the ideology par excellence of the bureaucratic intelligentsia, technicians, planners, and engineers.29 The position accorded to them is not just one of rule and privilege but also one of responsibility for the great works of nation building and social transformation. Where this intelligentsia conceives of its mission as the dragging of a technically backward, unschooled, subsistence-oriented population into the twentieth century, its self-assigned cultural role as educator of its people becomes doubly grandiose. Having a historic mission of such breadth may provide a ruling intelligentsia with high morale, solidarity, and the willingness to make (and impose) sacrifices. This vision of a great future is often in sharp contrast to the disorder, misery, and unseemly scramble for petty advantage that the elites very likely see in their daily foreground. One might in fact speculate that the more intractable and resistant the real world faced by the planner, the greater the need for utopian plans to fill, as it were, the void that would otherwise invite despair.

A colleague of mine who has now been a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, for more than two decades told me that she grew up in Kaiserslautern and learned English from American GIs. Instead of being rewarded for her knowledge of the language, her secondary school teacher, who knew far less English than this little girl, gave her nothing but bad grades because she “didn’t speak proper English, just American dialect.” As stated in the preface, I had virtually the identical experience at the prestigious secondary school, the Theresianische Akademie, that I attended in Vienna in the 1960s, even though I was fortunate enough—unlike my colleague from Kaiserslautern and Trinity—to get straight A’s in English in spite of my inferior “American dialect,” my “faulty” American spelling, and after being reminded virtually on a daily basis that “in a prestigious institution such as ours, where we educate Austria’s elites, we do not talk American, do not walk American, do not look American because we are not in the Wild West but in a civilized place.” Italian elites also regularly refer to American English as a dialect that they view as inferior to British English.

a reader of the Daily Mail brings it down to earth: "Only the 'elite' will go. The rest of us will be left to die.

Saskia Sassen in the Daily Beast observed that “if there’s one underlying condition, it has to do with the unemployment and bitter poverty among people who desire to be part of the middle class and who are keenly aware of the sharp inequality between themselves and their country’s wealthy elite.

As noted on Page 90 of the MKULTRA inspired KUBARK interrogation manual, 'sustained long enough, a strong fear of anything vague or unknown induces regression'. Whether that fear represents the possibility of being unemployed, being harassed daily for not complying, or a mutating virus, amongst other things, if 'sustained long enough' it begins to wear people down psychologically..

In April 2001, a student group called the Progressive Student Labor Movement took over the offices of the university’s president, demanding a living wage for Harvard janitors and food workers. That spring, a daily diversion on the way to class was to see which national figure—Cornel West or Ted Kennedy one day, John Kerry or Robert Reich another—had turned up in the Yard to encourage the protesters. Striding past the protesters and the politicians addressing them, on my way to a “Pizza and Politics” session with a journalist like Matt Bai or a governor like Howard Dean, I did not guess that the students poised to have the greatest near-term impact were not the social justice warriors at the protests […] but a few mostly apolitical geeks who were quietly at work in Kirkland House

As a financial journalist, she rubbed elbows daily with Wall Street’s elite, which appeared to be Serve’s main demographic.

For the elite of his day, and for the monetary elite today, the Hegelian dialectic provides tools for the manipulation of society. To move the public from point A to point B, one need only find a spokesperson for a certain argument and position him or her as an authority. That person represents Goalpost One. Another spokesperson is positioned on the other side of the argument, to represent Goalpost Two. Argument A and B can then be used to manipulate a given social discussion. If one wishes, for in stance, to promote Idea C, one merely needs to promote the arguments of Goalpost One (that tend to promote Idea C) more effectively than the arguments of Goalpost Two. This forces a slippage of Goalpost Two’s position. Thus both Goalpost One and Goalpost Two advance downfield toward Idea C. Eventually, Goalpost Two occupies Goalpost One’s original position. The “anti-C” argument now occupies the pro-C position. In this manner whole social conversations are shifted from, say, a debate over market freedom vs. socialism to a debate about the degree of socialism that is desirable. The Hegelian dialectic is a powerful technique for influencing the conversations of cultures and nations, especially if one already controls (owns) much of the important media in which the arguments take place. One can then, as the monetary elite characteristically do, emphasize one argument at the expense of the other, effectively shifting the positions of Goalposts One and Two.” - Daily Bell, Hegelian Dialectic

Kate was often preoccupied with how to do good in a corrupt world, where just by eating dinner or turning on a laptop each of us was complicit in someone else's suffering. She struggled with how to speak the truth when it put others on the defensive or made her seem like a downer. The things she worried about on a daily basis included but were not limited to: Children starving in Africa. Chemicals in her daughter's food and drinking water. Corruption in Washington, everywhere you looked. The poor, who no one even talked about anymore. Rape in the Congo, which didn't seem to be going away despite so much talk. Rape at the elite American colleges, which wasn't going away either. Plastic. Oil in the Gulf. Beer commercials, in which men were always portrayed as dolts who thought exclusively about football, and women as insufferable nags who only cared about shopping. The evils of the Internet. Sweatshops, and, in the same vein, where exactly everything in their life came from-their meat, their clothes, their shoes, their cell phones. The polar bears. .. The gun-control laws that would likely never come, despite the five minutes everyone spent demanding them whenever a child or politician got shot. The cancer various members of her family would eventually get, from smoking, microwaves, sunlight, deodorant, and all the other vices that made life that much more convenient and/or bearable.

It is clear from both documentary and archaeological sources that conspicuous display and consumption of wealth was fundamental for an elite male to maintain power and position in society.

Kim Il-sung had promised North Koreans three bowls of rice every day. Rice, especially white rice, was a luxury in North Korea. It was a magnanimous promise that was impossible to fulfill for all but the elite. However, the public distribution system did supply the population with a mixture of grains in amounts that were carefully calibrated in accordance with rank and work. Coal miners doing hard labor were to get 900 grams of grain daily, while factory workers like Mrs. Song got 700 grams. The system also dispensed other staples in the Korean diet, such as soy sauce, cooking oil, and a thick red bean paste called gochujang. On national holidays, such as the Kim family birthdays, there might be pork or dried fish. The best part was the cabbage, distributed in the autumn for making kimchi. The spicy preserved cabbage is the Korean national dish, the only vegetable product in the traditional diet during the long winters and as integral to the culture as rice. The North Korean regime understood you couldn’t keep Koreans happy without kimchi. Each family got 70 kilograms (154 pounds) per adult and 50 kilos (110 pounds) per child,

Looking back, the one thing that has taken me most by surprise in following Jesus is the level of undiluted difficulty. Sure, as kids we were warned about how hard it was to follow Jesus, but for all the wrong reasons. Following Jesus was going to be hard, so we were led to believe, because people of the world would hate us and want nothing to do with us. The reality I have discovered is that when we live lives that reflect Jesus, most people (with the exception of the religious elite, lovers of power, and lovers of money) actually love us—just like they did with Jesus! However, living a life that makes the gospel attractive is difficult—it means that we must get beyond ourselves, oppose cultural forces that dilute the beauty of the message, and embrace a life that is dedicated to doing undiluted justice. Committing our daily lives to being people who live to make the world a little less broken and a little more reconciled isn’t easy—but it is beautiful.

In 1933, the U.S. Senate approved legislation introducing a thirty-hour workweek. Although the bill languished in the House of Representatives under industry pressure, a shorter workweek remained the labor unions’ top priority. In 1938, legislation protecting the five-day workweek was finally passed. The following year, the folk song “Big Rock Candy Mountain” climbed to the top of the charts, describing a utopia in which “hens lay soft-boiled eggs,” cigarettes grow on trees, and “the jerk that invented work” is strung up from the tallest tree. After World War II, leisure time continued its steady rise. In 1956, Vice President Richard Nixon promised Americans that they would only have to work four days a week “in the not too distant future.” The country had reached a “plateau of prosperity,” and he believed a shorter workweek was inevitable.8 Before long, machines would be doing all the work. This would free up “abundant scope for recreation,” enthused an English professor, “by immersion in the imaginative life, in art, drama, dance, and a hundred other ways of transcending the constraints of daily life.”9 Keynes’ bold prediction had become a truism. In the mid-1960s, a Senate committee report projected that by 2000 the workweek would be down to just fourteen hours, with at least seven weeks off a year. The RAND Corporation, an influential think tank, foresaw a future in which just 2% of the population would be able to produce everything society needed.10 Working would soon be reserved for the elite.

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