Institution Building Quotes

When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.

We don't need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run.

Will is… difficult,” Jem said. “But family is difficult. If I didn’t think the Institute was the best place for you, Tessa, I wouldn’t say it was. And one can build one’s own family. I know you feel inhuman, and as if you were set apart, away from life and love, but…” His voice cracked a little, the first time Tessa had heard him sound unsure. He cleared his throat. “I promise you, the right man won’t care.

Being different will always threaten the institution of understanding of a closed mind. However, evolution is built on difference, changing and the concept of thinking outside the box. Live to be your own unique brand, without apology.

We went back to the weird Institute building. At night there was a lot more activity. Erasers coming in non-stop. Nice cars, nice clothes, nice smug faces (that I wanted to smash!). -Fang's Blog

We don’t need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run.

I knew that, in a large degree, we were trying an experiment--that of testing whether or not it was possible for Negroes to build up and control the affairs of a large education institution. I knew that if we failed it wold injure the whole race.

They who strive to build up a firm faith in Scripture through disputation are doing things backwards.

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.

Engage, educate, equip, encourage, empower, energize, and elevate. Those are the methods for maximizing the potential of any individual, team, organization, or institution for ultimate success and significance. Those are the methods of a mentor leader.

This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads - this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews, and why they force all free peoples to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences. What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time's passage. They want for the days to repeat themselves, unchanging, they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions. Institutions and offices, stamps,newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, applications and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, elections results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others. What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of barcodes, labelling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language be illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way by night, in their great underground shops, they can organize reading of their own barcoded poetry. Move. Get going. Blesses is he who leaves.

For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure--one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.

Racism is the norm rather than an aberration. Feedback is key to our ability to recognize and repair our inevitable and often unaware collusion. In recognition of this, I try to follow these guidelines: 1.   How, where, and when you give me feedback is irrelevant—it is the feedback I want and need. Understanding that it is hard to give, I will take it any way I can get it. From my position of social, cultural, and institutional white power and privilege, I am perfectly safe and I can handle it. If I cannot handle it, it’s on me to build my racial stamina. 2. Thank you. The above guidelines rest on the understanding that there is no face to save and the game is up; I know that I have blind spots and unconscious investments in racism. My investments are reinforced every day in mainstream society. I did not set this system up, but it does unfairly benefit me, I do use it to my advantage, and I am responsible for interrupting it. I need to work hard to change my role in this system, but I can’t do it alone. This understanding leads me to gratitude when others help me.

Why should a man marry and have children, study and build a career; why should he invent new techniques, build new institutions, and develop new ideas--when he doubts if there will be a tomorrow which can guarantee the value of human effort? Crucial here for nuclear man is the lack of a sense of continuity, which is so vital for a creative life. He finds himself part of a nonhistory in which only the sharp moment of the here and now is valuable. For nuclear man life easily becomes a bow whose string is broken and from which no arrow can fly. In his dislocated state he becomes paralyzed. His reactions are not anxiety and joy, which were so much a part of existential man, but apathy and boredom.

The lottery is a tax on poor people and on people who can’t do math. Rich people and smart people would be in the line if the lottery were a real wealth-building tool, but the truth is that the lottery is a rip-off instituted by our government. This is not a moral position; it is a mathematical, statistical fact. Studies show that the zip codes that spend four times what anyone else does on lottery tickets are those in lower-income parts of town. The lottery, or gambling of any kind, offers false hope, not a ticket out.

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.

We cannot, of course, expect every leader to possess the wisdom of Lincoln or Mandela’s largeness of soul. But when we think about what questions might be most useful to ask, perhaps we should begin by discerning what our prospective leaders believe it worthwhile for us to hear. Do they cater to our prejudices by suggesting that we treat people outside our ethnicity, race, creed or party as unworthy of dignity and respect? Do they want us to nurture our anger toward those who we believe have done us wrong, rub raw our grievances and set our sights on revenge? Do they encourage us to have contempt for our governing institutions and the electoral process? Do they seek to destroy our faith in essential contributors to democracy, such as an independent press, and a professional judiciary? Do they exploit the symbols of patriotism, the flag, the pledge in a conscious effort to turn us against one another? If defeated at the polls, will they accept the verdict, or insist without evidence they have won? Do they go beyond asking about our votes to brag about their ability to solve all problems put to rest all anxieties and satisfy every desire? Do they solicit our cheers by speaking casually and with pumped up machismo about using violence to blow enemies away? Do they echo the attitude of Musolini: “The crowd doesn’t have to know, all they have to do is believe and submit to being shaped.”? Or do they invite us to join with them in building and maintaining a healthy center for our society, a place where rights and duties are apportioned fairly, the social contract is honored, and all have room to dream and grow. The answers to these questions will not tell us whether a prospective leader is left or right-wing, conservative or liberal, or, in the American context, a Democrat or a Republican. However, they will us much that we need to know about those wanting to lead us, and much also about ourselves. For those who cherish freedom, the answers will provide grounds for reassurance, or, a warning we dare not ignore.

In fact, the belief that climate could be plausibly governed, or managed, by any institution or human instrument presently at hand is another wide-eyed climate delusion. The planet survived many millennia without anything approaching a world government, in fact endured nearly the entire span of human civilization that way, organized into competitive tribes and fiefdoms and kingdoms and nation-states, and only began to build something resembling a cooperative blueprint, very piecemeal, after brutal world wars—in the form of the League of Nations and United Nations and European Union and even the market fabric of globalization, whatever its flaws still a vision of cross-national participation, imbued with the neoliberal ethos that life on Earth was a positive-sum game. If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it—the threat everywhere, and overwhelming, and total. And yet now, just as the need for that kind of cooperation is paramount, indeed necessary for anything like the world we know to survive, we are only unbuilding those alliances—recoiling into nationalistic corners and retreating from collective responsibility and from each other. That collapse of trust is a cascade, too.

The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions where the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from western clothes and hair styles to the European practice of colonizing foreign people. Unfortunately, they took up empire-building at precisely the moment when the cost of imperialism began to exceed the benefits.

Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations…. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures…. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures.

We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run.

I feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely. Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems. In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal. Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death. For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite-sized portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age. At least you used to. But on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those two states of mind converge. Suddenly it feels like I am back in Africa, where things can be taken away from you at random, in a single violent stroke, as quick as the whip of a snake’s head. Where tumult is raised with an abruptness that is as breathtaking as the violence itself.

Our analysis is clear: in today’s fast-moving and competitive world, the best thing you can do for your products, your company, and your people is institute a culture of experimentation and learning, and invest in the technical and management capabilities that enable it.

Well, what is there to do around here, anyway?" "Well, here we have World Domination; it builds strategy skills—you can play as a dog, a boot, or a trebuchet." Bewilder builds language and observation skills..." "I said I wanted to play VIDEO games." "Video games are a waste of time." "And board games AREN'T? Why do you even have these? No one lives here but you!" "I used to have some henchmen. Game night was a big hit." "Henchmen? What happened to them?" "I can't work with mercenaries. It's impossible to build trust when they only care about their paychecks. " "Oooh. Let me guess. The Institution paid them off?" "I don't want to talk about it.

Because as Europe and the United States become more diverse, it creates an anxiety, a racial anxiety, that is reflected in declining support for public space, public institutions, public infrastructure, and public education.

Research from the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute in Portugal suggests a possible explanation: sustained stress causes us to fall back on familiar routines. The part of our brain associated with decision-making and goal-directed behaviors shrinks and the brain regions associated with habit formation grow when we’re under chronic stress.

We not only do not believe that man is punished for his 'sins,' but emphatically state that there is no such thing as sin. There are wrongs and injustices, but no sin. Sin, like purgatory and hell, was invented by priests, first to frighten, and then to rob the living. We do not fear these myths and curses, and that is why we devote our time and energies to help our fellow man. That is why we build educational institutions and seek, by a slow and painful process, to teach man the true nature of the universe and a proper understanding of his place as a member in society. At the same time we try to fortify his mind with courage to withstand the rebuffs, the trials and tribulations of life. That it is a difficult and arduous task no one can deny because we cannot correct all of 'God's mistakes' in one life time. As Ingersoll so succinctly states: 'Nature cannot pardon.' Remember this: You are not a depraved human being. You have no sins to atone for. There is no need for fear. There are no ghosts—holy or otherwise. Stop making yourself miserable for 'the love of God.' Drive this monster of tyrannic fear from your mind, and enjoy the inestimable freedom of an emancipated human being.

Howard was almost as fond of this hall as he was of his own shop. The Brownies used it on Tuesdays, and the Women's Institute on Wednesdays. It had hosted jumble sales and Jubilee celebrations, wedding receptions and wakes, and it smelled of all of these things: of stale clothes and coffee urns, and the ghosts of home-baked cakes and meat salads; of dust and human bodies; but primarily of aged wood and stone.

we must all accept the responsibilities that come with the positions we hold, and we must ensure that obligations and restraints actually protect and empower us. We need to inhabit these institutions, love them, and reform them to help make them more lovely to others as well.

To my mind, a civilization is much more than just the contents of a few first-rate art galleries. It is a highly complex human organization. Its paintings, statues and buildings may well be its most eye-catching achievements, but they are unintelligible without some understanding of the economic, social and political institutions which devised them, paid for them, executed them – and preserved them for our gaze.

Ruins. Places built up by man, painstaking, sometimes over centuries. Layer upon layer of human experience, history, and art, represented in stone and wood and glass. Every single building had been put together with the idea of meeting some specific goal, a specific individual’s tastes, filling a purpose as an institution, or being built to cater to society’s tastes as a whole. Virtually every building had been a familiar place to someone, a home, a place of business. Roads had once been a part of people’s daily routines, bridges a convenience that was appreciated, if rarely acknowledged.

Yet today, from countless paintings, statues, and buildings, from literature and history, from personality and institution, from profanity, popular song, and entertainment media, from confession and controversy, from legend and ritual—Jesus stands quietly at the center of the contemporary world, as he himself predicted. He so graced the ugly instrument on which he died that the cross has become the most widely exhibited and recognized symbol on earth.

The Freedman’s Savings Bank serves as a cautionary tale for government support of banking for the poor when that support is just a façade. Draping a flag over a building and then installing private profit-motivated management inside is the most dangerous sort of government support. It induces trust in a vulnerable customer base that not only suffers from financial loss, but also loses all faith in public institutions. It poisons true government efforts to help. A similar phenomenon was at the heart of the failure of the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the recent financial

Building on the discovery of social causation through independent observation and verification this book presents a viable strategy for taming the violence unleashed on innocent people by religious and political institutions, and introduces the reader to a wealth of Win-Win Solutions for Our World in Crisis.

(This is how the iron law of bureaucracy installs itself at the heart of an institution. Most of the activities of any bureaucracy are devoted not to the organization’s ostensible goals, but to ensuring that the organization survives: because if they aren’t, the bureaucracy has a life expectancy measured in days before some idiot decision maker decides that if it’s no use to them they can make political hay by destroying it. It’s no consolation that some time later someone will realize that an organization was needed to carry out the original organization’s task, so a replacement is created: you still lost your job and the task went undone. The only sure way forward is to build an agency that looks to its own survival before it looks to its mission statement. Just another example of evolution in action.)

Development is not primarily a matter of mechanically collecting taxes to fund spending, no matter how useful this spending may be. Development is about building trust in institutions, including, most importantly, governments. When governments take more from the poor than from the wealthy, sustained trust becomes impossible.

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

Jimmy Hoffa once said to Frank Sheeran enthusiastically, “If you got it, Irish, a truck driver brought it to you. Don’t ever forget that. That’s the whole secret to what we do.” That “you got it” part covered food, clothing, medicine, building materials, fuel for home and industry, just about everything. Because a nationwide trucking strike could literally starve and shut down the nation, Bobby Kennedy called Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters “the most powerful institution in the country aside from the United States government.…

was a female Palestinian suicide bomber clutching a rifle in one hand and her little son in the other. This, it seemed, was the state’s only vision of gender equality. Ahmadinejad instituted separate elevators for men and women in government buildings, and he fired swaths of municipal workers who were not religious or devoted enough to his ideology. Tehran

The lesson, says Collins, is clear. We don’t need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run.

Research from the HeartMath Institute (heartmath.org) shows that when you have a feeling in your heart, it goes to every cell in the body, then outward—and other people up to 10 feet away can sense feelings transmitted by your heart. This means that each day you are broadcasting to your team how you feel. You are either broadcasting positive energy or negative energy, apathy or passion, indifference or purpose.

Never before in history had societies thought that such a set of high expectations about marriage was either realistic or desirable. Although many Europeans and Americans found tremendous joy in building their relationships around these values, the adoption of these unprecedented goals for marriage had unanticipated and revolutionary consequences that have since come to threaten the stability of the entire institution.

How and why, then, did California go about the biggest prison-building project in the history of the world? In my view, prisons are partial geographical solutions to political economic crises, organized by the state, which is itself in crisis. Crisis means instability that can be fixed only through radical measures, which include developing new relationships and new or renovated institutions out of what already exists.

The Bedlam that greeted James Tilly Matthews, then, was not so much a baroque spectacle of depravity as an exhausted and run-down public institution, its building falling apart and its professional image tarnished.

Still, there will come a day when the Trump era is over. In the best-case scenario, it is ended by the voters at the ballot box. In the worst-case scenario, it lasts more than four years. In either case, the first three years have shown that an autocratic attempt in the United States has a credible chance of succeeding. Worse than that, they have shown that an autocratic attempt builds logically on the structures and norms of American government: on the concentration of power in the executive branch, and on the marriage of money and politics. Recovery from Trumpism—a process that will be necessary whenever Trumpism ends—will not be a process of returning to government as it used to be, a fictional state of pre-Trump normalcy. Recovery will be possible only as reinvention: of institutions, of what politics means to us, and of what it means to be a democracy, if that is indeed what we choose to be.

Our ever-advancing technologies can have the effect of leveraging our mere human efforts into something greater. We can learn more, know more, build more, do more -- and that's wonderful. But access to these tools is not limited to those with good intentions. A small determined group can do a lot of damage. Large institutions, both public and private, operate with few controls in a fast-changing environment. For some reason, I don't find this entirely comforting.

Maybe today some people see opposition between, on the one hand, a seemingly barren, old, institutional church, cut off from the world, looking after buildings, and worried about membership and attendance, and on the other hand, new communities, filled with life, enthusiasm, risk, openness and welcome, concerned about the big issues of the world - injustice, torture, peace, disarmament, ecology, a better distribution of wealth, the liberation of women, drug addiction, AIDS, people with handicaps, etc. . . . But we know that every community, with time, risks closing in on itself and becoming an empty institution governed by laws. The new communities of today can become the closed up, barren institutions of tomorrow.

Hyggelige as the Danes may be, there is one serious drawback to being crazy about candles: the soot. Studies show that lighting just one candle fills the air with more microparticles than traffic in a busy street. A study undertaken by the Danish Building Research Institute showed that candles shed more particles indoors than either cigarettes or cooking. Despite Denmark being a highly regulated country, we have yet to see warning labels on candles. Nobody messes with the hygge fanatics.

A time of ongoing cultural revolution when the adversaries of Christianity have made plain their intent to use the state machinery to promote radical social ideologies hardly seems an opportune moment to discuss how the rights of property might be compromised. Private property is an important bulwark against the ongoing anti-Christian campaign. Although opponents of the free market will doubtless claim that they wish to interfere with the rights of property only to this or that extent, or only to bring about this or that allegedly desirable social outcome, there can be little excuse for such naiveté in our day. No Christian should want to build up an institution that he would be terrified to see in the hands of his ideological opponents.

In countries in which violent insurgencies have been victorious, we find, however that the country is much less likely to become a peaceful democracy after the conflict has ended. On the other hand, in analogous countries where mass, nonviolent campaigns have occurred, we see a much higher rate of postconflict democracies and a much lower rate of relapse into civil war. This does not mean that there will not be any sharp political contention or democratic backsliding following a successful nonviolent transition. But it does mean that political contention is more likely to transpire through nonviolent channels. Some may cite the American Revolution against the British as a counterexample to the above assertion. It should be remembered, however, that the armed insurgency against British forces, notably in the form of guerrilla warfare, was preceded by a decade of parallel institution building, nonviolent boycotts, civil disobedience, noncooperation, and other nation-building methods.

Regardless of whether one subscribes to the aims of the four movements whose stories we have told, there is much to appreciate about them as movements. They have overcome schisms; disbandment; leadership scandals; and/or the deaths of their founders. They have developed a highly innovative strategy—bypassing the state—to overcome the obstacles that their ideological strictness; ambitious agendas; and reluctance to compromise present. They have shown a strong entrepreneurial spirit in building effective social service agencies, medical facilities, schools, and businesses that often put the state’s efforts to shame. While they are not the Christian militias, al-Qaeda cells, or Jewish extremist groups whose terrorism has attracted much attention, the Muslim Brotherhood, Shas, Comunione e Liberazione, and the Salvation Army, with their strategy of rebuilding society, one institution at a time, may well prove more successful in sacralizing their societies than movements that use violence.

What does it mean to be Indigenous and to have ties to the person of Jesus without being tied to the destructive, colonizing institution of the church? It is a constant decolonizing. It is a constant longing for interaction with others who, following the Universal Christ, as Richard Rohr calls it, can take on the hope of a decolonizing faith. It is sharing space with Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color, and letting our experiences shape each other. It means interacting with my white friends, having really difficult conversations, and facing my own privilege in that conversation as well. Deconstruction and decolonization can be partners, along with grief and truth-telling. May we learn from this community that we are called to the bigger work ahead of us, so that, together, we know what it means to return to Mystery that has always wanted all of us. May we do this work together so that, each day that we move on, we are building a future that is made for everyone.

Fire, fire! The branches crackle and the night wind of late autumn blows the flame of the bonfire back and forth. The compound is dark; I am alone at the bonfire, and I can bring it still some more carpenters' shavings. The compound here is a privileged one, so privileged that it is almost as if I were out in freedom -- this is an island of paradise; this is the Marfino "sharashka" -- a scientific institute staffed with prisoners -- in its most privileged period. No one is overseeing me, calling me to a cell, chasing me away from the bonfire, and even then it is chilly in the penetrating wind. But she -- who has already been standing in the wind for hours, her arms straight down, her head drooping, weeping, then growing numb and still. And then again she begs piteously "Citizen Chief! Please forgive me! I won't do it again." The wind carries her moan to me, just as if she were moaning next to my ear. The citizen chief at the gatehouse fires up his stove and does not answer. This was the gatehouse of the camp next door to us, from which workers came into our compound to lay water pipes and to repair the old ramshackle seminary building. Across from me, beyond the artfully intertwined, many-stranded barbed-wire barricade and two steps away from the gatehouse, beneath a bright lantern, stood the punished girl, head hanging, the wind tugging at her grey work skirt, her feet growing numb from the cold, a thin scarf over her head. It had been warm during the day, when they had been digging a ditch on our territory. And another girl, slipping down into a ravine, had crawled her way to the Vladykino Highway and escaped. The guard had bungled. And Moscow city buses ran right along the highway. When they caught on, it was too late to catch her. They raised the alarm. A mean, dark major arrived and shouted that if they failed to catch the girl, the entire camp would be deprived of visits and parcels for whole month, because of her escape. And the women brigadiers went into a rage, and they were all shouting, one of them in particular, who kept viciously rolling her eyes: "Oh, I hope they catch her, the bitch! I hope they take scissors and -- clip, clip, clip -- take off all her hair in front of the line-up!" But the girl who was now standing outside the gatehouse in the cold had sighed and said instead: "At least she can have a good time out in freedom for all of us!" The jailer had overheard what she said, and now she was being punished; everyone else had been taken off to the camp, but she had been set outside there to stand "at attention" in front of the gatehouse. This had been at 6 PM, and it was now 11 PM. She tried to shift from one foot to another, but the guard stuck out his head and shouted: "Stand at attention, whore, or else it will be worse for you!" And now she was not moving, only weeping: "Forgive me, Citizen Chief! Let me into the camp, I won't do it any more!" But even in the camp no one was about to say to her: "All right, idiot! Come on it!" The reason they were keeping her out there so long was that the next day was Sunday, and she would not be needed for work. Such a straw-blond, naive, uneducated slip of a girl! She had been imprisoned for some spool of thread. What a dangerous thought you expressed there, little sister! They want to teach you a lesson for the rest of your life! Fire, fire! We fought the war -- and we looked into the bonfires to see what kind of victory it would be. The wind wafted a glowing husk from the bonfire. To that flame and to you, girl, I promise: the whole wide world will read about you.

To help our youth abide by the principles involved in temple marriage, we must help them to understand that temple marriage is more than just a place where the ceremony occurs; it is a whole orientation to life and marriage and home. It is a culmination of building attitudes toward the Church, chastity, and about our personal relationship with God--and many other things. "Thus, simply preaching temple marriage is not enough. Our family home evenings, seminaries, institutes, and auxiliaries must build toward this goal, not by exhortation alone but by showing that the beliefs and attitudes involved in temple marriage are those which can bring the kind of life here and in eternity that most humans really want for themselves" (The Teachings of Harold B. Lee, p. 244).

Compare the air to a forest. When forest fires occur regularly, there is less fuel for any one fire, so the burns don't become conflagrations. If you prevent forest fires and build up a huge mass of living and dead wood in the forest, when a burn at last occurs, it is likely to be serious and large. When increased atmospheric carbon warms the air and when more vapor is available, conflagrational storms become more likely. [...] Will the pattern of storms be seen in the future as an anomaly? Or with so much more water vapor in the air, is it now normal? 'Everyone talks about global warming,' said Gavin Schmidt, head of the NASA climate models at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 'but changes in rainfall often have a bigger impact. We're forcing the climate into a state we have not seen for millions of years

The teens whom [danah boyd, director of the research institute Data & Society] interviewed insisted they prefer hanging out in person to messaging on smartphones, but adults have restricted their mobility so thoroughly that they have few alternatives. The Internet has become young people's core social infrastructure because we've unfairly deprived them of access to other sites for meaningful connection. If we fail to build physical places where people can enjoy one another's company, regardless of age, class, race, or ethnicity, we will all be similarly confined.

A very small percentage of those in the church stand behind a pulpit or sport certain kinds of identifiable clothing. The actual leadership roster of the church includes disciples ministering in every arena of life, in business, law, medicine, education, the arts, sciences, government, and religion. The objective of Jesus’s church-growth strategy was not to build a single, behemoth social institution with a limited set of ordained authorities. Instead, his Spirit was to be poured out on all flesh to effect a widening, deepening base of influence within every nation, worldview, and social institution.

In my previous murals, I had tried to achieve a harmony in my painting with the architecture of the building. But to attempt such a harmony in the garden of the Institute would have defeated my purposes. For the walls here were of an intricate Italian baroque style, with little windows, heads of satyrs, doorways, and sculpturesque mouldings. It was within such a frame that I was to represent the life of an age which had nothing to do with baroque refinements -- a new life which was characterized by masses, machines, and naked mechanical power. So I set to work consciously to over-power the ornamentation of the room.

For more than a century, ideological extremists, at either end of the political spectrum, have seized upon well-publicized incidents, such as my encounter with Castro, to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal, working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists,' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it. “We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years......It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries.

Limits on people's capacities to conduct activities that are essential to everyday life are imposed by structural and systemic barriers. These barriers are part of a social system that regards some bodies as "normal" and some as "other", rather than considering a broad range of bodies and possibilities, for example when designing a building or piece of furniture. This relegates people with disabilities to the status of lesser citizens because of their lack of access. Disability is a byproduct of a society which is organized around only certain bodies which are defined as "normal", in laws, education, institutions, and in popular culture.

It is but fair to say that America is not a land of one race or one class of men. We are all Americans that have toiled and suffered and known oppression and defeat, from the first Indian that offered peace in Manhattan to the last Filipino pea pickers. America is not bound by geographical latitudes. America is not merely a land or an institution. America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of men that are building a new world. America is a prophecy of a new society of men: of a system that knows no sorrow or strife or suffering. America is a warning to those who would try to falsify the ideals of freemen.

Western capitalism will decay, but non-Western capitalism will not take its place, certainly not on a global scale, and neither will Western non-capitalism. As to non-Western capitalism, China will for many reasons not be able to take over as capitalism’s historical host and provide an orderly global environment for its further progress. Nor will there be a co-directorate of China and the United States amicably dividing between them the task of making the world safe for capitalism. And concerning non-capitalism, there is no such thing today as a global socialist movement, comparable to the socialisms that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries so successfully confronted capitalism in national power struggles. As long as the capitalist dynamism continues to outrun collective order-making and the building of non-market institutions, as it has for several decades now, it disempowers both capitalism’s government and its opposition, with the result that capitalism can be neither reborn nor replaced.

And when the ocean starts rising to the level of whatever building they're in and whatever floor they're on as they write their editorials, yeah, then they'll agree that there's a greenhouse effect and we'd better do something about it. Sure, no matter how lunatic people are, at some point or other they're going to realize that these problems exist, and they are approaching fast. It's just that the next thing they'll ask is, "So how can we make some money off it?" In fact, anybody in business who didn't ask that question would find themselves out of business—just because that's the way that capitalist institutions work. I mean, if some executive came along and said," I'm not going to look at it that way, I'm going to do things differently," well, they'd get replaced by someone who would try to make more money off it―because these are simply institutional facts, these are facts about the structure of the institutions. And if you don't like them, and I don't, then you're going to have to change the institutions. There really is no other way.

For years, walking round London, I had been aware of the actual land, lying concealed but not entirely changed or destroyed, beneath the surface of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century city. It has been said that 'God made the country and man made the town', but that is not true: the town is simply disguised countryside. Main roads, some older than history itself, still bend to avoid long-dried marshes, or veer off at an angle where the wall of a manor house once stood. Hills and valleys still remain; rivers, even though entombed in sewer pipes, still cause trouble in the foundations of neighbouring buildings and become a local focus for winter mists. Garden walls follow the line of hedgerows; the very street-patterns have been determined by the holdings of individual farmers and landlords, parcels of land some of which can be traced back to the Norman Conquest. The situation of specific buildings - pubs, churches, institutions - often dates from long distant decisions and actions on the part of men whose names have vanished from any record.

To cover all the bases, I also signed up for a class on psycholinguistics, which had a prerequisite in neural networking. In addition to not having taken it, I also didn’t know what neural networking was. For some reason, this didn’t really bother me, or seem like a problem. The handsome Italian professor wore the most elegant suits I had ever seen, in the most subtle colors—gray with a hint of smoky blue so elusive that you had to keep looking to be sure you hadn’t imagined it. The class met on the tenth floor of the psychology building, most of which was devoted to an institute for bat study and smelled accordingly. It was total sensory discord to see the handsome professor in his elegant suits stepping out of the elevator into the hall of stinky bats.

So the history of the modern state can also be read as the history of race, bringing together the stories of two kinds of victims of European political modernity: the internal victims of state building and the external victims of imperial expansion. Hannah Arendt noted this in her monumental study on the Holocaust, which stands apart for one reason: rather than talk about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Arendt sited it in the imperial history of genocide. The history she sketched was that of European settlers killing off native populations. Arendt understood the history of imperialism through the workings of racism and bureaucracy, institutions forged in the course of European expansion into the non-European world: “Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa, and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt and India.” Hannah Arendt’s blind spot was the New World. Both racism and genocide had occurred in the American colonies earlier than in South Africa. The near decimation of Native Americans through a combination of slaughter, disease, and dislocation was, after all, the first recorded genocide in modern history.

The bigger question now becomes, "so what? Who cares?" You will never have an infinite number of balls and you will never have a large enough urn to hold all of them. You will never build a lamp that can turn on and off arbitrarily fast. We cannot investigate time or space past a certain smallness, except when pretending, so what are supertasks, but recreational fictions, entertaining riddles? We can ask more questions than we can answer, so what? Well, here's what. Neanderthals. Neanderthals and humans, us, Homo sapiens, lived together in Europe for at least five thousand years. Neanderthals were strong and clever, they may have even intentionally buried their dead, but for hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthals barely went anywhere. They pretty much just explored and spread until they reached water or some other obstacle and then stopped. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, didn't do that. They did things that make no sense crossing terrain and water without knowing what lay ahead. Svante Pääbo has worked on the Neanderthal genome at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and he points out that technology alone didn't allow humans to go to Madagascar, to Australia. Neanderthals built boats too. Instead, he says, there's "some madness there. How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island? I mean, it's ridiculous. And why do you do that? Is it for the glory? For immortality? For curiosity? And now we go to Mars. We never stop." It's ridiculous, foolish, maybe? But it was the Neanderthals who went extinct, not the humans.

Entrepreneurs are everywhere. You don’t have to work in a garage to be in a startup. The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. That means entrepreneurs are everywhere and the Lean Startup approach can work in any size company, even a very large enterprise, in any sector or industry. 2. Entrepreneurship is management. A startup is an institution, not just a product, and so it requires a new kind of management specifically geared to its context of extreme uncertainty. In fact, as I will argue later, I believe “entrepreneur” should be considered a job title in all modern companies that depend on innovation for their future growth. 3. Validated learning. Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically by running frequent experiments that allow entrepreneurs to test each element of their vision. 4. Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop. 5. Innovation accounting. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting designed for startups—and the people who hold them accountable.

Thus, by 1888 it had become evident that a national cooperative movement could not succeed in America, at least not in the absence of sustained, massive and violent attack on the wage-system, far more massive and well-organized than the Knights’ movement had been. As Henry Sharpe said, what they were doing was not realistic. Small workshops with little capital and obsolete machinery in an age of rapid industrialization; insufficient institution-building to give financial and material support to co-ops; enslavement to the market at a time when competitors would stop at nothing to suppress working-class moves toward independence. Especially with the weak leadership of Terence Powderly and the mass desertion of former Knights after 1886, as they lost strike after strike, the great dream of building a national cooperative economy was effectively over.

...pseudo-scientific minds, like those of the scientist or the painter in love with the pictorial, both teaching as they were taught to become architects, practice a kind of building which is inevitably the result of conditioning of the mind instead of enlightenment. By this standard means also, the old conformities are appearing as new but only in another guise, more insidious because they are especially convenient to the standardizations of the modernist plan-factory and wholly ignorant of anything but public expediency. So in our big cities architecture like religion is helpless under the blows of science and the crushing weight of conformity--caused to gravitate to the masquerade in our streets in the name of "modernity." Fearfully concealing lack of initial courage or fundamental preparation or present merit: reactionary. Institutional public influences calling themselves conservative are really no more than the usual political stand-patters or social lid-sitters. As a feature of our cultural life architecture takes a backward direction, becomes less truly radical as our life itself grows more sterile, more conformist. All this in order to be safe? How soon will "we the people" awake to the fact that the philosophy of natural or intrinsic building we are here calling organic is at one with our freedom--as declared, 1776?

India is a land where contradictions will continue to abound, because there are many Indias that are being transformed, with different levels of intensity, by different forces of globalization. Each of these Indias is responding to them in different ways. Consider these coexisting examples of progress and status quo: India is a nuclear-capable state that still cannot build roads that will survive their first monsoon. It has eradicated smallpox through the length and breadth of the country, but cannot stop female foeticide and infanticide. It is a country that managed to bring about what it called the ‘green revolution’, which heralded food grain self-sufficiency for a nation that relied on external food aid and yet, it easily has the most archaic land and agricultural laws in the world, with no sign of anyone wanting to reform them any time soon. It has hundreds of millions of people who subsist on less that a dollar a day, but who vote astutely and punish political parties ruthlessly. It has an independent judiciary that once set aside even Indira Gandhi’s election to parliament and yet, many members of parliament have criminal records and still contest and win elections from prison. India is a significant exporter of intellectual capital to the rest of the world—that capital being spawned in a handful of world class institutions of engineering, science and management. Yet it is a country with primary schools of pathetic quality and where retaining children in school is a challenge. India truly is an equal opportunity employer of women leaders in politics, but it took over fifty years to recognize that domestic violence is a crime and almost as long to get tough with bride burning. It is the IT powerhouse of the world, the harbinger of the offshore services revolution that is changing the business paradigms of the developed world. But regrettably, it is also the place where there is a yawning digital divide.

There are two inevitable conditions of life, confronting all of us, which destroy its whole meaning; (1) death, which may at any moment pounce upon each of us; and (2) the transitoriness of all our works, which so soon pass away and leave no trace. Whatever we may do--found companies, build palaces and monuments, write songs and poems--it is all not for long time. Soon it passes away, leaving no trace. And therefore, however we may conceal it from ourselves, we cannot help seeing that the significance of our life cannot lie in our personal fleshly existence, the prey of incurable suffering and inevitable death, nor in any social institution or organization. Whoever you may be who are reading these lines, think of your position and of your duties--not of your position as landowner, merchant, judge, emperor, president, minister, priest, soldier, which has been temporarily allotted you by men, and not of the imaginary duties laid on you by those positions, but of your real positions in eternity as a creature who at the will of Someone has been called out of unconsciousness after an eternity of non-existence to which you may return at any moment at his will. Think of your duties-- not your supposed duties as a landowner to your estate, as a merchant to your business, as emperor, minister, or official to the state, but of your real duties, the duties that follow from your real position as a being called into life and endowed with reason and love.

The ending of the existing social order and the renewal of life with the aid of the new principles can be accomplished only by concentrating all the means of social existence in the hands of our committee, and the proclamation of compulsory physical labour for everyone. The committee, as soon as the present institutions have been overthrown, proclaims that everything is common property, orders the setting up of workers' societies (artels) and at the same time publishes statistical tables compiled by experts and pointing out what branches of labour are most needed in a certain locality and what branches may run into difficulties there. For a certain number of days assigned for the revolutionary upheaval and the disorders that are bound to follow, each person must join one or another of these artels according to his own choice... All those who remain isolated and unattached to workers' groups without sufficient reason will have no right of access either to the communal eating places or to the communal dormitories, or to any other buildings assigned to meet the various needs of the brother-workers or that contain the goods and materials, the victuals or tools reserved for all members of the established workers' society; in a word, he who without sufficient reason has not joined an artel, will be left without means of subsistence. All the roads, all the means of communication will be closed to him; he will have no other alternative but work or death.

When we think of an institution, we can usually see it as embodied in a building: the Vatican, the Pentagon, the Sorbonne, the Treasury, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Kremlin, the Supreme Court. What we cannot see, until we become close students of the institution, are the ways in which power is maintained and transferred behind the walls and beneath the domes, the invisible understandings which guarantee that it shall reside in certain hands but not in others, that information shall be transmitted to this one but not to that one, the hidden collusions and connections with other institutions of which it is supposedly independent. When we think of the institution of motherhood, no symbolic architecture comes to mind, no visible embodiment of authority, power, or of potential or actual violence. Motherhood calls to mind the home, and we like to believe that the home is a private place. Perhaps we imagine row upon row of backyards, behind suburban or tenement houses, in each of which a woman hangs out the wash, or runs to pick up a tear-streaked two-year-old; or thousands of kitchens, in each of which children are being fed and sent off to school. Or we think of the house of our childhood, the woman who mothered us, or of ourselves. We do not think of the laws which determine how we got to these places, the penalties imposed on those of us who have tried to live our lives according to a different plan, the art which depicts us in an unnatural serenity or resignation, the medical establishment which has robbed so many women of the act of giving birth, the experts—almost all male—who have told us how, as mothers, we should behave and feel. We do not think of the Marxist intellectuals arguing as to whether we produce “surplus value” in a day of washing clothes, cooking food, and caring for children, or the psychoanalysts who are certain that the work of motherhood suits us by nature. We do not think of the power stolen from us and the power withheld from us, in the name of the institution of motherhood.

Everything about the former colonial administrative offices made Holden sad. The drab, institutional green walls, the cluster of cubicles in the central workspace, the lack of windows or architectural flourishes. The Mormons had been planning to run the human race’s first extrasolar colony from a place that would have been equally at home as an accounting office. It felt anticlimactic. Hello, welcome to your centuries-long voyage to build a human settlement around another star! Here’s your cubicle. The space had been

JFK asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to break up organized crime. Nobody high-up in government has tangled the Mafia. J. E. Hoover, the hired hands of FBI and CIA, ran the assassination teams. They have been used since World War II. JFK was attempting to end the oil-tax depletion rip-offs, to get tax money from oil companies. JFK instituted the nuclear test ban treaty, often called “the kiss of death,” to oppose the Pentagon. JFK called off the Invasion of Cuba. He allowed Castro to live, antagonized narcotics and gambling, oil and sugar interests, formerly in Cuba. JFK asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to break up the CIA, the “hidden government behind my back.” Allen Dulles was fired. Dulles, the attorney for international multinationals, was angry. JFK planned to withdraw troops from Vietnam after the 1964 elections. Nov. 24, 1963, two days after JFK’s burial, the Pentagon escalated the Vietnam war … with no known provocations, after JFK was gone. There was no chance Kennedy could survive antagonizing the CIA, oil companies, Pentagon, organized crime. He was not their man. The assassination of JFK employed people from the Texas-Southwest. It was not a Southern plot. Upstarts could not have controlled the northern CIA, FBI, Kennedy family connections. This was a more detailed, sophisticated conspiracy that was to set the pattern for future murders to take place. The murder was funded by Permindex, with headquarters in Montreal and Switzerland. Their stated purpose was to encourage trade between nations in the Western world. Their actual purpose was fourfold: 1) To fund and direct assassinations of European, Mid-East and world leaders considered threats to the western world, and to Petroleum Interests of their backers. 2) Provide couriers, agents for transporting and depositing funds through Swiss Banks for Vegas, Miami and the international gambling syndicate. 3) Coordinate the espionage activities of White Russian Solidarists and Division V of the FBI, headed by William Sullivan. 4) Build, acquire and operate hotels and gambling casinos. See: Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal, by William Torbitt.

One of the things we've learned in the past 5 years is that we can have seemingly powerful institutions that turn out to be extremely vulnerable and brittle: our banks in the financial collapse were too big to fail. Our energy system and our agricultural system are just as top-heavy and just as vulnerable. What that means is not, as with the banks, that we should bail them out because they're too big to fail. It means that anything that's too big to fail is too big, and we need to build down this system, spread it out, make it more stable.

Very few eighteenth-century slaves have shared their stories about the institution and experience of slavery. The violence required to feed the system of human bondage often made enslaved men and women want to forget their pasts, not recollect them. For fugitives, like Ona Judge, secrecy was a necessity. Enslaved men and women on the run often kept their pasts hidden, even from the people they loved the most: their spouses and children. Sometimes, the nightmare of human bondage, the murder, rape, dismemberment, and constant degradation, was simply too terrible to speak of. But it was the threat of capture and re-enslavement that kept closed the mouths of those who managed to beat the odds and successfully escape. Afraid of being returned to her owners, Judge lived a shadowy life that was isolated and clandestine. For almost fifty years, the fugitive slave woman kept to herself, building a family and a new life upon the quicksand of her legal enslavement. She lived most of her time as a fugitive in Greenland, New Hampshire, a tiny community just outside the city of Portsmouth. At

Impact is a critically important concept when it comes to social innovation, generally used in the context of measuring whether social interventions do or don’t work. But conceptually, it’s very similar to the problem of measuring success in a business before you have profits. That’s why lean methods are so perfectly suited to this kind of work. The only real difference is that instead of talking about maximizing shareholder value, Lean Impact talks about maximizing social impact. An advance party of pioneers, some of whom you’ll read about here, is already doing this, but we need more. This book is a way to help add to their numbers. Lean Impact is not only transformational for the social sector, though. My hope is that people in other kinds of businesses and organizations will also pick it up and, after reading about the dedicated people and clear strategies whose stories Ann Mei has gathered, think about how the products and institutions they build affect the world. All of us have more to learn about how we make impact so we can move together into this new era. —Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way

Past successes may be inspirational and encouraging, but they are not by themselves reliable indicators of or guides to future success. The most efficacious changes in any system are informed not by successes but by failures. The surest way for the designer of any system to achieve success is to recognize and correct the flaws of predecessor systems, whether they be in building codes or in banking policies or in bridges.25 The history of civilization itself has been one of rises and falls, of successes and failures. Some of these have been of empires, dynasties, families; others have been of nations, states, and cities. Common to all of them has been the human element, embodied in the ruler and the ruled alike. Given that the ultimate unit of civilization is the individual, we need look no further than within ourselves to gain insight into the world and its ways, including the failure of its institutions and its systems. And, just as those institutions and systems are made up of individual people and things, so ultimately must we look to ourselves and to how we interact with the world, both given and made, whenever something goes wrong.

A prison is perhaps the easiest place to see the power of bad incentives. And yet in many walks of life, we find otherwise normal men and women caught in the same trap and busily making the world much less good than it could be. Elected officials ignore long-term problems because they must pander to the short-term interests of voters. People working for insurance companies rely on technicalities to deny desperately ill patients the care they need. CEOs and investment bankers run extraordinary risks—both for their businesses and for the economy as a whole—because they reap the rewards of success without suffering the penalties of failure. District attorneys continue to prosecute people they know to be innocent because their careers depend on winning cases. Our government fights a war on drugs that creates the very problem of black-market profits and violence that it pretends to solve. We need systems that are wiser than we are. We need institutions and cultural norms that make us more honest and ethical than we tend to be. The project of building them is distinct from—and, in my view, even more important than—an individual’s refining his personal ethical code.

Q: What are in your eyes the major defects in the West? A: The West has come to regard the values of freedom, the yardstick of human rights, as something Western. Many of them [westerns] specially in Europe take the values and the institutions on freedom, the institutions on science, curiosity, the individual, i mean, the rule of law and they’ve come to take that all for granted that they are not aware of the threat against it and not aware of the fact that you have to sustain it day by day as with all man made things. I mean, a building for example, the roof will leak, the paint will fall and you have to repaint it, you have to maintain it all the time it seems that people have forgotten that and perhaps part of the reason is because the generation that is now enjoying all the freedoms in the West is not the generations that built it; these are generations that inherited and like companies, family companies, often you’ll see the first generation or the second generation are almost always more passionate about the brand and the family company and name and keeping it all int he family and then the third generation live, use, take the money and they are either overtaken by bigger companies, swallowed up or they go bankrupt and I think there is an analogy there in that the generations after the second world war living today in Europe, United States may be different but I’m here much too short to say anything about it, is that there are people who are so complacent, they’ve always been free, they just no longer know what it is that freedom costs and for me that would be making the big mistake and you can see it. The education system in Europe where history is no longer an obligatory subject, science is no longer an obligatory subject, school systems have become about, look at Holland, our country where they have allowed parents, in the name of freedom, to build their own schools that we now have schools founded on what the child wants so if the child wants to play all day long then that is an individual freedom of the child and so it’s up to the child to decide whether to do math or to clay and now in our country in Holland, in the name of freedom of education, the state pays for these schools and I was raving against muslim schools and i thought about this cuz i was like you know ok in muslin schools at least they learn to count.

Police activism, especially in the guise of union activity, remains somewhat perplexing. The historical development is clear enough, but politically it is troublesome—especially for the left. The whole issue presents a nest of paradoxes: the police have unionized and gone on strike—but continue in their role as strikebreakers. They have pitted themselves against their bosses and the government, but represent a threat to democracy rather than an expression of it. They have resisted authority for the sake of authoritarian aims, have broken laws in the name of law and order, and have demanded rights that they consistently deny to others. (...) Police associations thus developed in relative isolation from the rest of the labor movement, while building close ties with the command hierarchy within the departments. This fact points to two related reasons why police unions are not legitimate labor unions. First, as is discussed above, the police are clearly part of the managerial machinery of capitalism. Their status as “workers” is therefore problematic. Second, the agendas of police unions mostly reflect the interests of the institution (the police department) rather than those of the working class.

So why did strong, modern states not emerge in Latin America as they did in Europe? If there is a single factor that explains this outcome, it is the relative absence of interstate war in the New World. We have seen how central war and preparation for war were in the creation of modern states in China, Prussia, and France. Even in the United States, state building has been driven by national security concerns throughout the twentieth century. Though Europe has been remarkably peaceful since 1945, the prior centuries were characterized by high and endemic levels of interstate violence. Over the past two centuries, the major political acts that reconfigured the map of Europe—the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, and the wars of unification of Italy and Germany—all involved high levels of violence, culminating in the two world wars of the twentieth century. There has been plenty of violence in Latin America, of course: today the region is infested with drug cartels, street gangs, and a few remaining guerrilla groups, all of which inflict enormous sufferings on local populations. But in comparison with Europe, Latin America has been a peaceful place in terms of interstate war. This has been a blessing for the region, but it has also left a problematic institutional legacy.

The media squabble over Shchepotin’s final day at the Cancer Institute, and the doubts it raised over the motivation of all concerned, were appropriate, because the most corrosive aspect of corruption is the way that it undermines trust. When corruption is widespread, it becomes impossible to know whom to believe, since the money infects every aspect of state and society. Every newspaper article can be criticized as paid for, every politician can be called corrupt, every court decision can be called into question. Charities are set up by oligarchs to lobby for their interests, and those then provoke doubts about every other non-governmental organization. If even doctors are on the take, can you trust their diagnoses? Are they claiming a patient needs treatment only because that would be to their profit? If policemen are crooked, and courts are paid for, are criminals really criminals? Or are they honest people who interfered in criminals’ business? Not knowing whom to believe, you retreat into trusting only those closest to you—your oldest friends, and your relatives—and that reinforces the divisions in society that corruption thrives on. It is impossible to build a thriving economy, or a healthy democracy, without a society whose members fundamentally trust each other. If you take that away, you are left with something far darker and more mercenary.

All of us deserve better than what thinness takes. We deserve a new paradigm of health: one that acknowledges its multifaceted nature and holds t-cell counts and blood pressure alongside mental health and chronic illness management. We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect. We deserve more places for thin people to heal from the endless social messages that tell them at once that their bodies will never be perfect enough to be beautiful and simultaneously that their bodies make them inherently superior to fatter people. We deserve spaces for thin people to build their self-confidence with one another so that the task no longer falls to fat people who are already contending with widespread judgment, harassment, and even discrimination. We deserve more spaces for fat people too—fat-specific spaces and fat-only spaces, where we can have conversations that can thrive in specificity, acknowledging that our experiences of external discrimination are distinct from internal self-confidence and body image issues (though we may have those too). We deserve those separate spaces so that we can work through the trauma of living in a world that tells all of us that our bodies are failures—punishing thin people with the task of losing the last ten pounds and fat people with the crushing reality of pervasive social, political, and institutional anti-fatness. We deserve more spaces to think and talk critically about our bodies as they are, not as we wish they were, or as an unforgiving and unrealistic culture pressures them to change. We deserve spaces and movements that allow us to think and talk critically about the messages each of us receive about our bodies—both on a large scale, from media and advertising, and on a small scale, interpersonally, with friends and family. But we can only do this if we acknowledge the differences in our bodies and the differences in our experiences that spring from bodies. We deserve to see each other as we are so that we can hear each other. And the perfect, unreachable standard of thinness is taking that from us.

Until Americans can overcome this idealization of law, until they begin to see that law is, like other institutions and actions, to be measured against moral principles, against human needs, we will remain a static society in a world of change, a society deaf to the rising cries for justice- and therefore,a society in serious trouble.” Added a quotation: “The realities of american politics, it turns out, are different than as described in old civic textbooks, which tell us how fortunate we are to have the ballot. The major nominees for president are not chosen by the ballot, but are picked for us by a quadrennial political convention which is half farce, half circus, most of whose delegates have not been instructed by popular vote. For months before the convention, the public has been conditioned by the mass media on who is who, so that it will not be temped to think beyond that list which the party regulars have approved.” Added a quotation: “I do not think civil disobedience is enough; it is a way of protest, but in itself it does not construct a new society. There are many other things that citizens should do to begin to build a new way of life in the midst of the old, to live the way human beings should live- enjoying the fruits of the earth, the warmth of nature and of one another-without hostility, without the artificial separation of religion, or race, or nationalism. Further, not all forms of civil disobedience are moral; not all are effective.” Added a quotation: “It is very hard, in the comfortable environment of middle-class America, to discard the notion that everything will be better if we don't have the disturbance of civil disobedience, if we confine ourselves to voting, writing letters to our congressmen, speaking our minds politely.....somehow we must transcend our own tight, air-conditioned chambers and begin to feel their plight, their needs. It may become evident that, despite out wealth, we can have no real peace until they do. We might then join them in battering at the complacency of those who guard a false "order," with that healthy commotion that has always attended the growth of justice.

So what exactly is HOW? For many, business and life has always been about the pursuit of What: “What do we do? What’s on the agenda? What do we need to accomplish?” Whats are commodities; they are easily duplicated or reverse-engineered and delivered faster and at a lower cost by someone else. How is a philosophy. It's a way of thinking about individual and organizational behavior. And How we do what we do – our behavior – has become today’s greatest source of our advantage. In this world, How is no longer a question, but the answer to what ails us as people, institutions, companies, nations. How we behave, how we consume, how we build trust in our relationships and how we relate to others provides us with the power to not just survive, but thrive and endure.

Given the country’s low birth rate, more Germans will have to follow Mr Gerloff’s example if companies are to avoid crippling shortages of skilled labour in the coming years. At 21 per cent, Germany already has a higher share of its population over the age of 65 than any other country, bar Japan. Despite a large increase in immigration last year, there are already skills shortages in some sectors, particularly in machine building and healthcare and at small and medium-sized companies in rural areas. But this is only a harbinger of the difficulties to come when German baby boomers begin retiring over the next 15 to 20 years. Between 2010 and 2030 the stock of economically active people is set to decline by almost 10 per cent to 39.1m, according to a 2012 report by the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training.

Since our civilization is irreversibly dependent on electronics, abolition of EMR is out of the question. However, as a first step toward averting disaster, we must halt the introduction of new sources of electromagnetic energy while we investigate the biohazards of those we already have with a completeness and honesty that have so far been in short supply. New sources must be allowed only after their risks have been evaluated on the basis of the knowledge acquired in such a moratorium. 
With an adequately funded research program, the moratorium need last no more than five years, and the ensuing changes could almost certainly be performed without major economic trauma. It seems possible that a different power frequency—say 400 hertz instead of 60—might prove much safer. Burying power lines and providing them with grounded shields would reduce the electric fields around them, and magnetic shielding is also feasible. 
A major part of the safety changes would consist of energy-efficiency reforms that would benefit the economy in the long run. These new directions would have been taken years ago but for the opposition of power companies concerned with their short-term profits, and a government unwilling to challenge them. It is possible to redesign many appliances and communications devices so they use far less energy. The entire power supply could be decentralized by feeding electricity from renewable sources (wind, flowing water, sunlight, georhermal and ocean thermal energy conversion, and so forth) into local distribution nets. This would greatly decrease hazards by reducing the voltages and amperages required. Ultimately, most EMR hazards could be eliminated by the development of efficient photoelectric converters to be used as the primary power source at each point of consumption. The changeover would even pay for itself, as the loss factors of long-distance power transmission—not to mention the astronomical costs of building and decommissioning short-lived nuclear power plants—were eliminated. Safety need not imply giving up our beneficial machines. 
Obviously, given the present technomilitary control of society in most parts of the world, such sane efficiency will be immensely difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, we must try. Electromagnetic energy presents us with the same imperative as nuclear energy: Our survival depends on the ability of upright scientists and other people of goodwill to break the military-industrial death grip on our policy-making institutions.

The conventional approach to community building and development addresses problem areas such as public safety, jobs and local economy, affordable housing, youth, universal health care, and education. Every city has thousands of institutions, programs, and agencies all committed to serving the public good. From the standpoint of building community and social capital, these institutions and programs are just treating the symptoms. Safety, jobs, housing, and the rest are symptoms of the unreconciled and fragmented nature of the community—what Lopez calls the breakdown of community. This fragmentation or breakdown creates a context where trying to solve the symptoms only sustains them. Otherwise, why have we been working on these symptoms for so long and so hard; and even with so many successful programs, why have we seen too little fundamental change?

Keeping a new church outwardly focused from the beginning is much easier than trying to refocus an inwardly concerned church. In order to plant a successful church, you have to know that you know that you are undeniably called by God. The call to start a new church plant is not the same as the call to serve in an existing church or work in a ministry-related organization. You may be the greatest preacher this side of Billy Graham but still not be called to start a church. If you think you may have allowed an improper reason, voice or emotion to lead you to the idea of starting a new church, back away now. Spend some more time with God. You don’t want to move forward on a hunch or because you feel “pretty sure” that you should be planting a church. You have to be completely certain. “You’re afraid? So what. Everybody’s afraid. Fear is the common ground of humanity. The question you must wrestle to the ground is, ‘Will I allow my fear to bind me to mediocrity?’” When you think of a people group that you might be called to reach, does your heart break for them? If so, you may want to consider whether God is specifically calling you to reach that group for His kingdom. Is your calling clear? Has your calling been confirmed by others? Are you humbled by the call? Have you acted on your call? Do you know for certain that God has called you to start a new church? Nail it down. When exactly were you called? What were the circumstances surrounding your call? How did it match up with the sources of proper calling? Do you recognize the four specific calls in your calling? How? How does your call measure up to biblical characteristics? What is the emerging vision that God is giving you with this call? As your dependence on God grows, so will your church. One of the most common mistakes that enthusiastic and well-meaning church starters make is to move to a new location and start trying to reach people without thinking through even a short-term strategy. Don’t begin until you count the cost. why would you even consider starting a church (the only institution Jesus left behind and the only one that will last forever) without first developing a God-infused, specific, winning strategy? There are two types of pain: the pain of front-end discipline and the pain of back-end regret. With the question of strategy development, you get to choose which pain you’d rather live with. Basically, a purpose, mission and vision statement provides guiding principles that describe what God has called you to do (mission), how you will do it (purpose) and what it will look like when you get it done (vision). Keep your statement simple. Be as precise as possible. Core values are the filter through which you fulfill your strategy. These are important, because your entire strategy will be created and implemented in such a way as to bring your core values to life. Your strategic aim will serve as the beacon that guides the rest of your strategy. It is the initial purpose for which you are writing your strategy. He will not send more people to you than you are ready to receive. So what can you do? The same thing Dr. Graham does. Prepare in a way that enables God to open the floodgates into your church. If you are truly ready, He will send people your way. If you do the work we’ve described in this chapter, you’ll be able to build your new church on a strong base of God-breathed preparation. You’ll know where you are, where you’re going and how you are going to get there. You’ll be standing in the rain with a huge bucket, ready to take in the deluge. However, if you don’t think through your strategy, write it down and then implement it, you’ll be like the man who stands in the rainstorm with a Dixie cup. You’ll be completely unprepared to capture what God is pouring out. The choice is yours!

Until Americans can overcome this idealization of law, until they begin to see that law is, like other institutions and actions, to be measured against moral principles, against human needs, we will remain a static society in a world of change, a society deaf to the rising cries for justice- and therefore,a society in serious trouble.” “The realities of american politics, it turns out, are different than as described in old civic textbooks, which tell us how fortunate we are to have the ballot. The major nominees for president are not chosen by the ballot, but are picked for us by a quadrennial political convention which is half farce, half circus, most of whose delegates have not been instructed by popular vote. For months before the convention, the public has been conditioned by the mass media on who is who, so that it will not be temped to think beyond that list which the party regulars have approved.” “I do not think civil disobedience is enough; it is a way of protest, but in itself it does not construct a new society. There are many other things that citizens should do to begin to build a new way of life in the midst of the old, to live the way human beings should live- enjoying the fruits of the earth, the warmth of nature and of one another-without hostility, without the artificial separation of religion, or race, or nationalism. Further, not all forms of civil disobedience are moral; not all are effective.” “It is very hard, in the comfortable environment of middle-class America, to discard the notion that everything will be better if we don't have the disturbance of civil disobedience, if we confine ourselves to voting, writing letters to our congressmen, speaking our minds politely.....somehow we must transcend our own tight, air-conditioned chambers and begin to feel their plight, their needs. It may become evident that, despite out wealth, we can have no real peace until they do. We might then join them in battering at the complacency of those who guard a false "order," with that healthy commotion that has always attended the growth of justice.

Much of the so-called environmental movement today has transmuted into an aggressively nefarious and primitive faction. In the last fifteen years, many of the tenets of utopian statism have coalesced around something called the “degrowth” movement. Originating in Europe but now taking a firm hold in the United States, the “degrowthers,” as I shall characterize them, include in their ranks none other than President Barack Obama. On January 17, 2008, Obama made clear his hostility toward, of all things, electricity generated from coal and coal-powered plants. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal . . . under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. . . .”3 Obama added, “. . . So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”4 Degrowthers define their agenda as follows: “Sustainable degrowth is a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet. It calls for a future where societies live within their ecological means, with open localized economies and resources more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions.”5 It “is an essential economic strategy to pursue in overdeveloped countries like the United States—for the well-being of the planet, of underdeveloped populations, and yes, even of the sick, stressed, and overweight ‘consumer’ populations of overdeveloped countries.”6 For its proponents and adherents, degrowth has quickly developed into a pseudo-religion and public-policy obsession. In fact, the degrowthers insist their ideology reaches far beyond the environment or even its odium for capitalism and is an all-encompassing lifestyle and governing philosophy. Some of its leading advocates argue that “Degrowth is not just an economic concept. We shall show that it is a frame constituted by a large array of concerns, goals, strategies and actions. As a result, degrowth has now become a confluence point where streams of critical ideas and political action converge.”7 Degrowth is “an interpretative frame for a social movement, understood as the mechanism through which actors engage in a collective action.”8 The degrowthers seek to eliminate carbon sources of energy and redistribute wealth according to terms they consider equitable. They reject the traditional economic reality that acknowledges growth as improving living conditions generally but especially for the impoverished. They embrace the notions of “less competition, large scale redistribution, sharing and reduction of excessive incomes and wealth.”9 Degrowthers want to engage in polices that will set “a maximum income, or maximum wealth, to weaken envy as a motor of consumerism, and opening borders (“no-border”) to reduce means to keep inequality between rich and poor countries.”10 And they demand reparations by supporting a “concept of ecological debt, or the demand that the Global North pays for past and present colonial exploitation in the Global South.”11

After a careful look up and down the corridor, James ushered Cordelia down the stairs. But their covert escape was not to be: Will appeared suddenly on the landing, in the midst of fixing his cuff links, and beamed with delight to see Cordelia. “My dear,” he said. “A pleasure to see you. Have you come from Cornwall Gardens? How is your mother?” “Oh, very well, thank you,” Cordelia said, then realized that if her mother really were in peak condition, she had little excuse for staying away from James and the Institute. “Well, she has been very tired, and of course we are all concerned that she get her energy back. Risa has been trying to build her back up again with many…soups.” Soups? Cordelia was not at all sure why she’d said that. Perhaps because her mother had always told her that ash-e jo, a sour barley soup, could cure anything. “Soups?” “Soups,” Cordelia said firmly. “Risa’s caretaking is very thorough, though of course, my mother wishes me to be by her side as much as possible. I have been reading to her—” “Oh, anything interesting? I’m always seeking a new book,” said Will, having finished with the cuff links. They were studded with yellow topaz. The color of James’s eyes. “Ah—no,” said Cordelia. “Only very boring things, really. Books about…ornithology.” Will’s eyebrows went up, but James had already thrown himself into the fray. “I really must get Cordelia back home,” he said, laying a hand on her back. It was an entirely ordinary husbandly gesture, not at all remarkable. It felt to Cordelia like being struck by lightning between her shoulder blades. “I’ll see you in a moment, Father.” “Well Cordelia, we all hope you’ll be back before too long,” Will said. “James is positively pining away without you here. Incomplete without his better half, eh, James?” He went away up the stairs and down the corridor, whistling. “Well,” said James after a long silence. “I thought, when I was ten years old and my father showed everyone the drawings I’d made of myself as Jonathan Shadowhunter, slaying a dragon, that was the most my parents would ever humiliate me. But that is no longer the case. There is a new champion.” “Your father is something of a romantic, that’s all.” “So you’ve noticed?

IS CARDIO BEST BEFORE OR AFTER LIFTING? NEITHER! Doing cardio right before or after lifting can seriously hinder muscle and strength gains. Why? Researchers from RMIT University worked with well–trained athletes in 2009 and found that “combining resistance exercise and cardio in the same session may disrupt genes for anabolism.” In laymen’s terms, they found that combining endurance and resistance training sends “mixed signals” to the muscles37. Cardio before the resistance training suppressed anabolic hormones such as IGF–1 and MGF, and cardio after resistance training increased muscle tissue breakdown. Several other studies, such as those conducted by Children’s National Medical Center38, the Waikato Institute of Technology39, and the University of Jyvaskyla (Finland)40 , came to same conclusions: training for both endurance and strength simultaneously impairs your gains on both fronts. Training purely for strength or purely for endurance in a workout is far superior. Cardio before weightlifting also saps your energy and makes it much harder to train heavy, which in turn inhibits your muscle growth. So, how do you do it right?

A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence, exploitation, and impotence. I use the term "tool" broadly enough to include not only simple hardware such as drills, pots, syringes, brooms, building elements, or motors, and not just large machines like cars or power stations; I also include among tools productive institutions such as factories that produce tangible commodities like corn flakes or electric current, and productive systems for intangible commodities such as those which produce "education," "health," "knowledge," or "decisions." I use this term because it allows me to subsume into one category all rationally designed devices, be they artifacts or rules, codes or operators, and to distinguish all these planned and engineered instrumentalities from other things such as basic food or implements, which in a given culture are not deemed to be subject to rationalization. School curricula or marriage laws are no less purposely shaped social devices than road networks. 5

In The Descent of Man, Darwin says: With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilized society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. This is pure Malthus. So is the demurral: “[We could not] check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature … We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind…” None of this is abstract or general or innocent of political history or implication. The Descent of Man (1871) is a late work which seems to be largely ignored by Darwinists now.

The father of communism, Karl Marx, famously predicted the “withering away of the state” once the proletarian revolution had achieved power and abolished private property. Left-wing revolutionaries from the nineteeth-century anarchists on thought it sufficient to destroy old power structures without giving serious thought to what would take their place. This tradition continues up through the present, with the suggestion by antiglobalization authors like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that economic injustice could be abolished by undermining the sovereignty of states and replacing it with a networked “multitude.”17 Real-world Communist regimes of course did exactly the opposite of what Marx predicted, building large and tyrannical state structures to force people to act collectively when they failed to do so spontaneously. This in turn led a generation of democracy activists in Eastern Europe to envision their own form of statelessness, where a mobilized civil society would take the place of traditional political parties and centralized governments. 18 These activists were subsequently disillusioned by the realization that their societies could not be governed without institutions, and when they encountered the messy compromises required to build them. In the decades since the fall of communism, Eastern Europe is democratic, but it is not thereby necessarily happy with its politics or politicians.19 The fantasy of statelessness

Equal protection under the law is not a hard principle to convince Americans of. The difficulty comes in persuading them that it has been violated in particular cases, and of the need to redress the wrong. Prejudice and indifference run deep. Education, social reform, and political action can persuade some. But most people will not feel the sufferings of others unless they feel, even in an abstract way, that 'it could have been me or someone close to me'. Consider the astonishingly rapid transformation of American attitudes toward homosexuality and even gay marriage over the past decades. Gay activism brought these issues to public attention but attitudes were changed during tearful conversations over dinner tables across American when children came out to their parents (and, sometimes, parents came out to their children). Once parents began to accept their children, extended families did too, and today same-sex marriages are celebrated across the country with all the pomp and joy and absurd overspending of traditional American marriages. Race is a wholly different matter. Given the segregation in American society white families have little chance of seeing and therefore understanding the lives of black Americans. I am not black male motorist and never will be. All the more reason, then, that I need some way to identify with one if I am going to be affected by his experience. And citizenship is the only thing I know we share. The more differences between us are emphasized, the less likely I will be to feel outrage at his mistreatment. Black Lives Matter is a textbook example of how not to build solidarity. There is no denying that by publicizing and protesting police mistreatment of African-Americans the movement mobilized supporters and delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. But there is also no denying that the movement's decision to use this mistreatment to build a general indictment of American society, and its law enforcement institutions, and to use Mau-Mau tactics to put down dissent and demand a confession of sins and public penitence (most spectacularly in a public confrontation with Hillary Clinton, of all people), played into the hands of the Republican right. As soon as you cast an issue exclusively in terms of identity you invite your adversary to do the same. Those who play one race card should be prepared to be trumped by another, as we saw subtly and not so subtly in the 2016 presidential election. And it just gives that adversary an additional excuse to be indifferent to you. There is a reason why the leaders of the civil rights movement did not talk about identity the way black activists do today, and it was not cowardice or a failure to be "woke". The movement shamed America into action by consciously appealing to what we share, so that it became harder for white Americans to keep two sets of books, psychologically speaking: one for "Americans" and one for "Negroes". That those leaders did not achieve complete success does not mean that they failed, nor does it prove that a different approach is now necessary. No other approach is likely to succeed. Certainly not one that demands that white Americans agree in every case on what constitutes discrimination or racism today. In democratic politics it is suicidal to set the bar for agreement higher than necessary for winning adherents and elections.