Political Mandate Quotes

Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same... Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease.

Many well-meaning Dutch people have told me in all earnestness that nothing in Islamic culture incites abuse of women, that this is just a terrible misunderstanding. Men all over the world beat their women, I am constantly informed. In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quaran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience of their community. I wanted my art exhibit to make it difficult for people to look away from this problem. I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that "Islam is peace and tolerance.

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

Muhammad introduced the concept of such Glorious and Omnipotent God in Whose eyes all worldly systems are pieces of straw. Islamic equality of mankind is no fiction as it is in Christianity. No human mind has ever thought of such total freedom as established by Muhammad.

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression...

Muhammad adhered meticulously to the charter he forged for Medina, which - grounded as it was in the Quranic injunction, "Let there be no compulsion in religion" (2:256) - is arguably the first mandate for religious tolerance in human history.

[P]eople only make decisions based on what they know. You can have everyone in the country vote freely and democratically and still come up with the wrong answer - if the information they base that decision on is wrong. People don't want the truth [when] it is complicated. They don't want to spend years debating an issue. They want it homogenized, sanitized, and above all, simplified into terms they can understand...Governments are often criticized for moving slowly, but that deliberateness, it turns out, is their strength. They take time to think through complex problems before they act. People, however, are different. People react first from the gut and then from the head...give that knee-jerk reflex real power to make its overwhelming will known as a national mandate instantly and you can cause a political riot. Combine these sins - simplification of information and instant, visceral democratic mandates - and you lose the ability to cool down. There is no longer deliberation time between events that may or may not be true and our reaction to them. Policy becomes instinct rather than thought.

Government in our democracy, state and national, must be neutral in matters of religious theory, doctrine, and practice. It may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another or even against the militant opposite. The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion. [Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97, 1968.]

Being radical is a choice, and it takes work. A person with a marginalized identity can engage in conservative, oppressive political work, and activists, organizers, and intellectuals living under capitalism, colonialism, anti-Black racism, and patriarchy require years of unlearning or decolonization.

Neither the great political and financial power structures of the world, nor the specialization-blinded professionals, nor the population in general realize that...it is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on earth at a “higher standard of living than any have ever known”. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival. War is obsolete.4 -R. Buckminster Fuller

Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones -- the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on.

But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

A politics built around getting and spending money is sexier than a politics built around politics. And so, at a time of unprecedented freedom and power for women, at a time when we were more poised than ever to understand our lives politically, we got, instead of expanded reproductive protections and equal pay and federally mandated family leave and subsidized childcare and a higher minimum wage, the sort of self-congratulatory empowerment feminism that corporations can get behind. The kind that comes with merchandise: mugs that said 'male tears'; T-shirts that said 'feminist as fuck.

In short, the explosion in sub-prime lending was a thoroughly top–down, political project, mandated by Congress, implemented by government-sponsored enterprises, enforced by the law, encouraged by the president and monitored by pressure groups.

Political correctness has thrown a veil of silence over our important discussions. Rather than asking those with whom we disagree to clearly state their case, we set up rules of political correctness that mandate that their perspective must be the same as ours. We then demonize those with whom we disagree and as a result fail to reach any consensus that might solve our problems.

Christians are commanded to pray for those in political leadership, but they have no biblical mandate to use the Christian ministry or the cause of Christ to endorse or campaign for any politician. They are entitled to their own views and opinions, but they are not entitled to equate those views and opinions with Christian dogma.

Political mandates matter, but delivering on promises requires institutions. And it takes individuals to build those institutions, so expertise matters, as does the system’s openness to lateral induction of talent. For an idea to succeed, no matter how worthy on its own, all these elements must come together to form a unique constellation.

In 1904 Roosevelt pronounced what has come to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. It mandated that any nation engaged in “chronic wrong-doing”—that is, did anything to threaten perceived US economic or political interests—would be disciplined militarily by the United States, which was to serve as an “international police power.”8

The values of solidarity, collectivism, and internationalism are not so much desirable as they are actually mandated by nature and reality itself.

The political imperative to use the Mandate for Palestine as a means to resolve the Jewish refugee crisis overrode the questions of law.

Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call ‘the mandate of heaven’, but life for the peasant changes little.

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

Are the disjointed efforts of opinions, biases, cultural mandates, politically-correct notions, and all things vogue and trendy an effort to write ourselves sweeping permission to justify sweeping behaviors that will in time sweep us away?

Jesus was not just a moralist whose teachings had some political implications; he was not primarily a teacher of spirituality whose public ministry unfortunately was seen in a political light; he was not just a sacrificial lamb preparing for his immolation, or a God-Man whose divine status calls us to disregard his humanity. Jesus was, in his divinely mandated (i.e., promised, anointed, messianic) prophethood, priesthood, and kingship, the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships.

In our tribunal, we look only at personal criminal responsibility in a very tightly defined, narrow way and we demand proof beyond a resonable doubt about the involvement of the individual. We do no have a mandate to establish the moral responsibility of those who saw things happen and did nothing, including people who might have had the capacity to stop the process and did nothing. But we have to be careful in thinking that just because we focus on individual criminal guilt we therefore absolve the community. The old distinctions are too simplistic when we move up the chain of command and witness the merging of the collectivity into the personae of these charismatic political and military leaders.' -Louise Arbour, Chief Prosecutor for International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

An interesting example is found in an article by Dr. Jennifer Roback titled “The Political Economy of Segregation: The Case of Segregated Streetcars,” in the Journal of Economic History (1986). During the late 1800s, private streetcar companies in Augusta, Houston, Jacksonville, Mobile, Montgomery, and Memphis were not segregated, but by the early 1900s, they were. Why? City ordinances forced them to segregate black and white passengers. Numerous Jim Crow laws ruled the day throughout the South mandating segregation in public accommodations.

Ants and neurons are democracies, that old political saw the Mandate works so hard to discredit. You have different groundswells of popular opinion gathering momentum, and picking up new adherents like a snowball, until one urge or impulse reaches a critical mass, after which the whole—the nest, the brain—adopts that tabled motion wholeheartedly. And here’s where the hive aspect comes in, because those elements which were rooting for the alternatives give in with good grace and wave flags for the winner. There’s no holdout of political grousers claiming someone else won the election. The whole institution acts in unison the moment that threshold is crossed. And that’s us. No demagogues having to harangue the crowd, no self-interested cult leader talking everyone into servitude. Just a group acting together, for everyone’s best benefit.

Here in the United States, very little effort has been made to voice formal apologies, make reparations, or pass political mandates about education. Yet this country was founded in part by genocidal policies directed at Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people. Both of these things are morally repugnant. Still I love my country. In fact, it is because I love my country that I want to make sure the mistakes of our past do not get repeated. We cannot afford to cover over the dark chapters of our history, as we have for decades upon decades. It is time for that to stop.

As you rusticate, you'll encounter beauty and ugliness, peace and danger. But it will be real and of the earth. I'm an optimistic person, but deep inside all optimists, there's a bound-and-gagged pessimist sitting in the basement, struggling to get out. I believe if we don't deconstruct our lives and learn to be more earthbound and earth-friendly and sustainable, and try to live with all God's creatures, even if they're not big-eyed and behind bars in a zoo, or on our screen savers, then sooner than expected we'll be forced to, through political mandate or economics or from overuse of our resources.

In short, the explosion in sub-prime lending was a thoroughly top–down, political project, mandated by Congress, implemented by government-sponsored enterprises, enforced by the law, encouraged by the president and monitored by pressure groups. Remember this when you hear people blame the free market for the excesses of the sub-prime bubble.

In every known culture, humans experience joy, sadness, disgust, anger, fear, and surprise. In every known culture, these emotions are indicated by the same facial expressions. This empirical observation, which is predicted and mandated by the structural logic of evolution, is known as the psychic unity of mankind. (I prefer the term “psychological unity of humankind,” but I didn’t invent it.)

George W. Bush’s legacy will always be defined by the events of September 11, 2001, which provided him with something of a delayed mandate. Without 9/11, there would have been no unconstitutional Patriot Act, no Homeland Security Department, no decade-long occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and no open-ended “war on terror.” As such, it is important to look closely at exactly what really happened on 9/11/2001.

The British treated the Palestinians with the same contemptuous condescension they lavished on other subject peoples from Hong Kong to Jamaica. Their officials monopolized the top offices in the Mandate government and excluded qualified Arabs;46 they censored the newspapers, banned political activity when it discomfited them, and generally ran as parsimonious an administration as was possible in light of their commitments.

The fixation with Israel/Palestine does sometimes return, but the magnitude of what is going on elsewhere has finally enabled at least some observers to understand that the problems of the region are not down to the existence of Israel. That was a lie peddled by the Arab dictators as they sought to deflect attention from their own brutality, and it was bought by many people across the area and the dictators’ useful idiots in the West. Nevertheless the Israeli/Palestinian joint tragedy continues, and such is the obsession with this tiny piece of land that it may again come to be considered by some to be the most pressing conflict in the world. The Ottomans had regarded the area west of the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Coast as a part of the region of Syria. They called it Filistina. After the First World War, under the British Mandate this became Palestine.

These studies showed that delaying the mask mandates and bar closures was associated with increased cases. On May 20th, we sent analysis to every governor and the mayor of every major city showing the significant benefit of early action. Too few changed their approaches but facing a rising sea of local doubters even many elected officials who didn't make changes were silently grateful for someone publicly pushing them to do the right things.

In September 2021, in a statement justifying COVID vaccine mandates to school children, Dr. Fauci dreamily recounted his own grade school measles and mumps vaccines—an unlikely memory, since those vaccines weren’t available until 1963 and 1967, and Dr. Fauci attended grade school in the 1940s.19 Dr. Fauci’s little perjuries about masks, measles, mumps, herd immunity, and natural immunity attest to his dismaying willingness to manipulate facts to serve a political agenda.

The point of all these changes was to make the government more partisan, the courts more pliable, more beholden to the party. Or maybe we should call it, as we once did, the Party. They had no mandate to do this: Law and Justice was elected with a percentage of the vote that allowed them to rule but not to change the constitution. And so, in order to justify breaking the law, the party stopped using ordinary political arguments, and began identifying existential enemies instead.

A succession of murders clears the field of most of the significant impediments, actual or potential, to Richard’s seizing power. But it is striking that Shakespeare does not envisage the tyrant’s climactic accession to the throne as the direct result of violence. Instead, it is the consequence of an election. To solicit a popular mandate, Richard conducts a political campaign, complete with a fraudulent display of religious piety, the slandering of opponents, and a grossly exaggerated threat to national security. Why

But you’ve got to care about truth, haven’t you? I won’t say that the speeches didn’t move me, but it was the intellectual dishonesty of the whole orthodox thing that galled me into action. Science, as a creed, should care about truth. It shouldn’t be bent for political aims. You shouldn’t say there’s a Wild Man of Kiln when there’s clearly nothing of humanity about the place. And on such hills I die. That doubtless sounds stupid, to you who tell yourself you will take up arms when they starve your children, when they rob you of your goods, when they come for that demographic which includes you. But it’s deviation from truth that lets them do these things. It’s the lies, at all levels, which mean when they come for you and yours, the others won’t lift a finger, because they’ve believed the lies spread about you. It is the lies that starve your children because you believe the stories about general shortages, even though the grandees of the Mandate feast off gold plates every day of the year. And it is lies about science which cut most deeply, telling you that this or that group of people are naturally inferior, or another group has an innate ability to lead.

One could argue that people can only teach what they know. Or, looking at it from a different perspective, at some point we all lack knowledge about something until we choose or are forced to learn. Anyone committed to collective liberation must acknowledge ignorance and take up the work of comprehensive political education. For example, I have been out of my depth on disability justice and climate change, to name two topics, and so I follow the lead of people who are more knowledgeable. But this doesn’t let me off the hook: I still need to seek out knowledge on my own about these issues.

We may laugh now at the naiveté of the idea that nationalisation of industries actually benefits anybody. But it is instructive how the themes that Mrs Gandhi introduced to Indian politics in 1977 are still dominant in our political discourse. She painted the Syndicate as being in the grips of crony capitalists—and that is an idea that every party from the Left to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) recycles again and again. She spoke of ending an era of privilege, of breaking up cosy cartels and of sharing the national wealth. The very same ideas were to re-appear in one form or the other in the 2014 election.

The Ming Dynasty controlled almost all of China and was the most advanced and powerful empire in the world. Like European empires, it was family-controlled with an emperor who had the “mandate of heaven.” The emperor oversaw a bureaucracy that was run and protected by ministers and military leaders who worked in symbiotic—though sometimes contentious—relationships with landowning noble families who oversaw peasant workers. In 1500 the Ming Dynasty was approaching its peak and was leaps and bounds ahead of Europe in wealth, technology, and power. It had enormous cultural and political influence all over East Asia and Japan.

[W]e can't attack hard enough those wretched criminals who would prefer to make religion provide political, or rather business, services for them. The impudent liars who do this profess their faith before the whole world in stentorian tones, so that all sinners may hear--not that they are ready to die for it, but rather that they may live all the better. They are ready to sell their faith for a single political swindle. For ten parliamentary mandates, they would ally themselves with the Marxists, who are the mortal foes of all religion. And for a seat in the cabinet, they would enter into marriage with the devil--if the latter hadn't still retained some traces of decency.

But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

In response to this direct challenge to British authority, the Mandate authorities deported virtually the entire Palestinian nationalist leadership, including the mayor of Jerusalem, Dr. Husayn al-Khalidi, my uncle. With four others (he and another two were members of the AHC) he was sent to the Seychelles Islands, an isolated location in the Indian Ocean that the British Empire frequently chose for exiling nationalist opponents.61 The men were held in a heavily guarded compound for sixteen months, deprived of visitors and outside contact. Their fellow prisoners in the Seychelles included political leaders from Aden in Yemen and Zanzibar. Other Palestinian leaders were exiled to Kenya or South Africa,

The rule through pandemic medical and emergency decrees is nothing more than a coup d’état on a worldwide scale and it therefore follows the same patterns, not necessarily in the same order, observed in banana republics: First, pointing to a threat, lockdown of the borders, and restrictions of the means of transportation; checked. Second, full control of the media; checked. Third, declaration of a state of emergency and deployment of forces on the ground; checked. Fourth, restrictions of assembly and civil rights; checked. Fifth, repressive measure for those not cooperating; checked. Sixth, changes to the figures and political scene as some go away and old ones come back; checked. Seventh, attempt to return to normalcy; checked. - On Tyranny Through Emergency Decrees

The term may have been coined in 1845, but the seeds of Manifest Destiny arrived with Christopher Columbus when he stumbled onto the shores of North America—the self-styled “New World.” Since then, the death grip of its ideology has been the operating principle of the American Empire—a fervent, fanatical, at times religious mandate to carry out economic and geo-political acts that will always benefit the chosen few, which, in today’s parlance is the “one percent.” In fact, this Draconian gospel of exceptionalism has been the all-powerful dogma fueling American imperialism and free-market fundamentalism at the core of U.S. armed atrocities—both domestic and foreign. Writer and cabinetmaker Charles Sullivan offers this allegory: “It is the unquestioned religion of America that also bears a strange resemblance to the ideology of the cancer cell.

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own

The political forces arrayed on the side of capital have always wanted to treat labor as a commodity, driving down costs and demanding the freedom to move production to countries with the lowest wages. They have tried to prevent workers from forming unions and look for opportunities to break unions once they are formed. They have also tried to prevent governments from regulating working hours and conditions, imposing minimum wages or mandating family leave. On the other side, the workers have organized into unions, braving numerous bloody confrontations, in order to be able to bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions, and over the years have won a number of important concessions, such as laws that prohibit child labor and provide for a regulated work week, safer working conditions and so on. The heyday of this era was in the 1950s, when an assembly-line autoworker in Detroit was able to earn enough to afford a house and a car, raise a family and then retire comfortably. That era is now over.

Democrats are so keen on these “reforms,” why don’t they pursue them through the normal political channels? Why don’t the Democrats campaign to change the immigration laws? Go ahead and pass laws that allow open borders. Go ahead and limit or eliminate enforcement. Go ahead and mandate health coverage for illegals and all of Mexico, if you want to go that far. If it’s “democratic socialism” they are trying to impose, then do it through the democratic process. Yet interestingly the Democratic left seems to have no interest in this. Rather, they are in open defiance of existing laws. They portray enforcement of those laws, in a difficult atmosphere where they are flagrantly violated, as hateful, racist and Nazi-like betrayals of basic human decency. While exposing the holding facilities as overcrowded and understaffed, they work with activists in Central American countries to further overwhelm those facilities, apparently seeking the chaos that makes effective administration of the immigration laws more difficult so that more illegals get through.

Working class bodies (like any other) will only flourish as long as there is a sense of purpose in participating in them. If there is no real discussion, if everything of significance is decided in advance elsewhere, the organ atrophies and the participants vote with their feet. That kind of apathy and passivity is what capitalist society relies upon. Demanding that we put a cross on a piece of paper, to indicate our trust in representatives who can do what they like for five years, is the sole political duty of the “citizen”. Meanwhile the so-called democratic state represents only the interests of the propertied classes. Socialist society is different. It is not just about dispossessing the wealthy of their ownership of the means of production, even if abolishing both the law of value and exploitation are bedrocks on which a new mode of production must arise. Socialism demands the active participation of all producers in the decisions that affect their lives. Its democracy is direct and based on the ability to recall delegates if they do not fulfil the mandate they were given by the collectivity.

is dynamic. “Experts” frequently differ on scientific questions and their opinions can vary in accordance with and demands of politics, power, and financial self-interest. Nearly every lawsuit I have ever litigated pitted highly credentialed experts from opposite sides against each other, with all of them swearing under oath to diametrically antithetical positions based on the same set of facts. Telling people to “trust the experts” is either naive or manipulative—or both. All of Dr. Fauci’s intrusive mandates and his deceptive use of data tended to stoke fear and amplify public desperation for the anticipated arrival of vaccines that would transfer billions of dollars from taxpayers to pharmaceutical executives and shareholders. Some of America’s most accomplished scientists, and the physicians leading the battle against COVID in the trenches, came to believe that Anthony Fauci’s do-or-die obsession with novel mRNA vaccines—and Gilead’s expensive patented antiviral, remdesivir—prompted him to ignore or even suppress effective early treatments, causing hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths while also prolonging the pandemic

Dissent from liberal orthodoxy is cast as racism, misogyny, bigotry, phobia, and, as we’ve seen, even violence. If you criticize the lack of due process for male college students accused of rape, you are a “rape apologist.” End of conversation. After all, who wants to listen to a rape lover? People who are anti–abortion rights don’t care about the unborn; they are misogynists who want to control women. Those who oppose same-sex marriage don’t have rational, traditional views about marriage that deserve respect or debate; they are bigots and homophobes. When conservatives opposed the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” it wasn’t due to a differing philosophy about the role of government. No, they were waging a “War on Women.” With no sense of irony or shame, the illiberal left will engage in racist, sexist, misogynist, and homophobic attacks of their own in an effort to delegitimize people who dissent from the “already decided” worldview. Non-white conservatives are called sellouts and race traitors. Conservative women are treated as dim-witted, self-loathing puppets of the patriarchy, or nefarious gender traitors. Men who express the wrong political or ideological view are demonized as hostile interlopers into the public debate. The illiberal left sees its bullying and squelching of free speech as a righteous act. This

The depression which spread over the world like a great conflagration toward the end of 1929 gave Adolf Hitler his opportunity, and he made the most of it. Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times, at first when the masses were unemployed, hungry and desperate, and later when they were intoxicated by war. Yet in one respect he was unique among history’s revolutionaries: He intended to make his revolution after achieving political power. There was to be no revolution to gain control of the State. That goal was to be reached by mandate of the voters or by the consent of the rulers of the nation—in short, by constitutional means. To get the votes Hitler had only to take advantage of the times, which once more, as the Thirties began, saw the German people plunged into despair; to obtain the support of those in power he had to convince them that only he could rescue Germany from its disastrous predicament. In the turbulent years from 1930 to 1933 the shrewd and daring Nazi leader set out with renewed energy to obtain these twin objectives. In retrospect it can be seen that events themselves and the weakness and confusion of the handful of men who were bound by their oath to loyally defend the democratic Republic which they governed played into Hitler’s hands. But this was by no means foreseeable at the beginning of 1930.

As Americans were debating bailouts, individual mandates, and Michelle Obama’s finely toned arms, progressives knew they had a golden opportunity to sneak Common Core through the back door. And that’s just what they did. Remember what Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s first chief of staff, said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Common Core was that political philosophy in action. The controllists’ plan was almost perfect. They knew they didn’t have to sell Common Core to lawmakers in individual state legislatures, where citizens would find out about it and demand it be stopped. Instead, they could just go to the individual state boards of education—entities that most Americans don’t even know exist—for permission. In Wisconsin, for example, all it took was one individual, the state superintendent of public instruction, to adopt the standards. It was a devious and brilliant plan, but that didn’t make it foolproof. It wasn’t a given that state school board members would agree to Common Core. Some might sense that it was a ploy to slowly nationalize their state’s education system. To counter that possibility, progressives wrote special funding for the Common Core “initiative” into President Obama’s nearly $800 billion stimulus plan via the “Race to the Top” program. This gave the administration the ability to bribe cash-starved states into adopting Common Core by making it a prerequisite for states to compete for seven-figure education grants. In addition, they delayed the testing component of the standards for several years, thereby giving state bureaucrats several years of zero accountability. Many of these bureaucrats no doubt knew they’d be retired or in a different position by the time the real pain came around.

city builders and rebuilders (Jerusalem) and city-loving exiles (Babylon). In New Testament times, the people of God become city missionaries (indeed, New Testament writings contain few glimpses of nonurban Christianity). Finally, when God’s future arrives in the form of a city, his people can finally be fully at home. The fallen nature of the city — the warping of its potential due to the power of sin — is finally overcome and resolved; the cultural mandate is complete; the capacities of city life are freed in the end to serve God. All of God’s people serve him in his holy city. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REFLECTION 1. Keller writes, “The church should continue to relate to the human cities of our time, not as the people of God did under Abraham, Moses, or David, but as they did during the time of the exile.” In what ways is the situation of the Christian church different from that of the exiles in Babylon? In what ways is it similar? How does this affect the mission of the church today? 2. From Acts 17 through the end of the book of Acts, Paul has strategically traveled to the intellectual (Athens), commercial (Corinth), religious (Ephesus), and political (Rome) centers of the Roman world. What are the centers of power and influence in your own local context? How is your church seeking to strategically reach these different centers of cultural influence? 3. Keller writes, “Then, as now, the cities were filled with the poor, and urban Christians’ commitment to the poor was visible and striking.” Do you believe this is still true of the Christian church? If so, give an example. If not, how can this legacy be recaptured? 4. Keller writes, “Gardening (the original human vocation) is a paradigm for cultural development. A gardener neither leaves the ground as is, nor does he destroy it. Instead, he rearranges it to produce food and plants for human life. He cultivates it. (The words culture and cultivate come from the same root.) Every vocation is in some way a response to, and an extension of, the primal,

A daunting example of the impact that the loose talk and heavy rhetoric of the Sixties had on policy can be seen in the way the black family—a time-bomb ticking ominously, and exploding with daily detonations—got pushed off the political agenda. While Carmichael, Huey Newton and others were launching a revolutionary front against the system, the Johnson administration was contemplating a commitment to use the power of the federal government to end the economic and social inequalities that still plagued American blacks. A presidential task force under Daniel Patrick Moynihan was given a mandate to identify the obstacles preventing blacks from seizing opportunities that had been grasped by other minority groups in the previous 50 years of American history. At about the same time as the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Moynihan published findings that emphasized the central importance of family in shaping an individual life and noted with alarm that 21 percent of black families were headed by single women. “[The] one unmistakable lesson in American history,” he warned, is that a country that allows “a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder—most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure—that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.” Moynihan proposed that the government confront this problem as a priority; but his conclusions were bitterly attacked by black radicals and white liberals, who joined in an alliance of anger and self-flagellation and quickly closed the window of opportunity Moynihan had opened. They condemned his report as racist not only in its conclusions but also in its conception; e.g., it had failed to stress the evils of the “capitalistic system.” This rejectionist coalition did not want a program for social change so much as a confession of guilt. For them the only “non-racist” gesture the president could make would be acceptance of their demand for $400 million in “reparations” for 400 years of slavery. The White House retreated before this onslaught and took the black family off the agenda.

Power is seeping away from autocrats and single-party systems whether they embrace reform or not. It is spreading from large and long-established political parties to small ones with narrow agendas or niche constituencies. Even within parties, party bosses who make decisions, pick candidates, and hammer out platforms behind closed doors are giving way to insurgents and outsiders—to new politicians who haven’t risen up in the party machine, who never bothered to kiss the ring. People entirely outside the party structure—charismatic individuals, some with wealthy backers from outside the political class, others simply catching a wave of support thanks to new messaging and mobilization tools that don’t require parties—are blazing a new path to political power. Whatever path they followed to get there, politicians in government are finding that their tenure is getting shorter and their power to shape policy is decaying. Politics was always the art of the compromise, but now politics is downright frustrating—sometimes it feels like the art of nothing at all. Gridlock is more common at every level of decision-making in the political system, in all areas of government, and in most countries. Coalitions collapse, elections take place more often, and “mandates” prove ever more elusive. Decentralization and devolution are creating new legislative and executive bodies. In turn, more politicians and elected or appointed officials are emerging from these stronger municipalities and regional assemblies, eating into the power of top politicians in national capitals. Even the judicial branch is contributing: judges are getting friskier and more likely to investigate political leaders, block or reverse their actions, or drag them into corruption inquiries that divert them from passing laws and making policy. Winning an election may still be one of life’s great thrills, but the afterglow is diminishing. Even being at the top of an authoritarian government is no longer as safe and powerful a perch as it once was. As Professor Minxin Pei, one of the world’s most respected experts on China, told me: “The members of the politburo now openly talk about the old good times when their predecessors at the top of the Chinese Communist Party did not have to worry about bloggers, hackers, transnational criminals, rogue provincial leaders or activists that stage 180,000 public protests each year. When challengers appeared, the old leaders had more power to deal with them. Today’s leaders are still very powerful but not as much as those of a few decades back and their powers are constantly declining.”3

Might it be logically inconsistent, for example, that we claim to value the lives of disabled people even as we create (and mandate) more and more prenatal tests to screen out “undesirable” fetuses? Glossing over these inconsistencies, or pretending that they can be easily and definitively resolved, simplifies the complexities inherent in questions of social justice. The desire for clear answers, free of contradiction and inconsistency, is understandable, but I want to suggest that accessible futures require such ambiguities. Following Puar, I believe that “contradictions and discrepancies…are not to be reconciled or synthesized but held together in tension. They are less a sign of wavering intellectual commitment than symptoms of the political impossibility to be on one side or the other.” Indeed, part of the problem I'm tracing in these pages is the assumption that there is only one side to the question of disability and that we're all already on it.

The Americans had almost destroyed themselves with their COVID mandates; failed wars in a part of the world they would never understand; race riots; political upheaval; and a border policy of which Gromyko’s predecessors could only have dreamed. Russia

Though demonized by his Jewish and British enemies, Hajj Amin al-Husayni in fact cooperated well enough with the mandate administration. Only gradually did he use his religious authority to achieve a position of significant political influence contrary to British interests. It was a potent mix. The key event in this transformation was the so-called ‘Western Wall riots’ in 1929. The Western Wall was the only revealed section of what remained from the massive retaining wall built by Herod. This wall allowed Herod to enlarge the platform on which the Second Temple stood before being destroyed in 70 CE. Given this association, the wall became Judaism’s most important place of pilgrimage and prayer. The wall also was part of a Muslim religious trust (waqf): Muslim attachment to the wall and to the al-Haram al-Sharif (or ‘Noble Sanctuary’, as the Temple Mount is known in Arabic) is due to their association with the story of Muhammad’s night journey to heaven. The wall is known to Muslims as al-Buraq, because Muhammad tethered his horse there, and the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque, built in the 7th century, are two of Islam’s most revered buildings.

So I want to let Assata Shakur have the last word tonight. “At this moment,” she wrote a few years ago, I am not so concerned about myself. Everybody has to die sometime, and all I want is to go with dignity. I am more concerned about the growing poverty, the growing despair that is rife in America. I am more concerned about our younger generations, who represent our future. I am more concerned about the rise of the prison-industrial complex that is turning our people into slaves again. I am more concerned about the repression, the police brutality, violence, the rising wave of racism that makes up the political landscape of the US today. Our young people deserve a future, and I consider it the mandate of my ancestors to be a part of the struggle to ensure that they have one.

Much later, Emperors reigned from the kikukamonsho, the Chrysanthemum Throne, a name which referred to the throne itself as well as the imperial chrysanthemum crest (kiku). When the later Japanese thought of their nation as a political unity at all they imagined the god-descended individual who sat upon the kikukamonsho and ruled according to divine mandate.

The four major testing companies—Pearson Education, Educational Testing Service, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw Hill—make $2 billion a year in revenue while spending $20 million a year lobbying for more mandated student assessments. Prisons bring in $70 billion a year in revenue, and its industry spends $45 million a year lobbying to keep people incarcerated and for longer sentences.

Consul Ballobar, who considered the bishop antisemitic, teased him for having attended and wrote in his diary that the mufti hadn’t managed to hide his true feelings about the whole thing—his face was as yellow as a rotten melon. In Ballobar’s opinion, the ceremony was an unnecessary and harmful political spectacle—he was not fond of Weizmann.

There was probably nothing the military administration disliked more than local politics. Unlike Ronald Storrs, most of the British were not interested, did not understand, and did their best to avoid the whole tangle. They had come to fight, conquer, and rule, not to engage in politics, Stirling told a representative of the Zionist movement.

The more we focus on tangential issues, the less effective we will be in addressing matters of true moral significance. I hear very little from evangelicals about the impact of gun proliferation on violent crime, much less an issue like nuclear disarmament. I hear almost nothing about health care for the poor and protecting widows and orphans, both biblical mandates, and scant mention of the thirteen million children who die worldwide from malnutrition in a year. I hear scornful dismissal of concerns about global warming, an issue viewed seriously by the vast majority of scientists. I hear talk about family values, but when an administration proposed legislation to allow mothers to take unpaid leave after childbirth, conservative religious groups opposed

On the right and the left, persuading your opponents is out of fashion, replaced by the mandate to rile up your supporters.

Some political parties think being a politicians is about being corrupt. So they made corruption their mandate. The more corrupt you are . The more they will promote you to higher positions. The more they feel you are one of their own. You don't stand a chance or have a say if you are not corrupt within the party.

If Amman was to benefit as an economic and political power centre during the time that the West Bank was part of Jordan, this was neither entirely inevitable nor purely the result of the social forces of centralisation. In part it was the product of regime policy,14 concerned that the centre of gravity of the state should stay with Amman as an important instrument in the incorporation of the West Bank. For geographical and historical reasons Jerusalem was the obvious alternate pole in the new state, not least because it had been the seat of the British administration under the mandate. As Avi Plascow has put it: ‘The [Jordanian] regime’s general policy was to prevent Jerusalem from either gaining special status or becoming a symbolic focus for divisive West Bank–East Bank antagonism.’15 The authorities in Amman set about the task with conviction.

American. My strength as President was then tenuous—I had no strong mandate from the people; I had not been elected to that office. But I recognized that the moral force of the Presidency is often stronger than the political force. I knew that a President can appeal to the best in our people or the worst; he can call for action or live with inaction.

The activism that started with Covid mask mandates, the visuals of angry parents packing school board meetings and holding signs on street corners, revealed something important about power to national politicians.

Our MANDATE at Blackhawk is to create mega-millionaires. Period. More wealth for our clients, more power for all of us ...the People.

In times of strife, taliban have usually mobilized in defense of tradition. British documents from as early as 1901 decry taliban opposition to colonialism in present-day Pakistan. However, as with so much else, it was the Soviet invasion and the US response that sent the transformative shock. In the 1980s, as guns and money coursed through the ranks of the Kandahar mujahedeen, squabbling over resources grew so frequent that many increasingly turned to religious law to settle their disputes. Small, informal bands of taliban, who were also battling against the Russians, established religious courts that heard cases from feuding fighters from across the south. Seemingly impervious to the lure of foreign riches, the taliban courts were in many eyes the last refuge of tradition in a world in upheaval. ... Thousands of talibs rallied to the cause, and an informal, centuries-old phenomenon of the Pashtun countryside morphed into a formal political and military movement, the Taliban. As a group of judges and legal-minded students, the Taliban applied themselves to the problem of anarchy with an unforgiving platform of law and order. The mujahedeen had lost their way, abandoned their religious principles, and dragged society into a lawless pit. So unlike most revolutionary movements, Islamic or otherwise, the Taliban did not seek to overthrow an existing state and substitute it with one to their liking. Rather, they sought to build a new state where none existed. This called for “eliminating the arbitrary rule of the gun and replacing it with the rule of law—and for countryside judges who had arisen as an alternative to a broken tribal system, this could only mean religious law. Jurisprudence is thus part of the Taliban’s DNA, but its single-minded pursuit was carried out to the exclusion of all other aspects of basic governance. It was an approach that flirted dangerously with the wrong kind of innovation: in the countryside, the choice was traditionally yours whether to seek justice in religious or in tribal courts, yet now the Taliban mandated religious law as the compulsory law of the land. It is true that, given the nature of the civil war, any law was better than none at all—but as soon as things settled down, fresh problems arose. The Taliban’s jurisprudence was syncretic, mixing elements from disparate schools of Islam along with heavy doses of traditional countryside Pashtun practice that had little to do with religion. As a result, once the Taliban marched beyond the rural Pashtun belt and into cities like Kabul or the ethnic minority regions of northern Afghanistan, they encountered a resentment that rapidly bred opposition.

In the postwar period, democratic politics was transformed not only by the switch to oil, but by the development of two new methods of governing democracies, both made possible by the growing use of energy from oil. One of these was an arrangement for managing the value of money and limiting the power of financial speculation, which was said to have destroyed interwar democracy – a system built with the pipelines, oil agreements and oligarchies that organised the supply and pricing of oil. It was accompanied by the construction of the Cold War, which provided a framework for the policing of the postwar Middle East that replaced the need for mandates, trusteeships, development programmes and other scaffoldings for imperial power. The other new mode of governing democracies was the manufacture of ‘the economy’ – an object whose experts began to displace democratic debate and whose mechanisms set limits to egalitarian demands.

applications on their way to the hospital. The mandate

interchangeably. There are numerous biblical texts expressing Yahweh’s hatred and condemnation of all people who could be generically defined as witches: “diviners,” “pythons,” “conjurers,” “fortune-tellers.” We know that all Neolithic Goddess-worshiping peoples were identified by the Hebrew prophets and patriarchs as “evil,” “idolatrous,” and “unclean”—and Yahweh wanted them all dead. Christianity’s remarkably ugly record of religious intolerance begins in the Old Testament, where Yahweh’s people are directed, by him, to murder anyone practicing a rival religion. The five hundred years of European Inquisition and witch-burnings had their direct inspiration and sanctification from the Holy Bible, and there is no way to avoid this conclusion. The secular motives, and secular gains, of the witch-hunts, can be credited to the imperialism of the Roman Catholic church, to the equally power-hungry fanaticism of the Protestant Reformists—and to all the other European men who obtained advantage or sick thrills from the torture and destruction of the human body in general, and women’s bodies in particular. The Christian church used the Bible’s divine mandate for religious murder not only to survive the political turmoil of the Middle Ages, but to expand and secure one of the largest and most powerful secular institutions on earth: Western Christendom.

There are seemingly parallel origins of Nature’s God in America and China’s Mandate of Heaven. These twin concepts created socio-political forces for public good and orderly governance, and a unique cultural ethos (related to the Creator of the Universe in America and the Son of Heaven in China) is deeply rooted in both societies. Each concept is physically yet stealthily manifested in the architectural designs of the two capital cities, Beijing and Washington.

At a political science convention which I attended some years ago, one of the speakers mentioned toward the end of his talk that the education code of every state in the Union gives the public schools a mandate to form moral character. In the discussion period that followed a young woman with a marked Southern accent protested: "Ah am shocked by what Ah just heard—it goes against everything Ah learned in graduate school!

Government is weaker today because the public it serves is quicker to anger, and because the Opposition has realised the safest way back to power is opposition, not policy renewal. No mandate need be respected because the Opposition can trust the media to set impossible standards for government to meet. p237

You'd be amazed at how many presidents, senators, congressmen, governors, even mayors get elected not because of their own merits or actions, but simply because someone else sees the potential in personal or political gain for themselves in having that candidate win a particular race. The candidate may think that his or her victory is some great mandate from the people to do whatever was promised during the campaign, but the truth is that someone else simply figured, hey, if he wins, then it pays off for me in the long run. It's really that simple, but you'd be amazed how many politicians never understand it.

Why didn't the Democrats accomplish more right after the 2006 elections that gave them control of Congress? It wasn't just that they didn't have votes to override a presidential veto or block a filibuster. They didn't use their mandate to substantially change how the public--and the media-- thought about issues. They just tried to be rational, to devise programs to fit people's interests and the polls. Because there was little understanding of the brain, there was no campaign to change brains. Indeed, the very idea of "changing brains" sounds a little sinister to progressives-- a kind of Frankenstein image comes to mind. It sounds Machiavellian to liberals, like what the Republicans do. But "changing minds" in any deep way always requires changing brains. Once you understand a bit more about how brains work, you will understand that politics is very much about changing brains-- and that it can be highly moral and not the least bit sinister or underhanded.

The mandate was the linchpin. In fact, in pushing for this plan beginning in 2005, Romney, citing the original Heritage Foundation article, would deride the “free riders” who refuse to buy insurance and call the mandate “the ultimate conservative idea” because it was rooted in the principle of individual responsibility. To

Political democracy, judged on its own terms (as a basic political value in itself), is not to be judged (consequentially) in terms of its outcomes (successful or otherwise), but in terms of engagement. This is obviously reflected, quite basically, in electoral turnout figures (which, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, are in global decline); but it is also reflected in related elements such as levels of public debate, competition for and accessibility of office, accountability of representatives, and so on. In other words, if people do not engage seriously or, at a minimum, even bother to vote at all, then the political system has failed and those who claim a democratic mandate lack popular legitimacy – lack authority.

Many of the problems of today’s Kashmir are rooted in Pandit Nehru’s unforgivable blunder of taking the Indian case to the Security Council. The seemingly naïve, (some called him arrogant), Pandit Nehru had no experience of the intricacies and pitfalls of international politics. Even the United Nations, partial though it was to Pakistan, mandated a plebiscite only on the condition that all Pakistan forces, regular and irregular, withdraw from the entire state and the plebiscite be held under the umbrella of Indian sovereignty.

To understand, however, how the received form of the Bible frames and presents them, we do well to refer to the way I introduced them in chapter 1: the laws are, first and foremost, treaty stipulations. They are the conditions and mandates set down by the sovereign king YHWH for His treaty with the vassal Israel.12 As such, they are prescriptive in nature, and are meant to be binding on the members of the covenantal community. It is on the basis of the fulfillment of these stipulations that Israel the vassal will be judged by the heavenly sovereign king, just as earthly sovereigns judged their vassals on the basis of their compliance with the treaty stipulations. It may well be, additionally, that Scripture intends that judges make quasi-statutory, analogical, or referential uses of some of these laws.13 At the same time, it is clear that judges, perforce, must have also engaged a comprehensive oral law, or set of unwritten norms and social customs. The

If your politics puts you at the unorthodox end of the spectrum, you can remind the Party that Confucius also talked about the Mandate of Heaven, the concept that the people could overthrow unjust rulers.

The modern left proves how prescient the Framers were. The left’s class warfare strategies mean that election campaigns are actually conducted against the Constitution’s safeguards of freedom. Supporters of the Constitution’s federalist framework of limited central government and its protection of liberty and property rights are demagogued as enemies of social justice. Statist candidates construe electoral victories as a mandate to undo constitutional constraints that impede their authority to do “the right thing,” as Obama puts it. Winning office becomes a license for lawlessness.

It was patently obvious, then, that thwarting the Yucca Mountain project by stubborn noncompliance was “simply flouting the law.” The court took pains to reiterate that “the President and federal agencies may not ignore statutory mandates or prohibitions merely because of policy disagreement with Congress.

As a federal district court in Texas recently ruled, federal law “mandates the initiation of immigration removal proceedings whenever an immigration officer encounters an illegal alien who is not ‘clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted.’” Moreover, the court explained, the Department of Homeland Security does not have “prosecutorial discretion” to ignore this requirement; Congress, not the president, has the plenary power to make immigration law; and the executive branch may not “implement measures that are incompatible with Congressional intent.

The president and his subordinates have violated the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty and freedom of conscience. The president and his subordinates at the Department of Health and Human Services have promulgated a regulatory mandate, under the PPACA, requiring that the insurance policies that Americans are now compelled to purchase must cover FDA-approved forms of contraception, including abortifacients.

The mandate oozes hostility to religion (the sort of thing that, as detailed above, the president and his subordinates propose to ban when the religion in question is Islam).

Standing with Israel is not a political mandate. It is a prophetic mandate.

Here is a foundation for understanding today what was clear to only a few fifty years earlier. Now we can see how the state-mandated racial segregation that was the subject of the Brown litigation did not suddenly appear, as a former student, Nirej Sekhorn, put it, like a bad weed in an otherwise-beautiful racial garden, a weed the Court sought to eradicate with a single swing of its judicial hoe. It illustrates as well how segregation provided whites with a sense of belonging based on neither economic nor political well-being, but simply on an identification with the ruling class determined by race and a state-supported and subsidized belief that, as whites, they were superior to blacks.

The liberal constitutional experiment that the Egyptian political scene had witnessed in the 1930s and 1940s remained the province of Cairo's and Alexandria's elite and upper middle class. The liberal cultural fashions of the same period were detached from the crushing living standards of the peasants in the Delta and Al-Saeed, as well as the poor in the country's urban areas. It was no surprise then that the vast majority of people on the Egyptian street cheered Nasser's repudiation of the ‘bygone era'(which conveniently lumped together the monarchy, the aristocrats, the landed gentry and the different political parties – from the liberal and secular to the conservative and religious). Nasser's political and socio-economic plans emerged as the country's sole and compelling project with a substantial, expansive mandate.

it is instructive how the themes that Mrs Gandhi introduced to Indian politics in 1977 are still dominant in our political discourse. She painted the Syndicate as being in the grips of crony capitalists—and that is an idea that every party from the Left to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) recycles again and again.

abortion will continue. Many opponents claim to be taking the moral high ground. However, by depriving them of their civil rights, opposition to abortion hurts women and is thus unethical. It condemns women to mandatory motherhood. This attitude is not new. The systematic maltreatment of women has been institutionalized by governments and religions for several millennia.56 57 58 The clarity and cogency of the argument against abortion should be sufficient to sway public opinion. However, over the past four decades, this has not been the case. Opponents of abortion have resorted to eight murders,59,60 arson, firebombing,61 intimidation of women and clinicians,62 governmental intrusion into the physician-patient relationship,63 imposition of obstacles that deter and delay abortion, and increased costs.64,65 A broad campaign of deception and chicanery, including crisis pregnancy centers and disinformation sites on the Internet,66 has influenced decisions about abortion and its safety. Without the smokescreen about abortion safety, the ongoing attack on women and health care providers might be recognized for what it is: misogyny directed against our wives, sisters, and daughters. Ironically, the same political conservatives who oppose “big government” and its interference in our daily lives are sponsoring anti-abortion legislation mandating more intrusion of government into the private lives—and bodies—of American women. While the ethical dimensions of abortion will continue to be debated, the medical science is incontrovertible: legal abortion has been a resounding public-health success.18,19 The development of antibiotics, immunization, modern contraception, and legalized abortion all stand out as landmark public-health achievements of the Twentieth Century.

The church will really change society for the better only when individual believers make their chief concern their own spiritual maturity, which means living in a way that honors God’s commands and glorifies His name. Such a concern inherently includes a firm grasp on Scripture and an understanding that its primary mandate to us is to know Christ and proclaim His gospel. A godly attitude coupled with godly living makes the saving message of the gospel credible to the unsaved.

Rajiv Gandhi was the first prime minister of India who had actually done something else with his life before joining politics.

After running away from the United States government to pursue his antigovernment vision, Roger Ver had chosen to live in a place that was uniquely unreceptive to his brand of antiauthoritarian politics. Japan was a country that was still deeply wedded to traditional hierarchies with an educational system that taught its citizens from a young age to obey authority. This was evident in the country’s rigid business traditions—the bowing and exchanging of cards—and in the spiky-haired punks in Tokyo, who waited patiently for walk signals, even when there were no cars in sight. Roger had picked Japan, not because it would allow him to be around other like-minded people, but because he liked the orderliness of Japanese culture—and the women. He had met his longtime Japanese girlfriend at a gathering in California and even she had almost no interest in politics. As Roger discovered, the deferential culture made Japanese people uniquely skeptical about a project like Bitcoin that aimed to challenge government currencies. Japan was the only place Roger had encountered where people’s response, when he described Bitcoin, was to call it scary—rather than interesting or silly. This was due, Roger believed, to the way in which the virtual currency broke from the government’s mandates about how money should work. One of the only people with whom Roger had gotten any traction in Japan was a local pornography tycoon.