Engaged Status Quotes

I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives—those fountains of inconvenient feeling—and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market. We’re hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we’re falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won’t stick.

But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.

The happiest people I've ever met, regardless of their profession, their social standing, or their economic status, are people that are fully engaged in the world around them. The most fulfilled people are the ones who get up every morning and stand for something larger than themselves. They are the people who care about others, who will extend a helping hand to someone in need or will speak up about an injustice when they see it.

Male domination, and the low and stigmatised status of women, cause teenage girls to engage in punishment of their bodies through eating disorders and self-mutilation. There is increasing evidence that woman-hating Western cultures are toxic to girls and very harmful to their mental health. It is, perhaps, not surprising, therefore, that there seem to be some girls baling out and seeking to upgrade their status.

Most of us waste this extraordinary thing called life. We have lived forty or sixty years, have gone to the office, engaged ourselves in social activity, escaping in various forms, and at the end of it, we have nothing but an empty, dull, stupid life, a wasted life. Now, pleasure has created this pattern of social life. We take pleasure in ambition, in competition, in acquiring knowledge or power, or position, prestige, status. And that pursuit of pleasure as ambition, competition, greed, envy, status, domination, power is respectable. It is made respectable by a society which has only one concept: that you shall lead a moral life, which is a respectable life. You can be ambitious, you can be greedy, you can be violent, you can be competitive, you can be a ruthless human being, but society accepts it, because at the end of your ambition, you are either so called successful man with plenty of money, or a failure and therefore a frustrated human being. So social morality is immorality.

A business is not just a legal entity - it’s a group of people engaged in the voluntary exchange of products, services, agreements and currencies. Buyers and sellers determine whether a business is a business. Not it’s legal entity status given by the state. I think legal status is good, but it’s not what truly establishes a business.

The truth is that a woman who chooses not to have children has generally engaged the question of a mother’s responsibilities to a degree of seriousness not previously explored when motherhood was simply a natural necessity.

To the extent people prioritize values and goals such as achievement, money, power, status and image, they tend to hold more negative attitudes towards the environment, are less likely to engage in positive environmental behaviors, and are more likely to use natural resources unsustainably,

People are cast in the underclass because they are seen as totally useless; as a nuisance pure and simple, something the rest of us could do nicely without. In a society of consumers - a world that evaluates anyone and anything by their commodity value - they are people with no market value; they are the uncommoditised men and women, and their failure to obtain the status of proper commodity coincides with (indeed, stems from) their failure to engage in a fully fledged consumer activity. They are failed consumers, walking symbols of the disasters awaiting fallen consumers, and of the ultimate destiny of anyone failing to acquit herself or himself in the consumer’s duties. All in all, they are the ‘end is nigh’ or the ‘memento mori’ sandwich men walking the streets to alert or frighten the bona fide consumers.

This is what we can promise the future: a legacy of care. That we will be good stewards and not take too much or give back too little, that we will recognize wild nature for what it is, in all its magnificent and complex history - an unfathomable wealth that should be consciously saved, not ruthlessly spent. Privilege is what we inherit by our status as Homo sapiens living on this planet. This is the privilege of imagination. What we choose to do with our privilege as a species is up to each of us. Humility is born in wildness. We are not protecting grizzlies from extinction; they are protecting us from the extinction of experience as we engage with a world beyond ourselves. The very presence of a grizzly returns us to an ecology of awe. We tremble at what appears to be a dream yet stands before us on two legs and roars.

There may be no better way to clear the diary of engagements than to wonder who among our acquaintances would make the trip to the hospital bed.

Scientists, for their part, need to be far more engaged with current public debates. They “should not be afraid of making their voice heard when the debate wanders into their field of expertise, be it medicine or history. Silence isn’t neuatrality; it is supporting the status quo. Of course, it is extremely important to go on doing academic research and to publish the results in scientific journals that only a few experts read. But it is equally important to communicate the latest scientific theories to the general public through popular-science books, and even through the skilful use of art and fiction.

The crowd, in its uncritical political engagement, is not always discerning about new possibility that comes with risk and often votes in fear for the status quo.

For too long the pro-life movement has been shouting conclusions rather than establishing facts. Staying focused on the status of the unborn brings moral clarity to the abortion debate.

Pirates are daring, adventurous, and willing to set forth into uncharted territories with no guarantee of success. They reject the status quo and refuse to conform to any society that stifles creativity and independence. They are entrepreneurs who take risks and are willing to travel to the ends of the earth for that which they value.

Nowadays, being “connected” means 24/7 availability. Emailing, texting, Twittering, calling, keeping one’s website and Facebook status current seem essential to being and remaining relevant in the world. In addition to the positive impact of globally interconnecting humanity, the information era is also contributing to the creation of a high-tech, low-touch society. It is impacting language, the publishing world, education, and social revolts. Neurologists and other pundits, including Nicholas Carr in his Atlantic article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, point out the paradoxical downsides of not setting healthy boundaries or applying discipline to how we engage technology. Some have gone so far as to suggest that it is making us “spiritually stupid” by keeping us too distracted to participate in spiritual practices. But how about this: can using technology with mindfulness lead to beneficial social and spiritual connection?

The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective. Even a bowed mirror works primarily by engaging the eyes, and she who centers herself in its surface is unlikely to notice anyone in the background who lacks a certain status, distinction.

Every time somebody on Facebook changes their status to engaged or married, I panic. I’m convinced Facebook was invented to make single people feel bad about their lives.

You will be learning along with the students, and your status as a learning expert will provide them with the support they need so that their work is the best it can be.

The more obsessed with personal identity campus liberals become, the less willing they become to engage in reasoned political debate. Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: 'Speaking as an X' . . . This is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. (One never says, 'Speaking as an gay Asian, I fell incompetent to judge on this matter'). It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned. So classroom conversations that once might have begun, 'I think A, and here is my argument', now take the form, 'Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B'. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means that there is no impartial space for dialogue. White men have one "epistemology", black women have another. So what remains to be said? What replaces argument, then, is taboo. At times our more privileged campuses can seem stuck in the world of archaic religion. Only those with an approved identity status are, like shamans, allowed to speak on certain matters. Particular groups -- today the transgendered -- are given temporary totemic significance. Scapegoats -- today conservative political speakers -- are duly designated and run off campus in a purging ritual. Propositions become pure or impure, not true or false. And not only propositions but simple words. Left identitarians who think of themselves as radical creatures, contesting this and transgressing that, have become like buttoned-up Protestant schoolmarms when it comes to the English language, parsing every conversation for immodest locutions and rapping the knuckles of those who inadvertently use them.

We have learned that to enable learning, an environment must be trusting, humanistic, and positive. It must promote high emotional engagement; mutual accountability; open-mindedness; permission to speak freely; reporting of and tolerance for mistakes; a maniacal vigilance against arrogance, elitism, and complacency; and the devaluation of status and hierarchy.

These men, often elevated to the status of local heroes, served as the most violently effective tool of a democracy aroused against Native Americans: citizen-soldiers engaged in acts of self-interest disguised as self-preservation.

The problem with pragmatism, as they say, is that it doesn’t work. The insecure overachiever never fully wills anything and thus is never fully satisfied. His brain is moving and his status is rising, but his heart and soul are never fully engaged.

These are evil actions. No excuses are available for engaging in them. To dehumanize a fellow being, to reduce him or her to the status of a parasite, to torture and to slaughter with no consideration of individual innocence or guilt, to make an art form of pain—that is wrong.

And, just as consequential, the post-Hart climate made it much easier for candidates who weren’t especially thoughtful—who didn’t have any complex understanding of governance, or even much affinity for it—to gain national prominence. When a politician could duck any real intellectual scrutiny simply by deriding the evident triviality of the media, when the status quo was to never say anything that required more than ten words’ worth of explanation, then pretty much anyone could rail against the system and glide through the process without having to establish more than a passing familiarity with the issues. As long as you weren’t delinquent on your taxes or having an affair with a stripper or engaged in some other form of rank duplicity, you could run as a “Tea Partier” or a “populist” without ever having to elaborate on what you actually believed or what you would do for the country.

Is it possible nevertheless that our consumer culture does make good on its promises, or could do so? Might these, if fulfilled, lead to a more satisfying life? When I put the question to renowned psychologist Tim Krasser, professor emeritus of psychology at Knox College, his response was unequivocal. "Research consistently shows," he told me, "that the more people value materialistic aspirations as goals, the lower their happiness and life satisfaction and the fewer pleasant emotions they experience day to day. Depression, anxiety, and substance abuse also tend to be higher among people who value the aims encouraged by consumer society." He points to four central principles of what he calls ACC — American corporate capitalism: it "fosters and encourages a set of values based on self-interest, a strong desire for financial success, high levels of consumption, and interpersonal styles based on competition." There is a seesaw oscillation, Tim found, between materialistic concerns on the one hand and prosocial values like empathy, generosity, and cooperation on the other: the more the former are elevated, the lower the latter descend. For example, when people strongly endorse money, image, and status as prime concerns, they are less likely to engage in ecologically beneficial activities and the emptier and more insecure they will experience themselves to be. They will have also lower-quality interpersonal relationships. In turn, the more insecure people feel, the more they focus on material things. As materialism promises satisfaction but, instead, yields hollow dissatisfaction, it creates more craving. This massive and self-perpetuating addictive spiral is one of the mechanisms by which consumer society preserves itself by exploiting the very insecurities it generates. Disconnection in all its guises — alienation, loneliness, loss of meaning, and dislocation — is becoming our culture's most plentiful product. No wonder we are more addicted, chronically ill, and mentally disordered than ever before, enfeebled as we are by such malnourishment of mind, body and soul.

We thrive in environments that respect us and allow us to (1) feel included, (2) feel safe to learn, (3) feel safe to contribute, and (4) feel safe to challenge the status quo. If we can’t do these things, if it’s emotionally expensive, fear shuts us down. We’re not happy and we’re not reaching our potential. But when the environment nurtures psychological safety, there’s an explosion of confidence, engagement, and performance. Ask yourself if you feel included, safe to learn, safe to contribute, and safe to challenge the status quo. Finally, ask yourself if you’re creating an environment where others can do these four things. In the process, look around and see others with respect and fresh amazement, find deeper communion in your relationships, and more happiness and satisfaction in your own life.

educators, we have to recognize that we help maintain the achievement gap when we don’t teach advance cognitive skills to students we label as “disadvantaged” because of their language, gender, race, or socioeconomic status. Many children start school with small learning gaps, but as they progress through school, the gap between African American and Latino and White students grows because we don’t teach them how to be independent learners. Based on these labels, we usually do the following (Mean & Knapp, 1991): Underestimate what disadvantaged students are intellectually capable of doing As a result, we postpone more challenging and interesting work until we believe they have mastered “the basics” By focusing only on low-level basics, we deprive students of a meaningful or motivating context for learning and practicing higher order thinking processes

They say "doubt everything," but I disagree. Doubt is useful in small amounts, but too much of it leads to apathy and confusion. No, don't doubt everything. QUESTION everything. That's the real trick. Doubt is just a lack of certainty. If you doubt everything, you'll doubt evolution, science, faith, morality, even reality itself - and you'll end up with nothing, because doubt doesn't give anything back. But questions have answers, you see. If you question everything, you'll find that a lot of what we believe is untrue...but you might also discover that some things ARE true. You might discover what your own beliefs are. And then you'll question them again, and again, eliminating flaws, discovering lies, until you get as close to the truth as you can. Questioning is a lifelong process. That's precisely what makes it so unlike doubt. Questioning engages with reality, interrogating all it sees. Questioning leads to a constant assault on the intellectual status quo, where doubt is far more likely to lead to resigned acceptance. After all, when the possibility of truth is doubtful (excuse the pun), why not simply play along with the most convenient lie? Questioning is progress, but doubt is stagnation.

the Qur’ān is not meant for a docile, arm-chair reading. It is essentially meant for those who seek to know the Truth and after knowing it will actively engage themselves in living according to its demands and will also strive to make it prevail in their milieu. It is meant for those who are ready to change themselves and willing truly to change the world around them. It calls upon those who embrace its message not to be satisfied ever with the status quo, but to strive ceaselessly to improve themselves, improve their fellow-beings and improve the order of things in which they are placed. Sayyid Mawdūdī’s

This isn’t some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream. We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society. Social psychologists have shown that group belief is a powerful motivator in performance. When groups perceive that it’s in their interest to work hard and achieve things, members of that group outperform other similarly situated individuals. It’s obvious why: If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown’s temptations—premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When

The researchers coded the videotapes to see what characteristics of the Chatters might be communicating their class differences. They found that richer Chatters were more disengaged during the conversation. They spent more time grooming themselves, doodling, and fiddling with pens, phones, or other objects. The poorer Chatters, in contrast, were more engaged. They looked directly at their conversation partner, and they nodded and laughed more. Higher status meant that the richer participants didn’t have anything “on the line” in the conversation. The poorer participants, in contrast, were working harder to be liked and accepted.

As Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres argue, one of the negative consequences of this colorblind ideology that it “inhibit[s] racialized minorities from struggling against their marginalized status. . . . It gives those who have enjoyed little power in our society no mechanisms for understanding and challenging the systemic nature of their oppression. . . . The way race has been used both to distribute resources and to camouflage the unfairness in that distribution remains invisible. . . . And the political space, where groups come together to give voice to their collective experience and mobilize to engage in fundamental social change, vanishes

People of color in the internal colonies of the US cannot defend themselves against police brutality or expropriate the means of survival to free themselves from economic servitude. They must wait for enough people of color who have attained more economic privilege (the “house slaves” of Malcolm X’s analysis) and conscientious white people to gather together and hold hands and sing songs. Then, they believe, change will surely come. People in Latin America must suffer patiently, like true martyrs, while white activists in the US “bear witness” and write to Congress. People in Iraq must not fight back. Only if they remain civilians will their deaths be counted and mourned by white peace activists who will, one of these days, muster a protest large enough to stop the war. Indigenous people need to wait just a little longer (say, another 500 years) under the shadow of genocide, slowly dying off on marginal lands, until-well, they’re not a priority right now, so perhaps they need to organize a demonstration or two to win the attention and sympathy of the powerful. Or maybe they could go on strike, engage in Gandhian noncooperation? But wait-a majority of them are already unemployed, noncooperating, fully excluded from the functioning of the system. Nonviolence declares that the American Indians could have fought off Columbus, George Washington, and all the other genocidal butchers with sit-ins; that Crazy Horse, by using violent resistance, became part of the cycle of violence, and was “as bad as” Custer. Nonviolence declares that Africans could have stopped the slave trade with hunger strikes and petitions, and that those who mutinied were as bad as their captors; that mutiny, a form of violence, led to more violence, and, thus, resistance led to more enslavement. Nonviolence refuses to recognize that it can only work for privileged people, who have a status protected by violence, as the perpetrators and beneficiaries of a violent hierarchy.

The real catalyst for the Religious Right was a court decision, but it was not Roe v. Wade. It was a lower court ruling in the District Court for the District of Columbia in a case called Green v. Connally. On June 30, 1971, the court ruled that any organization that engaged in racial segregation or racial discrimination was not by definition a charitable institution, and therefore it had no claims on tax-exempt status. The Supreme Court’s Coit v. Green decision upheld the district court, and the Internal Revenue Service then began making inquiries about the racial policies of so-called segregation academies as well as the fundamentalist school Bob Jones University, in Greenville, South Carolina, which boasted a long history of racial exclusion.

I am aware that teachers in modern societies often face tremendous challenges. Classes can be very large, the subjects taught can be very complex, and discipline can be difficult to maintain. Given the importance, and the difficulty, of teachers' jobs, I was surprised when I heard that in some western societies today teaching is regarded as a rather low-status profession. That is surely very muddled. Teachers must be applauded for choosing this career. They should congratulate themselves, particularly on days when they are exhausted and downhearted. They are engaged in work that will influence not just students' immediate level of knowledge but their entire lives, and thereby they have the potential to contribute to the future of humanity itself.

Both sex-positive feminism and choice feminism minimize and sideline the concerns of women of color and poor women who need the status quo to change. In this crucial sense, then, choice feminism prioritizes the needs and beliefs of white feminists based on individual choice because constructing a collective and engaging in the very political processes of consensus-building and contestation of various claims is not suitable for their purposes. Ironically, “choice” feminism actually ensures that those who are not benefiting from the status quo—from the untrammeled exercise of power and individuality that comes with white privilege—will never have choices beyond those they have at the present moment. In this crucial sense, then, choice feminism is white feminism

On a Sunday this January, probably of whatever year it is when you read this (at least as long as I’m living), I will probably be preaching somewhere in a church on “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.” Here’s a confession: I hate it. Don’t get me wrong. I love to preach the Bible. And I love to talk about the image of God and the protection of all human life. I hate this Sunday not because of what we have to say, but that we have to say it at all. The idea of aborting an unborn child or abusing a born child or starving an elderly person or torturing an enemy combatant or screaming at an immigrant family, these ought all to be so self-evidently wrong that a “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday” ought to be as unnecessary as a “Reality of Gravity Sunday.” We shouldn’t have to say that parents shouldn’t abort their children, or their fathers shouldn’t abandon the mothers of their babies, or that no human life is worthless regardless of age, skin color, disability, or economic status. Part of my thinking here is, I hope, a sign of God’s grace, a groaning by the Spirit at this world of abortion clinics and torture chambers (Rom. 8:22–23). But part of it is my own inability to see the spiritual combat zone that the world is, and has been from Eden onward. This dark present reality didn’t begin with the antebellum South or with the modern warfare state, and it certainly didn’t begin with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Human dignity is about the kingdom of God, and that means that in every place and every culture human dignity is contested.

The personal and the private are most often emphasized to the exclusion of almost everything else. Even the scope of psychotherapy generally leaves out the soul, the creator, and the citizen, those aspects of being human that extend into realms beyond private life. Conventional therapy, necessary and valuable at times to resolve personal crises and suffering, presents a very incomplete sense of self. As a guide to the range of human possibility it is grimly reductive. It will help you deal with your private shames and pains, but it won't generally have much to say about your society and your purpose on earth. [...] Such a confinement of desire and possibility to the private serves the status quo as well: it describes no role for citizenship and no need for social change or engagement.

When these red flags appeared early on, the narrative was “shaped” in a way that was at times romantic, passionate, and even practical. The old saying of “love is blind” applies here, and before these patterns set in, hope is often what allows people to look the other way when the red flags arise. Over time, the narratives become a bit more realistic, hope begins to fade, and it becomes brutally clear that these patterns of mistrust, anger, and deceit are here to stay. A human relationship should not be built on what you can do for someone, but simply on a mutual partnership. A narcissistic relationship can often devolve into superficial attributes, such as jobs, schools, titles, resources, addresses, photo-shopped images, status posts, quiet children, well-appointed homes, and possessions.

people in hunter-gatherer communities shared about 25 percent, while people in societies who regularly engage in trade gave away about 45 percent. Although religion was a modest factor in making people more generous, the strongest predictor was “market integration,” defined as “the percentage of a household’s total calories that were purchased from the market, as opposed to homegrown, hunted, or fished.” Why? Because, the authors conclude, trust and cooperation with strangers lowers transaction costs and generates greater prosperity for all involved, and thus market fairness norms “evolved as part of an overall process of societal evolution to sustain mutually beneficial exchanges in contexts where established social relationships (for example, kin, reciprocity, and status) were insufficient.”57

Seeing oneself as a prophetic minority does not mean retreat, and it certainly does not mean victim status. It also does not confer faithfulness. Marginalization can strip away from us the besetting sins of a majoritarian viewpoint, but it can bring others as well. We must remember our smallness but also our connectedness to a global, and indeed cosmic, reality. The kingdom of God is vast and tiny, universal and exclusive. Our story is that of a little flock and of an army, awesome with banners. Our legacy is a Christianity of persecution and proliferation, of catacombs and cathedrals. If we see ourselves as only a minority, we will be tempted to isolation. If we see ourselves only as a kingdom, we will be tempted toward triumphalism. We are, instead, a church. We are a minority with a message and a mission.

An antiracist movement that emphasizes the *actions* of individual 'white people' with a docus on things like 'calling out' everyday racism, or holding a company 'to account' for not catering to darker skin tones, perhaps isn't up to the task of defeating a concept that our societies have been deeply invested in for centuries, and that has assumed the 'truth' status that whiteness has. The focus on microaggressions and interpersonal slights often occurs at the expense of considering 'whiteness' or as a pervasive, insidious modus operandi, a particular way of engaging with the world. It is a system that is extractive, oppositional, and binary - a dominant system, one that asserts not just that white people should be dominant over other 'races' but that, more fundamentally, sees human life as dominant over all other life forms.

Firms justified their approach to recruitment by asserting that the best students go to the best universities and by arguing that it was more efficient to hire from listed schools because the screening that had already been done by these institutions’ admissions offices saved firms time and money. But as the next chapter’s examination of recruitment at core campuses shows, limiting competition to students at elite schools was much more than a matter of efficiency or effectiveness. Firms spent vast sums of money each year engaging in an elaborate courting ritual with students at core campuses. This showy, expensive undertaking not only bolstered the status of the participating companies in the eyes of students but it also generated emotional investment in the outcome of the hiring contest and began to seduce students into an upper-class style of life.

Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class—A Status Update by Rob Henderson The chief purpose of luxury beliefs is to indicate evidence of the believer’s social class and education. ... When an affluent person advocates for drug legalization, or anti-vaccination policies, or open borders, or loose sexual norms, or uses the term “white privilege,” they are engaging in a status display. They are trying to tell you, “I am a member of the upper class.” ... Affluent people promote open borders or the decriminalization of drugs because it advances their social standing, not least because they know that the adoption of those policies will cost them less than others. ... Unfortunately, the luxury beliefs of the upper class often trickle down and are adopted by people lower down the food chain, which means many of these beliefs end up causing social harm.

Sullivan described the analyst’s way of engaging the patient as “participant observation.” The patient attempts to draw the analyst into his characteristic forms of interaction. The analyst, like a sensitive instrument, uses her awareness of these subtle interpersonal pulls and pushes to develop hypotheses about the patient’s security operations. But Sullivan did not regard it as helpful for the analyst to get deeply personally involved with the patient. The analyst was an expert at interpersonal relations, and her expert status would keep her from getting drawn into pathological integrations. She needs to be aware enough of minor eruptions of anxiety within herself to avoid engaging in security operations of her own. The competent analyst would not need anything interpersonally from the patient and therefore would have no strong or turbulent feelings for the patient.

A man who marries a woman inferior to himself i.e. 'adopts' her must expect that she cannot feel anything for him but liking and gratitude. A woman is better off than a child, after all; if necessary, she can take care of herself, like any man. That she nevertheless allows her husband to pay all the bills is a personal concession that can be retracted at any time. She is entitled, therefore, to high expectations: everything done for her must be first-rate, otherwise she may engage another protector or else, depending upon circumstances, even decide to take care of herself. Compared with the real father, a wife's 'adopted father' has no hope of becoming his pseudo-child's protege in his old age, either. The most he can hope for is the status of an inadequate or pseudo-protege i.e. if he is lucky, he may come to enjoy the woman's altruistic love, her charity. The woman even gets a reward: she inherits his property, his insurance, his pension rights, so that he can go on providing for her after his death, the death she is statistically prepared to survive for, on the average, six years, plus the number of years she is younger than he is.

Vrajanātha: Lord Kṛṣṇa is the embodiment of mercy. Why did He make the jīva weak and thereby cause his bondage by māyā? (Note: Jīva here refers only to the conditioned souls). Bābājī: It is right that Kṛṣṇa is merciful, but He is also līlāmāyā, or one who performs only līlā. Considering that various types of līlās will be performed under various situations, the Lord made the jīva competent for unlimited gradations of positions from the marginal state up to the topmost platform of mahābhāva. To facilitate the jīvas and make them firm in their competence for these various positions, He created many low levels associated with māyā which present unlimited obstacles in the attainment of the supreme bliss. These range from the lowest inert matter up to false ego. The living entities bound by māyā are in ignorance of their svarūpa, engaged in acquiring pleasure for themselves, and not devoted to Kṛṣṇa. In this state, as much as the jīva goes down, that much more  the merciful Lord—becoming manifest before him along with His associates and abode—gives him the facility to attain the ultimate destination. Those jīvas who accept that facility try to achieve this highest destination.  Gradually they reach   the transcendental abode of the Lord and attain the exact same status as His eternal associates.

Speaking of gendered differences in reaction and action—you’ve talked of a certain “bullying reception” to your book here in New Zealand by a certain set of older male critics. The omniscient narrator, the idea that you “had to be everywhere,” seems to have affronted some male readers, as has the length of the book. Have you experienced this reaction in the UK, too, or in Canada? Has it been a peculiarly New Zealand response, perhaps because of the necessarily small pool of literary competition here? This is a point that has been perhaps overstated. There’s been a lot written about what I said, and in fact the way I think and feel about the reviewing culture we have in New Zealand has changed a lot through reading the responses and objections of others. Initially I used the word “bullying” only to remark that, as we all learn at school, more often than not someone’s objections are more to do with their own shortcomings or failures than with yours, and that’s something that you have to remember when you’re seeing your artistic efforts devalued or dismissed in print. I don’t feel bullied when I receive a negative review, but I do think that some of the early reviewers refused to engage with the book on its own terms, and that refusal seemed to me to have a lot to do with my gender and my age. To even things out, I called attention to the gender and age of those reviewers, which at the time seemed only fair. I feel that it’s very important to say that sexism is a hegemonic problem, written in to all kinds of cultural attitudes that are held by men and women alike. As a culture we are much more comfortable with the idea of the male thinker than the female thinker, simply because there are so many more examples, throughout history, of male thinkers; as an image and as an idea, the male thinker is familiar to us, and acts in most cases as a default. Consequently female thinkers are often unacknowledged and discouraged, sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by men, and sometimes by women. I am lucky, following the Man Booker announcement, that my work is now being read very seriously indeed; but that is a privilege conferred for the most part by the status of the prize, and I know that I am the exception rather than the rule. I’d like to see a paradigm shift, and I’m confident that one is on the way, but the first thing that needs to happen is a collective acknowledgment that reviewing culture is gendered—that everything is gendered—and that until each of us makes a conscious effort to address inequality, we will each remain a part of the problem, rather than a part of the solution. Protesting the fact of inequality is like protesting global warming or evolution: it’s a conservative blindness, born out of cowardice and hostility.

Making the most of an experience: Living fully is extolled everywhere in popular culture. I have only to turn on the television at random to be assailed with the following messages: “It’s the best a man can get.” “It’s like having an angel by your side.” “Every move is smooth, every word is cool. I never want to lose that feeling.” “You look, they smile. You win, they go home.” What is being sold here? A fantasy of total sensory pleasure, social status, sexual attraction, and the self-image of a winner. As it happens, all these phrases come from the same commercial for razor blades, but living life fully is part of almost any ad campaign. What is left out, however, is the reality of what it actually means to fully experience something. Instead of looking for sensory overload that lasts forever, you’ll find that the experiences need to be engaged at the level of meaning and emotion. Meaning is essential. If this moment truly matters to you, you will experience it fully. Emotion brings in the dimension of bonding or tuning in: An experience that touches your heart makes the meaning that much more personal. Pure physical sensation, social status, sexual attraction, and feeling like a winner are generally superficial, which is why people hunger for them repeatedly. If you spend time with athletes who have won hundreds of games or with sexually active singles who have slept with hundreds of partners, you’ll find out two things very quickly: (1) Numbers don’t count very much. The athlete usually doesn’t feel like a winner deep down; the sexual conqueror doesn’t usually feel deeply attractive or worthy. (2) Each experience brings diminishing returns; the thrill of winning or going to bed becomes less and less exciting and lasts a shorter time. To experience this moment, or any moment, fully means to engage fully. Meeting a stranger can be totally fleeting and meaningless, for example, unless you enter the individual’s world by finding out at least one thing that is meaningful to his or her life and exchange at least one genuine feeling. Tuning in to others is a circular flow: You send yourself out toward people; you receive them as they respond to you. Notice how often you don’t do that. You stand back and insulate yourself, sending out only the most superficial signals and receive little or nothing back. The same circle must be present even when someone else isn’t involved. Consider the way three people might observe the same sunset. The first person is obsessing over a business deal and doesn’t even see the sunset, even though his eyes are registering the photons that fall on their retinas. The second person thinks, “Nice sunset. We haven’t had one in a while.” The third person is an artist who immediately begins a sketch of the scene. The differences among the three are that the first person sent nothing out and received nothing back; the second allowed his awareness to receive the sunset but had no awareness to give back to it—his response was rote; the third person was the only one to complete the circle: He took in the sunset and turned it into a creative response that sent his awareness back out into the world with something to give. If you want to fully experience life, you must close the circle.

What are some of the concerns regarding the penal substitutionary metaphors? Some of this debate is theological and exegetical, often centering upon Paul and the proper understanding of his doctrine of justification. Specifically, some suggest that the penal substitutionary metaphors, read too literally, create a problematic view of God: that God is inherently a God of retributive justice who can only be “satisfied” with blood sacrifice. A more missional worry is that the metaphors behind penal substitutionary atonement reduce salvation to a binary status: Justified versus Condemned and Pure versus Impure. The concern is that when salvation reduces to avoiding the judgment of God (Jesus accepting our “death sentence”) and accepting Christ’s righteousness as our own (being “washed” and made “holy” for the presence of God), we can ignore the biblical teachings that suggest that salvation is communal, cosmic in scope, and is an ongoing developmental process. These understandings of atonement - that salvation is an active communal engagement that participates in God’s cosmic mission to restore all things - are vital to efforts aimed at motivating spiritual formation and missional living. As many have noted, by ignoring the communal, cosmic, and developmental facets of salvation penal substitutionary atonement becomes individualistic and pietistic. The central concern of penal substitutionary atonement is standing “washed” and “justified” before God. No doubt there is an individual aspect to salvation - every metaphor has a bit of the truth —but restricting our view to the legal and purity metaphors blinds us to the fact that atonement has developmental, social, political, and ecological implications.

But I believe that another important explanation for introverts who love their work may come from a very different line of research by the influential psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the state of being he calls “flow.” Flow is an optimal state in which you feel totally engaged in an activity—whether long-distance swimming or songwriting, sumo wrestling or sex. In a state of flow, you’re neither bored nor anxious, and you don’t question your own adequacy. Hours pass without your noticing. The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings. Although flow does not depend on being an introvert or an extrovert, many of the flow experiences that Csikszentmihalyi writes about are solitary pursuits that have nothing to do with reward-seeking: reading, tending an orchard, solo ocean cruising. Flow often occurs, he writes, in conditions in which people “become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself.” In a sense, Csikszentmihalyi transcends Aristotle; he is telling us that there are some activities that are not about approach or avoidance, but about something deeper: the fulfillment that comes from absorption in an activity outside yourself. “Psychological theories usually assume that we are motivated either by the need to eliminate an unpleasant condition like hunger or fear,” Csikszentmihalyi writes, “or by the expectation of some future reward such as money, status, or prestige.” But in flow, “a person could work around the clock for days on end, for no better reason than to keep on working.

Dr. Gilligan states: “I am suggesting that the only way to explain the causes of violence, so that we can learn how to prevent it, is to approach violence as a problem in public health and preventive medicine, and to think of violence as a symptom of life-threatening pathology, which, like all form of illness, has an etiology or cause, a pathogen.”160 In Dr. Gilligan's diagnosis he makes it very clear that the greatest cause of violent behavior is social inequality, highlighting the influence of shame and humiliation as an emotional characteristic of those who engage in violence.161 Thomas Scheff, a emeritus professor of sociology in California stated that “shame was the social emotion”.162 Shame and humiliation can be equated with the feelings of stupidity, inadequacy, embarrassment, foolishness, feeling exposed, insecurity and the like – all largely social or comparative in their origin. Needless to say, in a global society with not only growing income disparity but inevitably “self-worth” disparity - since status is touted as directly related to our “success” in our jobs, bank account levels and the like - it is no mystery that feelings of inferiority, shame and humiliation are staples of the culture today. The consequence of those feelings have very serious implications for public health, as noted before, including the epidemic of the behavioral violence we now see today in its various complex forms. Terrorism, local school and church shootings, along with other extreme acts that simply did not exist before in the abstractions they find context today, reveals a unique evolution of violence itself. Dr. Gilligan concludes: “If we wish to prevent violence, then, our agenda is political and economic reform.”163

This is why churches that try the most self-consciously to avoid social issues and political questions become, unwittingly, the most political of all. The founders of my church tradition, in concert with others, spoke much of the “spirituality of the church” as a reason for avoiding “political” issues. To some degree, they were right. The church does not bear the sword that’s been given to the state; the church advances by spiritual, not carnal, means. But the “spirituality of the church” was a convenient doctrine. My denomination was founded back in the nineteenth century by those who advocated for human slavery, and who sought to keep their consciences and their ballots and their wallets away from a transcendent word that would speak against the sinful injustice of a regime of kidnapping, rape, and human beings wickedly deigning to buy and sell other human beings created in the image of God. Slavery, they argued (to their shame), was a “political” issue that ought not distract the church from its mission: evangelism and discipleship. What such a move empowered was not just social injustice (which would have been bad enough), but also personal sin. When so-called “simple gospel preaching” churches in 1856 Alabama or 1925 Mississippi calls sinners to repentance for fornicating and gambling but not for slaveholding or lynching, those churches may be many things but they are hardly non-political. By not addressing these issues, they are addressing them, by implicitly stating that they are not worthy of the moral scrutiny of the church, that they will not be items of report at the Judgment Seat of Christ. These churches, thus, bless the status quo, with all the fealty of a court chaplain. The same is true of a church in twenty-first-century America that doesn’t speak to the pressing issues of justice and righteousness around us, such as the horror of abortion and the persisting sins of racial injustice.

It is feminist thinking that empowers me to engage in a constructive critique of [Paulo] Freire’s work (which I needed so that as a young reader of his work I did not passively absorb the worldview presented) and yet there are many other standpoints from which I approach his work that enable me to experience its value, that make it possible for that work to touch me at the very core of my being. In talking with academic feminists (usually white women) who feel they must either dismiss or devalue the work of Freire because of sexism, I see clearly how our different responses are shaped by the standpoint that we bring to the work. I came to Freire thirsty, dying of thirst (in that way that the colonized, marginalized subject who is still unsure of how to break the hold of the status quo, who longs for change, is needy, is thirsty), and I found in his work (and the work of Malcolm X, Fanon, etc.) a way to quench that thirst. To have work that promotes one’s lib­eration is such a powerful gift that it does not matter so much if the gift is flawed. Think of the work as water that contains some dirt. Because you are thirsty you are not too proud to extract the dirt and be nourished by the water. For me this is an experience that corresponds very much to the way individuals of privilege respond to the use of water in the First World context. When you are privileged, living in one of the richest countries in the world, you can waste resources. And you can especially justify your dispos­al of something that you consider impure. Look at what most people do with water in this country. Many people purchase special water because they consider tap water unclean—and of course this purchasing is a luxury. Even our ability to see the water that come through the tap as unclean is itself informed by an imperialist consumer per­ spective. It is an expression of luxury and not just simply a response to the condition of water. If we approach the drinking of water that comes from the tap from a global perspective we would have to talk about it differently. We would have to consider what the vast majority of the peo­ ple in the world who are thirsty must do to obtain water. Paulo’s work has been living water for me.

The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen in the last few generations has been designed to help fill free time with enjoyable experiences. Nevertheless, instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action. This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide for enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality. Mass leisure, mass culture, and even high culture when only attended to passively and for extrinsic reasons—such as the wish to flaunt one’s status—are parasites of the mind. They absorb psychic energy without providing substantive strength in return. They leave us more exhausted, more disheartened than we were before. Unless a person takes charge of them, both work and free time are likely to be disappointing. Most jobs and many leisure activities—especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media—are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to make money for someone else. If we allow them to, they can suck out the marrow of our lives, leaving only feeble husks. But like everything else, work and leisure can be appropriated for our needs. People who learn to enjoy their work, who do not waste their free time, end up feeling that their lives as a whole have become much more worthwhile. “The future,” wrote C. K. Brightbill, “will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.

It is foolish to be in thrall to fame and fortune, engaged in painful striving all your life with never a moment of peace and tranquillity. Great wealth will drive you to neglect your own well-being in pursuit of it. It is asking for harm and tempting trouble. Though you leave behind at your death a mountain of gold high enough to prop up the North Star itself, it will only cause problems for those who come after you. Nor is there any point in all those pleasures that delight the eyes of fools. Big carriages, fat horses, glittering gold and jewels – any man of sensibility would view such things as gross stupidity. Toss your gold away in the mountains; hurl your jewels into the deep. Only a complete fool is led astray by avarice. Everyone would like to leave their name unburied for posterity – but the high-born and exalted are not necessarily fine people, surely. A dull, stupid person can be born into a good house, attain high status thanks to opportunity and live in the height of luxury, while many wonderfully wise and saintly men choose to remain in lowly positions, and end their days without ever having met with good fortune. A fierce craving for high status and position is next in folly to the lust for fortune. We long to leave a name for our exceptional wisdom and sensibility – but when you really think about it, desire for a good reputation is merely revelling in the praise of others. Neither those who praise us nor those who denigrate will remain in the world for long, and others who hear their opinions will be gone in short order as well. Just who should we feel ashamed before, then? Whose is the recognition we should crave? Fame in fact attracts abuse and slander. No, there is nothing to be gained from leaving a lasting name. The lust for fame is the third folly. Let me now say a few words, however, to those who dedicate themselves to the search for knowledge and the desire for understanding. Knowledge leads to deception; talent and ability only serve to increase earthly desires. Knowledge acquired by listening to others or through study is not true knowledge. So what then should we call knowledge? Right and wrong are simply part of a single continuum. What should we call good? One who is truly wise has no knowledge or virtue, nor honour nor fame. Who then will know of him, and speak of him to others? This is not because he hides his virtue and pretends foolishness – he is beyond all distinctions such as wise and foolish, gain and loss. I have been speaking of what it is to cling to one’s delusions and seek after fame and fortune. All things of this phenomenal world are mere illusion. They are worth neither discussing nor desiring.

I had the most powerful magic, and the need to use it.  Lifting my right hand, I summoned forth my Mana, converted it into magic, and spoke my own word of power.  Much to her surprise, I could still cast with my right hand, despite its missing digits.   “You aren’t really going to do this, are you?” Shart asked.  He was making his way over to me with only the barest hint of floundering. “Hoopie!” The spell pierced her barrier, turning the now useless boundary a bright blue.  Her expression was a mix of terror and amazement as the spell bypassed her defenses and impacted her.  Her ass exploded in an echoing cacophony of flatulence. It was literally the loudest fart I’d ever heard.  As someone whose mother-in-law used to regularly drive people from the room with her anal symphonies, I considered myself an expert.  I highly suspected Bashara was the kind of lady who didn’t fart in public; she must have been saving that one up all day.  She blinked several times, as she checked her status log.  It was time to execute the second part of my plan. Grabbing Shart, amidst his squawking protests, I yelled my battlecry. “Poke-Shart, Go!” Then, I flung the invisible demon straight at her head. Shart only weighed thirty pounds or so; I was more than strong enough to fling him at a pretty good clip.  His cry of “you bastard” slowly faded the further he flew.     I had hoped that being hit in the face would knock her off balance.  That would have given me a moment to pick up my sword and close.  Actually, I hoped it was possible to hit her at all; despite Shart’s ability to fly, he wasn’t very aerodynamic.  I couldn’t win a spell duel, considering I had only one good hand and didn’t know any good spells.  I was going to have to engage her in combat.  I sincerely hoped that my invisible familiar would give me an advantage. I hadn’t calculated on hitting the top of her head with Shart’s Belly Button of Holding.  Her head disappeared, completely buried down to the top of her shoulders.  Her body, however, still worked.  She was careening around, her hands furiously pushing on the demon.  The remaining bandit, coincidentally, looked at Bashara just as her head vanished.  Incorrectly assuming that I had some sort of head vanishing spell, he tried to break and run.   You can’t run away from a homicidal badger.   I managed to get within arms’ reach of Bashara, just as she had successfully begun pushing Shart off her head. She had freed her mouth and was screaming.  As she continued pushing, her nose popped free.  I felt only slightly bad when I grabbed the demon and pushed him all the way down.  In seconds, only her feet were exposed.  Then, I pushed those in as well.

In 2009, Kahneman and Klein took the unusual step of coauthoring a paper in which they laid out their views and sought common ground. And they found it. Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform. The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid. In golf or chess, a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries, a consequence is quickly apparent, and similar challenges occur repeatedly. Drive a golf ball, and it either goes too far or not far enough; it slices, hooks, or flies straight. The player observes what happened, attempts to correct the error, tries again, and repeats for years. That is the very definition of deliberate practice, the type identified with both the ten-thousand-hours rule and the rush to early specialization in technical training. The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better. Kahneman was focused on the flip side of kind learning environments; Hogarth called them “wicked.” In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both. In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons. Hogarth noted a famous New York City physician renowned for his skill as a diagnostician. The man’s particular specialty was typhoid fever, and he examined patients for it by feeling around their tongues with his hands. Again and again, his testing yielded a positive diagnosis before the patient displayed a single symptom. And over and over, his diagnosis turned out to be correct. As another physician later pointed out, “He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid Mary.” Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson. Few learning environments are that wicked, but it doesn’t take much to throw experienced pros off course. Expert firefighters, when faced with a new situation, like a fire in a skyscraper, can find themselves suddenly deprived of the intuition formed in years of house fires, and prone to poor decisions. With a change of the status quo, chess masters too can find that the skill they took years to build is suddenly obsolete.

Epidemiologic theory. As a phrase, it sounds at once dry and arcane.Yet, in reality, it is vital and engaging. Epidemiologic theory is about explaining the people’s health. It is about life and death. It is about biology and society. It is about ecology and the economy. It is about how the myriad activities and meanings of people’s lives—involving work, dignity, desire, love, play, confl ict, discrimination, and injustice—become literally incorporated into our bodies—that is, embodied—and manifest in our health status, individually and collectively. It is about why rates of disease and death change over time and vary geographically. It is about why different societies—and within societies, why different societal groups—have better or worse health than others. And it is about essential knowledge critical for improving the people’s health and minimizing inequitable burdens of disease, disability, and death

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to see that education can inspire us to become more capable parents, more engaged citizens, and more resourceful human beings. Knowledge has the power to widen our eyes, open our minds, and enable us to see past people’s gender or economic status. It can help us value pricelessness over price tag. It can help us recognize the shame in humiliating and the grace in humility. And it can help us to understand that there is no greater richness than love.” Maha Al Fahim Share

It is proper Netiquette to post pictures with status updates to make them more engaging. NetworkEtiquette.net

To say that spiritual engagement somehow causes humanity to become violent is to ignore the obvious pressures on all human societies throughout history to accrue scarce resources, to shore up status and power, and to impose order on chaos. If anything, every new religion emerged at least in part as a protest against violence and oppression.

A hand touched her shoulder. “Miss Erstwhile,” Martin said. Jane spun around, guilty to have just come from a marriage proposal, ecstatic at her refusal, dispirited by another ending, and surprised to discover Martin was the one person in the world she most wanted to see. “Good evening, Theodore,” she said. “I’m Mr. Bentley now, a man of land and status, hence the fancy garb. They’ll allow me to be gentry tonight because they need the extra bodies, but only so long as I don’t talk too much.” His eyes flicked to a point across the room. Jane followed his glance and saw Mrs. Wattlesbrook wrapped in yards of lace and eyeing them suspiciously. “Let’s not talk, then.” Jane pulled him into the next dance. He stood opposite her, tall and handsome and so real there among all the half-people. They didn’t talk as they paraded and turned and touched hands, wove and skipped and do-si-doed, but they smiled enough to feel silly, their eyes full of a secret joke, their hands reluctant to let go. As the dance finished, Jane noticed Mrs. Wattlesbrook making her determined way toward them. “We should probably…” Martin said. Jane grabbed his hand and ran, fleeing to the rhythm of another dance tune, out the ballroom door and into a side corridor. Behind them, hurried boot heels echoed. They ran through the house and out back, crunching gravel under their feet, making for the dark line of trees around the perimeter of the park. Jane hesitated before the damp grass. “My dress,” she said. Martin threw her over his shoulder, her legs hanging down his front. He ran. Jostled on her stomach, Jane gave out laughter that sounded like hiccups. He weaved his way around hedges and monuments, finally stopping on a dry patch of ground hidden by trees. “Here you are, my lady,” he said, placing her back on her feet. Jane wobbled for a moment before gaining her balance. “So, these are your lands, Mr. Bentley.” “Why, yes. I shape the shrubs myself. Gardeners these days aren’t worth a damn.” “I should be engaged to Mr. Nobley tonight. You know you’ve absolutely ruined this entire experience for me.” “I’m sorry, but I warned you, five minutes with me and you’ll never go back.” “You’re right about that. I’d decided to give up on men entirely, but you made that impossible.” “Listen, I’m not trying to start anything serious. I just--” “Don’t worry.” Jane smiled innocently. “Weird intense Jane gone, new relaxed Jane just happy to see you.” “You do seem different.” He touched her arms, pulled her in closer. “I’m happy to see you too, if you’d know. I think I missed you a bit.” “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.

society. Sins such as adultery, bribery, and betrayal are more like treason than like crime; they damage the social order. Social harmony can be rewoven only by slowly recommitting to relationships and rebuilding trust. The sins of arrogance and pride arise from a perverse desire for status and superiority. The only remedy for them is to humble oneself before others. In other words, people in earlier times inherited a vast moral vocabulary and set of moral tools, developed over centuries and handed down from generation to generation. This was a practical inheritance, like learning how to speak a certain language, which people could use to engage their own moral struggles.

Mr. Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey” as well as the upcoming NBC period drama “The Gilded Age,” is adapting “Doctor Thorne,” the 1858 novel by Anthony Trollope, for ITV in Britain. The novel is the third in a series of six set in the fictional English county of Barsetshire, and depicts a tumultuous engagement. Like “Downton Abbey,” the story deals with social status, seduction, and illegitimacy.

Death in life is a mode of existence in which one has ceased all play; there is no further striving for titles. All competitive engagement with others has been abandoned. For some, though not for all, death in life is a misfortune, the resigned acceptance of a loser's status, a refusal to hold any title up for recognition. For others, however, death in life can be regarded as an achievement, the result of spiritual discipline, say, intended to extinguish all traces of struggle with the world, a liberation from the need for any title whatsoever. "Die before ye die," declare the Sufi mystics.

So, you’re in love with the Smith girl?” Ben stumbled at his father’s question that was really more of a statement. “No. Not at all.” He forced a short laugh. “Of course I’m not in love with Susanna Smith.” “Well, you certainly fooled me tonight.” “I cannot deny I’m attracted to Susanna,” he admitted. “Who wouldn’t be? She’s intelligent, witty, and interesting.” “She sounds like the perfect match for you.” He wanted to agree. Susanna was everything Hannah was not. He thought about her more than he should. And even in her grandfather’s study earlier, he’d felt a pull toward her that was unbearably strong and difficult to resist. He knew he needed to control himself better around Susanna. Surely he would have less trouble with his attraction once he was finally engaged to Hannah. “I’m in the process of trying to propose marriage to Hannah Quincy.” His father plodded forward without missing a step. “Then you love Miss Quincy?” Did he love Hannah? Ben shook his head. “Sometimes there are factors more important than love.” “Then you are in love with her wealth rather than her person?” Ben wanted to rebut his father’s words—similar to those of Parson Wibird from earlier in the day—but something about his father’s bluntness kept him from doing so. “Hannah Quincy will give me what I currently lack, namely the status and approval of my peers.” His father was silent for a long moment, the steady scraping of their boots against the dirt road reminding Ben of the steadiness of the man by his side. He was a deacon of the church and had been the selectman of the town for years. There was not a nobler or more respected man among the community. “There’s more than one way to earn the approval of your peers.” His father spoke slowly as if weighing his words carefully. “And often the best way is through strength of character.

If we do not have a vision before us of where we are headed, we will assume that the status quo is normal, and that we and our cultures and our societies are “only human,” without ever realizing that we have never seen normal humanity, in our lives.

Pirates are daring, adventurous, and willing to set forth into uncharted territories with no guarantee of success. They reject the status quo and refuse to conform to any society that stifles creativity and independence. They

The number of axes of social division under intersectionality can be almost infinite—but they cannot be reduced to the individual. (People often joke that the individual is the logical endpoint of an intersectional approach that divides people into smaller and smaller groups—but this misunderstands the fundamental reliance on group identity. Even if a person were a unique mix of marginalized identities, thus intersectionally a unique individual, she would be understood through each and all of those group identities, with the details to be filled in by Theory. She would not be understood as an individual.) Consequently, the categories in which intersectionality is interested are numerous. In addition to those of race, sex, class, sexuality, gender identity, religion, immigration status, physical ability, mental health, and body size, there are subcategories, such as exact skin tone, body shape, and abstruse gender identities and sexualities, which number in the hundreds. These all have to be understood in relation to one another so that the positionality each intersection of them confers can be identified and engaged. Moreover, this doesn’t just make intersectionality incredibly internally complex. It is also messy because it is so highly interpretive and operates on so many elements of identity simultaneously, each of which has different claims to a relative degree of marginalization, not all of which are directly comparable. However, there is nothing complex about the overarching idea of intersectionality, or the Theories upon which it is built. Nothing could be simpler. It does the same thing over and over again: look for the power imbalances, bigotry, and biases that it assumes must be present and pick at them. It reduces everything to one single variable, one single topic of conversation, one single focus and interpretation: prejudice, as understood under the power dynamics asserted by Theory. Thus, for example, disparate outcomes can have one, and only one, explanation, and it is prejudicial bigotry.

Expressive association In the United States, expressive associations are groups that engage in activities protected by the First Amendment – speech, assembly, press, petitioning government for a redress of grievances, and the free exercise of religion. In Roberts v. United States Jaycees, the U.S. Supreme Court held that associations may not exclude people for reasons unrelated to the group's expression. However, in the subsequent decisions of Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, the Court ruled that a group may exclude people from membership if their presence would affect the group's ability to advocate a particular point of view. The government cannot, through the use of anti-discrimination laws, force groups to include a message that they do not wish to convey. However, this concept does not now apply in the University setting due to the Supreme Court's ruling in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), which upheld Hastings College of Law policy that the school's conditions on recognizing student groups were viewpoint neutral and reasonable. The policy requires student organizations to allow "any student to participate, become a member, or seek leadership positions, regardless of their status or beliefs" and so, can be used to deny the group recognition as an official student organization because it had required its members to attest in writing that "I believe in: The Bible as the inspired word of God; The Deity of our Lord, Jesus Christ, God's son; The vicarious death of Jesus Christ for our sins; His bodily resurrection and His personal return; The presence and power of the Holy Spirit in the work of regeneration; [and] Jesus Christ, God's son, is Lord of my life." The Court reasoned that because this constitutional inquiry occurs in the education context the same considerations that have led the Court to apply a less restrictive level of scrutiny to speech in limited public forums applies. Thus, the college's all-comers policy is a reasonable, viewpoint-neutral condition on access to the student organization forum.

So for mammals, sexual competition, driven by the desire to both engage oneself and prevent others from engaging in sex, will texture their lives. Long before humans appear at the very twilight of our day, we will see the working of the archetypes that enable sexual competition, loyalties and betrayals, group living and tribalism, submission to leaders and fear of dominant males, the striving for status and social position, cooperative hunting and working together – all the themes that, when we eventually arrive, are going to play big time in the minds of humans. I find it amazing that so many of the desires that flow through me, and indeed all of us, were designed not only long before me but long before all humans.

While I know you were trying to earn points with her after seeing her status went from engaged to single, "You didn't need him anyway" probably wasn't the best comment to type after her fiance died in a car accident... I hope I've conveyed a message...

While working in a genito-urinary medicine clinic I saw a significant number of young men—some in their teens—who engaged in frequent unprotected sex because they wanted to contract HIV. This was at a time when HIV was almost exclusively associated with homosexuality, the development of AIDS and premature death. For many reasons, mostly social and cultural, HIV had become mixed up with sexual politics and notions of selfhood. These young men wanted to be HIV-positive to strengthen their sense of being gay and acquire status within the wider gay community. Many of them achieved their aim —and subsequently died.

Controlling images were never just about the object of study—popular culture memes or characters from movies and television shows—but about the process of reproducing structural inequalities in our everyday lives. Social psychologists study how we acknowledge and reproduce status groups like “man,” “woman,” “black,” “white,” “Asian,” “poor,” “rich,” “novice,” and “expert” in routine interactions. These are statuses of people that we recognize as meaningful categories. When we interact with someone, a few things happen. We size up the person we are engaging with, scanning for any risks to our own social status. You don’t want to be the person who mistakes the company president for the janitor, for example. We also scan others’ perception of us. This is how all kinds of impromptu moments of cooperation make our day go smoothly. It’s the guy who sees you struggling to get something on the bus and coordinates the four people around you to help you get on. Or it’s the three women in a fast food line who all grab for a baby’s bottle just before it hits the floor. We cooperate in micromoments and in longer settings like the waiting room of a doctor’s office. And, when we are cooperating with strangers or near strangers, we are using all kinds of ideas about status to make the interaction work to our benefit.

Authoritarians would rather leave the population demobilized and passive, while fascists want to engage and excite the public.65 Authoritarians want a strong but limited state. They hesitate to intervene in the economy, as fascism does readily, or to embark on programs of social welfare. They cling to the status quo rather than proclaim a new way.

One of the interesting variations, under the ways to fulfil ‘wish for attention’ through car ownership, is what the investigators call ‘conspicuous reserve’. Those people want other people to know their status but at the same time want to express it modestly. Some may engage in deliberate downgrading. This is ‘a frequent technique of people who are secure in their high social position. They show their superiority by displaying indifference to status - by purposely buying less expensive cars than they might be expected. They love beat-up station wagons and old cars.

The boundary separating fascism from authoritarianism is more subtle, but it is one of the most essential for understanding. I have already used the term, or the similar one of traditional dictatorship, in discussing Spain, Portugal, Austria, and Vichy France. The fascist-authoritarian boundary was particularly hard to trace in the 1930s, when regimes that were, in reality, authoritarian donned some of the decor of that period’s successful fascisms. Although authoritarian regimes often trample civil liberties and are capable of murderous brutality, they do not share fascism’s urge to reduce the private sphere to nothing. They accept ill-defined though real domains of private space for traditional “intermediary bodies” like local notables, economic cartels and associations, officer corps, families, and churches. These, rather than an official single party, are the main agencies of social control in authoritarian regimes. Authoritarians would rather leave the population demobilized and passive, while fascists want to engage and excite the public. Authoritarians want a strong but limited state. They hesitate to intervene in the economy, as fascism does readily, or to embark on programs of social welfare. They cling to the status quo rather than proclaim a new way.

Some believe that the bonobo is the “closest living representative of our earliest known ape-hominid ancestor.” In Jahme’s words, the bonobo is also known as the “make love not war” ape because sex is used by bonobos as a substitute for aggression. When things get tense between males, they stop themselves before things get really nasty and they rub their penises together . . . the females have lesbian sex, known as genito-genital rubbing, or GG rubbing . . . When an adolescent female bonobo tries to ingratiate herself into a new group of bonobos, she looks for a senior female and tries to become her friend. She sits on the periphery of things for a while and sizes up who is who in the hierarchy. The young female bonobo then tries to cement a bond with a high-status older female by engaging in homo-erotic acts with her.

Refusing to engage in an authentic exploration of racial realities erases (and denies) alternate racial experiences. If we block out other realities by not discussing them, we can pretend that they don’t exist, thereby assuming a shared racial experience. Not talking about race allows us to maintain our sense of ourselves as unique individuals, outside collective socialization and group experience. While it isn’t comfortable for most whites to talk about racism, we must do so if we want to challenge—rather than protect—racism. To avoid talking about racism can only hold our misinformation in place and prevent us from developing the necessary skills and perspectives to challenge the status quo.

Gail Pheterson writes in the Prostitution Prism that, "Significantly, those who explicitly provide sex are defined by their activity as 'prostitutes', a stigmatized and/or criminalized status, while those who buy sex are neither defined or branded by engagement in the same activity.

The truth about the situation of the Negro today is that there are powerful forces, composed largely of the corporate elite and Southern conservatives, which will resist any change in the economic or racial structure of this country that might cut into their resources or challenge their status; and such is precisely what any program genuinely geared to improve his lot must do. Moreover, these forces today are not merely resisting change. With their representative Richard Nixon in the White House, they are engaged in an assault on the advances made during the past decade. It has been Nixon's tragic and irresponsible choice to play at the politics of race—not, to be sure, with the primitive demagoguery of a "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, say, but nevertheless with the same intent of building a political majority on the basis of white hostility to blacks. So far he has been unsuccessful, but the potential for the emergence of such a reactionary majority does exist, especially if the turbulence and racial polarization which we have recently experienced persist. What is needed, therefore, is not only a program that would effect some fundamental change in the distribution of America's resources for those in the greatest need of them but a political majority that will support such a program as well. In other words, nothing less than a program truly, not merely verbally, radical in scope would be adequate to meet the present crisis; and nothing less than a politically constituted majority, outnumbering the conservative forces, would be adequate to carry it through.

…American men actually engage most in hunting and fishing. The desire of men in wealthy societies to re-create the food-gathering conditions of very primitive people appears to be an appropriate comment on the power of the hunting drives discussed earlier. Not only is hunting expensive in many places – think of the European on safari in Africa – but it is also time-consuming, potentially dangerous, and frequently involves considerable personal discomfort. Men do it because it is ‘fun’. So they say, and so one must conclude from their persistent rendition of the old pattern. What is relevant from our point of view is that hunting, and frequently fishing, are group activities. A man will choose his co-hunters very carefully. Not only does the relative intimacy of the hunt demand some congeniality, but there is also danger in hunting with inept or irresponsible persons. It is a serious matter, and even class barriers which normally operate quite rigidly may be happily breached for the period of the hunt. Some research on hunters in British Columbia suggests the near-piety which accompanies the hunt; hunting is a singular and important activity. One particular group of males takes along bottles of costly Crown Royal whisky for the hunt; they drink only superior whisky on this poignant re-creation of an ancient manly skill. But when their wives join them for New Year's celebrations, they drink an ordinary whisky: the purely formal and social occasion does not, it seems, merit the symbolic tribute of outstanding whisky. Gambling is another behaviour which, like hunting and sport, provides an opportunity in countless cultures for the weaving of and participation in the web of male affiliation. Not the gambling of the London casino, where glamorous women serve drinks, or the complex hope, greed, fate-tempting ritual, and action of the shiny American palaces in Nevada, and not the hidden gambling run by racketeers. Rather, the card games in homes or small clubs, where men gather to play for manageable stakes on a friendly basis; perhaps – like Jiggs and his Maggie – to avoid their women, perhaps to seek some money, perhaps to buy the pleasant passage of time. But also to be with their friends and talk, and define, by the game, the confines of their intimate male society. Obviously females play too, both on their own and in mixed company. But there are differences which warrant investigation, in the same way that the drinking of men in groups appears to differ from heterosexual or all-female drinking; the separation of all-male bars and mixed ones is still maintained in many places despite the powerful cultural pressures against such flagrant sexual apartheid. Even in the Bowery, where disaffiliated outcast males live in ways only now becoming understood, it has been noted that, ‘There are strong indications that the heavy drinkers are more integrated and more sociable than the light. The analytical problem lies in determining whether socialization causes drinking or drinking results in sociability when there is no disapproval.’ In the gentleman's club in London, the informally segregated working man's pub in Yorkshire, the all-male taverns of Montreal, the palm-wine huts of west Africa, perhaps can be observed the enactment of a way of establishing maleness and maintaining bonds which is given an excuse and possibly facilitated by alcohol. Certainly, for what they are worth in revealing the nature of popular conception of the social role of drinking, advertisements stress the manly appeal of alcohol – particularly whisky – though it is also clear that there are ongoing changes in the socio-sexual implications of drinking. But perhaps it is hasty to regard the process of change as a process of female emancipation which will culminate in similarity of behaviour, status, and ideals of males and females. The changes are still too recent to warrant this. Also, they have been achieved under sufficiently self-conscious pressure...

hunger lust drives many personalities to stand out from the crowd. Members of the new generation seek celebrity status regardless of the cost. We have each engaged in or witnessed someone else’s feeble attempts to define their personal strand of uniqueness derived through acquisitions, nationalism, body piercings, serving as rabid fans of various conglomeration’s sports teams, or by participating in other cult-like activities. Fervently engaging in these or similar misguided identity markers is laughable. Our real identity marker comes from engagement in a succession of character building experiences that integrate the conscious and unconscious mind into a coherent whole. A person defines the contours of their life through a series of life affirming actions, many of which choices initially seem disjointed from any functional significance beyond meeting the needs of our immediate family and mollifying our own selfishness. Akin to silent film actors of yesteryear, we must each play some worthwhile role in the symposium of life which staccato orchestra of spring beauty embraces every nook and cranny of planet Earth.

Generativity is considered normative in the middle and late adult years—so much so that people are considered “off time” or at odds with the “social clock” if, by their 40s, they are not assuming such responsibility through family or work. Generativity is not limited to family or kin. Nor does generativity seek necessarily to maintain the status quo ... Engaging in community volunteer work, especially for religious causes, confers particular benefits on the elderly. Panel data reveal that such community involvement lowers levels of depression in the elderly.

It was a jungle out there, and it was brutal. On the rare occasion when I started a conversation with a possible suitor, I found myself having to roll off a ten-minute questionnaire just to figure out if said man was actually available. I couldn’t just ask if he was single; as history had taught me, each man has his own unique definition of that status. I had to ask a range of questions: “Are you married?” “Are you engaged?” “Are you living with a woman?” “Do you have a girlfriend?” “Are you seeing anyone?” “Are you emotionally available?” A missed question could result in a strategic omission of fact and a subsequent waste of my time. Many men were hedging their bets or playing the market. I needed to be savvy. And wedding rings: what is it with married men not wearing wedding rings? As a single woman, my first glance is always at a man’s ring finger. No ring means fair game. It is hard enough finding a decent man without wasting an hour chatting with a potential only to find he neglected to wear the one thing that declared his commitment. Not a level playing field!

If I could redo college and choose any school, I’d choose Michigan again. Yes, the education was great. Yes, I made amazing friends. But the biggest reason for choosing Michigan again would be the aura of its collegiate football program. Auras naturally form around things like sports, religions, and political parties. But anything can have an aura. You should be looking for auras in every relationship you cultivate, every project you engage in, and every company you work for (or build). Different auras work for different people. You have to find one that works for you. While having an aura is a good thing, not having one is equally as bad. There are droves of companies with no aura. If you’re in one of these organizations, get out. I worked in a company with no aura for far too long. My department was the result of an acquisition that happened before I was hired, and the upper management never really knew what to do with our team. After two years of punching in and punching out, I quit. That’s when I started a company of my own, and I’m glad I took the risk. I found out recently that my department at the old company folded and, frankly, I’m not surprised. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I’m sure it had something to do with the aura, or lack thereof. When you’re part of an aura, you’re experiencing the essence of being alive. Caring. Believing. Feeling. Without it, you’re just showing up.

Everything in this manual is blatantly manipulative, but here’s the deal--all communication is manipulation. I cannot communicate, I cannot put a thought in your head, without manipulation. I have to get you to read this book. When you read it I must use skill to make sure that the message received is the message I intended. I want you to communicate skillfully, and one of the keys is to engage with the other person’s Human brain. And that means not triggering his or her Monkey brain. If someone feels their status is being challenged or questioned, much less threatened, the limbic system will kick in. Once the limbic system has kicked in, well, how good are you at talking to Monkeys in a way that gets things done? So study status. If you have a boss who acts out, gets aggressive and yells, instead of labeling him as an insecure little prick (labeling, hmmm?), try to take away his insecurity. If you are about to present an idea, ask for help with it instead of offering to help. The status that you manipulate here is not real. It is imaginary status based on what the ghost community of long-dead primates values.

Yet, the present dangers in the Middle East are a substantial result of the failures of recent American foreign policy. The Obama administration failed to negotiate a status of forces agreement (SOFA)5 with Iraq when U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq in 2011.6 Obama also refrained from engaging in significant military action in Iraq and Syria when such action had the chance of success. These omissions led to the removal of U.S. forces, leaving a power vacuum in the region.7 Iran, Russia, and ISIS have seized the opportunity, and all have grown stronger due to America’s withdrawal from the Middle East. The civil wars raging in Iraq and Syria—in which Iran, Russia, and ISIS are currently embroiled—illustrate the resulting power struggle. The instability in the Middle East has also led to a rise in refugees displaced from their homes, especially in Syria.

The new thinking about war also opened up the possibility of neutrality as a legal status; since war was no longer justified in accordance with a theological judgement based on notions of good and evil, it became possible for third parties to stand aside if their interests were not engaged. Equally, the ordinary subjects of belligerent rulers need not feel obliged to become emotionally engaged in the fray. War becomes a matter for sovereigns and their servants, civil and military; the kind of wider involvement that might be appropriate to a war between good and evil becomes strictly optional.6

When I got home, it was late at night. I walked into my room and it was painfully empty. And then I saw it. On the bed were the engagement ring and a letter. I couldn’t read the letter. I still have it but have never read it. I was too sad and ashamed about hurting her. Because I’d proposed to her on national television and now had some celebrity status, my management team said that we needed to make a statement. It could be in our own words, but Jamie and I had to make a statement announcing our breakup. We wrote it together over email and then we chose a date and time to post it. We texted each other right before we had decided we would post it, and then we each hit ENTER on our keyboards. There’s nothing more final than an official statement declaring to the world that your relationship is over. It was the hardest breakup I’ve ever had. And that is not a dig at Brandi or Tracy. I just think I was older, more mature, and more capable or forming a deeper connection with Jamie. And I did. I had a deeper connection to her than to anyone else I’ve ever known. As painful as it was to walk away from her, I know it was for the best for her and for me. And I will forever be thankful for the time I had with her. She made me a better person.

Cheered on by the growing crowd, Gabrielli joined forces with Mario. My teacher said, “In antiquity, pederasty was seen as an educational institution for the inculcation of moral and cultural values by the older man to the younger, as well as a form of sexual expression. It gained representation in history from the Archaic period onwards in Ancient Greece.” Both men had created an imaginary platform, as if speaking in a forum at an ancient amphitheater. “According to Plato, in ancient Greece, pederasty was a relationship and a bond, be it sexual or chaste, between an adult man and an adolescent boy outside his immediate family. “Most Greek men engaged in sexual relations with both women and boys, though exceptions to the rule were known; some avoided relations with women and others rejected relations with boys. In Rome relations with boys took a more informal and less civic path, with older men taking advantage of their dominant social status to extract sexual favors from their social inferiors. They carried on illicit relationships with freeborn boys.” My teacher spoke heroically.

Most Greek men engaged in sexual relations with both women and boys, though exceptions to the rule were known; some avoided relations with women and others rejected relations with boys. In Rome relations with boys took a more informal and less civic path, with older men taking advantage of their dominant social status to extract sexual favors from their social inferiors. They carried on illicit relationships with freeborn boys.” My teacher spoke heroically.

The program is grounded in 10 design principles, the aim of which is to create innovative solutions to intractable health problems....In other words, do not be content with the status quo. The remaining principles include several obvious but often overlooked themes in routine patient care: value each person, be human, be human-centered, codesign, facilitate connections, treat with dignity, and provide a stage from which the hardest, most important stories may be told.

Different Strokes for Different Folks “First things first—differences abound! Race, creed, color, gender, national origin, handicap, age, familial status, socio-economics, education, politics, religion, geography, and job status. Does that list look like a poster ad for the ACLU? Add in our vastly different life experiences and things really start to get interesting.

Julia's sexual tastes were more influenced by culture than Rob's. Men want to do the same sexual acts regardless of education levels, but female sexual preferences differ by education, culture, and status level. Highly educated women are much more likely to perform oral sex, engage in same-sex activity, and experiment with a variety of other activities than less-educated women. Religions women are less adventurous than nonreligious women, though the desires of religions men are not that much different than those of secular ones.

Maybe it’s time we all spend less time worrying about adhering to the cultural age expectations of engagement-marriage-house-puppy-baby and spend more time worrying about trying to embody His love to those around us here and now regardless of our relationship status.

ministry, pastors use their congregations to validate a sense of identity and worth. The church becomes an extension of the narcissistic ego, and its ups and downs lead to seasons of ego inflation and ego deflation for the pastor. Today social media platforms add to this mix. Because his sense of identity is bound up in external realities, his sense of mission is wavering and unmoored, often manifesting in constantly shifting visions and programs, frequent dissatisfaction with the status quo, and anxious engagement with staff and members.

Grant’s work extols the virtues of questioning default ideas, of engaging with different audiences and constantly looking for ways to change the status quo.