Prestige Related Quotes

The principles underlying propaganda are extremely simple. Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. They are selling hope. We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not just buy an auto, we buy prestige. And so with all the rest. In toothpaste, for example, we buy not a mere cleanser and antiseptic, but release from the fear of being sexually repulsive. In vodka and whisky we are not buying a protoplasmic poison which in small doses, may depress the nervous system in a psychologically valuable way; we are buying friendliness and good fellowship, the warmth of Dingley Dell and the brilliance of the Mermaid Tavern. With our laxatives we buy the health of a Greek god. With the monthly best seller we acquire culture, the envy of our less literate neighbors and the respect of the sophisticated. In every case the motivation analyst has found some deep-seated wish or fear, whose energy can be used to move the customer to part with cash and so, indirectly, to turn the wheels of industry.

Sexism is clearly not the continuation of patriarchal power relations in modern societies. Rather, it is a hitherto unthinkable individual degradation of one-half of humanity on a socio-biological grounds. The lower prestige assigned by patriarchal societies (of the Mediterranean or of any other type) must therefore be carefully distinguished from the personal degradation of each individual woman who, under the regime of sex, is forced to compete with men.

To be honest, I think emotional accessibility is a shame trigger for researchers and academics. Very early in our training, we are taught that a cool distance and inaccessibility contribute to prestige, and that if you’re too relatable, your credentials come into question.

Young, healthy, and attractive women act on their desires for somewhat older, high-prestige mates, attracting men who might otherwise become mates for older women. Men with status and relative wealth try to fulfill their preferences for youthful, healthy, attractive women.

After a duration of a thousand years, the power of astrology broke down when, with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the progress of astronomy overthrew the false hypothesis upon which the entire structure rested, namely the geocentric system of the universe. The fact that the earth revolves in space intervened to upset the complicated play of planetary influences, and the silent stars, related to the unfathomable depths of the sky, no longer made their prophetic voices audible to mankind. Celestial mechanics and spectrum analysis finally robbed them of their mysterious prestige.

We can get some relatively clear thought in science. But even there it is not entirely clear because scientists are worried about their prestige and status, and so on. Sometimes they won't consider ideas that don't go along with their theories or with their prejudices. Nevertheless, science is aimed at seeing the fact, whether the scientist likes what he sees or not—looking at theories objectively, calmly, and without bias. To some extent, relatively coherent thought has been achieved better in science than in some other areas of life. Some results flowed out of science and technology which are quite impressive—a great power was released. But now we discover that whenever the time comes to use science we just forget the scientific method. We just say that the use of what scientists have discovered will be determined by the needs of our country, or by my need to make money, or by my need to defeat that religion or merely by my need to show what a great powerful person I am. So we see that relatively unpolluted thought has been used to develop certain things, and then we always trust to the most polluted thought to decide what to do with them. That's part of the incoherence

Of course, peace treaties are very attractive to those who sign them. They strengthen one's prestige with the electorate. But the time will come when the names of these public figures will be erased from history. Nobody will remember them any longer. But the Western peoples will have to pay heavily for these overtrusting agreements.

Here the bewildering antithesis of play and seriousness presents itself once more. We have gradually become convinced that civilization is rooted in noble play and that, if it is to unfold in full dignity and style, it cannot afford to neglect the play-element. The observance of play-rules is nowhere more imperative than in the relations between countries and States. Once they are broken, society falls into barbarism and chaos. On the other hand we cannot deny that modern warfare has lapsed into the old agonistic attitude of playing at war for the sake of prestige and glory. Now this is our difficulty: modern warfare has, on the face of it, lost all contact with play.

With the support and protection of Democratic legislators, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major TV networks now undertook a relentless five-year propaganda campaign against the war, taking relatively minor incidents like the misbehavior of guards at the Abu Ghraib prison and blowing them up into international scandals damaging their country’s prestige and weakening its morale.

In my experience, the basis of almost all psychological problems is an unsatisfactory relation to one's urge to individuality. And the healing process often involves an acceptance of what is commonly called selfish, power-seeking or autoerotic. The majority of patients in psychotherapy need to learn how to be more effectively selfsh and more effective in the use of their own personal power; they need to accept responsibility for the fact of being centers of power and effectiveness. So-called selfish or egocentric behavior which expresses itself in demands made on others is not effective conscious self-centeredness or conscious individuality. We demand from others only what we fail to give ourselves. If we have insufficient self-love or self-prestige, our need expresses itself unconsciously by coercive tactics toward others. And often the coercion occurs under the guise of virtue, love, or altruism. Such unconscious selfishness is ineffectual and destructive to oneself and others. It fails to achieve its purpose because it is blind, without awareness of itself. What is required is not the extirpation of selfishness, which is impossible but rather that it be wedded to consciousness and thus becomes effective. All the facts of biology and psychology teach us that every individual unit of life is self-centered to the core. The only varying factor is the degree of consciousness which accompanies that fact.

The decline of community life suggests that in the future, we risk becoming secure and self-absorbed last men, devoid of thymotic striving for higher goals in our pursuit of private comforts. But the opposite danger exists as well, namely, that we will return to being first men engaged in bloody and pointless prestige battles, only this time with modern weapons. Indeed, the two problems are related to one another, for the absence of regular and constructive outlets for megalothymia may simply lead to its later resurgence in an extreme and pathological form.

Novels, says Sartre, are not life, but they owe our power upon us, as upon himself as an infant, to the fact that they are somehow like life. In life, he once remarked, 'all ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So we try to change the world; that is, to live as if the relations between things and their potentialities were governed not by deterministic processes but by magic.' The as if of the novel consists in a similar negation of determinism, the establishment of an accepted freedom by magic. We make up aventures, invent and ascribe the significance of temporal concords to those 'privileged moments' to which we alone award their prestige, make our own human clocks tick in a clockless world. And we take a man who is by definition de trop, and create a context in which he isn't. The novel is a lie only as our quotidian inventions are lies. The power which goes to its making--the imagination --is a function of man's inescapable freedom. This freedom, in Mary Warnock's words, 'expresses itself in his ability to see things which are not.' It is by his fiction that we know he is free. It is not surprising that Sartre as ontologist, having to describe many kinds of fictive behaviour, invents stories to do so, thus moving into a middle ground between life and novel. ....

In the first century BC, the funeral processions of members of the political elite, including females, even halted at the Forum, where an oration was delivered.99 The family also arranged for “living statues” to accompany the procession; these were actors wearing the masks of important ancestors who had themselves been honored with public statues. By these means, which endured into the Imperial Age, descendants created a publicly visible representation of their families and their position in society.100 How did surviving associates and relatives mark the exceptional nature of a funeral? On the one hand, they did it by ostentatiously neglecting their own outward appearance, leaving their hair unkempt (or at least without ornament), and wearing ragged, “dirty” (or at least dark) clothing. In sum, by renouncing signs of social distinction.101 At the same time, however, the opportunity for public exposure that the mourning ritual provided was not to be missed, for it was yet another opportunity to showcase the personal status or the prestige of the family or group.

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call “seeing a person we know” is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear. No doubt, in the Swann they had formed for themselves, my family had failed out of ignorance to include a host of details from his life in the fashionable world that caused other people, when they were in his presence, to see refinements rule his face and stop at his aquiline nose as though at their natural frontier; but they had also been able to garner in this face disaffected of its prestige, vacant and spacious, in the depths of these depreciated eyes, the vague, sweet residue—half memory, half forgetfulness—of the idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, around the card table or in the garden, during our life of good country neighborliness. The corporeal envelope of our friend had been so well stuffed with all this, as well as with a few memories relating to his parents, that this particular Swann had become a complete and living being, and I have the impression of leaving one person to go to another distinct from him, when, in my memory, I pass from the Swann I knew later with accuracy to that first Swann—to that first Swann in whom I rediscover the charming mistakes of my youth and who in fact resembles less the other Swann than he resembles the other people I knew at the time, as though one’s life were like a museum in which all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, a single tonality—to that first Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the smell of the tall chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries, and a sprig of tarragon.

He stared at it in utter disbelief while his secretary, Peters, who’d only been with him for a fortnight, muttered a silent prayer of gratitude for the break and continued scribbling as fast as he could, trying futilely to catch up with his employer’s dictation. “This,” said Ian curtly, “was sent to me either by mistake or as a joke. In either case, it’s in excruciatingly bad taste.” A memory of Elizabeth Cameron flickered across Ian’s mind-a mercenary, shallow litter flirt with a face and body that had drugged his mind. She’d been betrothed to a viscount when he’d met her. Obviously she hadn’t married her viscount-no doubt she’d jilted him in favor of someone with even better prospects. The English nobility, as he well knew, married only for prestige and money, then looked elsewhere for sexual fulfillment. Evidently Elizabeth Cameron’s relatives were putting her back on the marriage block. If so, they must be damned eager to unload her if they were willing to forsake a title for Ian’s money…That line of conjecture seemed so unlikely that Ian dismissed it. This note was obviously a stupid prank, perpetrated, no doubt, by someone who remembered the gossip that had exploded over that weekend house party-someone who thought he’d find the note amusing. Completely dismissing the prankster and Elizabeth Cameron from his mind, Ian glanced at his harassed secretary who was frantically scribbling away. “No reply is necessary,” he said. As he spoke he flipped the message across his desk toward his secretary, but the white parchment slid across the polished oak and floated to the floor. Peters made an awkward dive to catch it, but as he lurched sideways all the other correspondence that went with his dictation slid off his lap onto the floor. “I-I’m sorry, sir,” he stammered, leaping up and trying to collect the dozens of pieces of paper he’d scattered on the carpet. “Extremely sorry, Mr. Thornton,” he added, frantically snatching up contracts, invitations and letters and shoving them into a disorderly pile. His employer appeared not to hear him. He was already rapping out more instructions and passing the corresponding invitations and letters across the desk. “Decline the first three, accept the fourth, decline the fifth. Send my condolences on this one. On this one, explain that I’m going to be in Scotland, and send an invitation to join me there, along with directions to the cottage.” Clutching the papers to his chest, Peters poked his face up on the opposite side of the desk. “Yes, Mr. Thornton!” he said, trying to sound confident. But it was hard to be confident when one was on one’s knees. Harder still when one wasn’t entirely certain which instructions of the morning went with which invitation or piece of correspondence. Ian Thornton spent the rest of the afternoon closeted with Peters, heaping more dictation on the inundated clerk. He spent the evening with the Earl of Melbourne, his future father-in-law, discussing the earl’s daughter and himself. Peters spent part of his evening trying to learn from the butler which invitations his employer was likely to accept or reject.

ON DECEMBER 8, 1941, cinemas and theaters in Japan were made to temporarily suspend their evening performances and broadcast a speech recorded by Prime Minister Tojo Hideki earlier that day. U.S. films—films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which the Japanese relished in easier times—were now officially banned. That night, audiences were confronted with the voice of a leader who hardly resembled Jimmy Stewart. Tojo was a bald and bespectacled man of middle age with no remarkable features other than his mustache. His exaggerated buckteeth existed only in Western caricatures, but he did not look like a senior statesman who had just taken his country to war against a most formidable enemy, and his voice was memorable only for its dullness. He recited the speech, “On Accepting the Great Imperial Command,” with the affected diction of a second-rate stage actor. Our elite Imperial Army and Navy are now fighting a desperate battle. Despite the empire’s every possible effort to salvage it, the peace of the whole of East Asia has collapsed. In the past, the government employed every possible means to normalize U.S.-Japan diplomatic relations. But the United States would not yield an inch on its demands. Quite the opposite. The United States has strengthened its ties with Britain, the Netherlands, and China, demanding unilateral concessions from our Empire, including the complete and unconditional withdrawal of the imperial forces from China, the rejection of the [Japanese puppet] Nanjing government, and the annulment of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. Even in the face of such demands, the Empire persistently strove for a peaceful settlement. But the United States to this day refused to reconsider its position. Should the Empire give in to all its demands, not only would Japan lose its prestige and fail to see the China Incident to its completion, but its very existence would be in peril. Tojo, in his selective explanation of the events leading to Pearl Harbor, insisted that the war Japan had just initiated was a “defensive” war. He faithfully echoed Japan’s deep-seated feelings of persecution, wounded national pride, and yearning for greater recognition, which together might be called, for the want of a better phrase, anti-Westernism. It was a sentimental speech, and it was notable for what was left unsaid.

Although neither condemning nor protesting either institution in any explicit sense, the humble saint’s life serves as a radical juxtaposition and critique of the values of the world. He is not concerned with power. He is not interested in wealth. All he wants, with all his heart, is to be a poor imitator of Christ. Our world, as St. Francis knew, values individual greatness. In order for our lives to be significant—in order to be “great”—we are told that we must obtain as much power, wealth, and prestige as we can, living in constant competition with one another to see who has the most and thus is the best. Our worth is defined by what we possess as it relates to what others possess, and those who have more than others live believing that they are owed certain things from the world. Respect. Admiration. Glory. Fear. Love. This is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ that St. Francis lived by.

Ian Jobling has added the complementary view that whites are particularly devoted to “competitive altruism,”‡ or the appearance of generosity and philanthropy. There is much prestige in publicly ministering to the unsuccessful, and non-whites are the most obvious examples. Selflessness is a virtue, and nothing appears more selfless than protestations of sympathy for the oppressed and marginalized. The more oppressed and marginalized the altruist believes his beneficiaries to be, the more praiseworthy his altruism.

This implies that what matters is the activity as such, the process and not the result. In our culture the emphasis is just the reverse. We produce not for a concrete satisfaction but for the abstract purpose of selling our commodity; we feel that we can acquire everything material or immaterial by buying it, and thus things become ours independently of any creative effort of our own in relation to them. In the same way we regard our personal qualities and the result of our efforts as commodities that can be sold for money, prestige, and power. The emphasis thus shifts from the present satisfaction of creative activity to the value of the finished product. Thereby man misses the only satisfaction that can give him real happiness—the experience of the activity of the present moment—and chases after a phantom that leaves him disappointed as soon as he believes he has caught it—the illusory happiness called success.

Strategic culture provides an analytical lens through which to better grasp the continuities underlying international crises and the motivations of states’ actions. It encompasses both the emotionality of states (national pride and prestige) and the egoism of states (the pursuit of national interests).

At regular intervals in the past we have witnessed debates about the use of mathematics in economics. The critics of mathematics have focused on two main arguments. First, they have pointed out that mathematical models must by necessity build on so many conceptual simplifications that they are unable to capture the complexity of human relationships and the structure of social and economic life. Second, they have maintained that the increasing standard of theoretical formalization has led to unfortunate consequences for economists’ choice of topics for their research. Those who strive to achieve status and prestige among their colleagues will have an incentive to choose research problems that are easy to formalize rather than being related to important problems in the real world.

The old-fashioned word for that experience is “envy.” “I think the reason we talk so much about sex is that we don’t dare talk about envy,” Girard said.4 Envy is an engine of destructive mimetic desire, and there are few things to stop it because it operates underground. Prestige is measured relative to what we perceive someone else has that we lack, so it’s a breeding ground for envy.

She, like most people who are not wealthy, believed that the more one spends, the more satisfying life is. Thus, more money translates into more spending and therefore more happiness. But she does not completely understand the benefits of being wealthy. It has much more to do with being financially independent and secure than owning prestige brands. High self-esteem is related to achieving financial independence. Both the sense of achievement that comes from success and financial independence lead to happiness and life satisfaction, not meaningless badges.

Given the obvious “will to power” (as Friedrich Nietzsche called it) of the human race, the enormous energy put into its expression, the early emergence of hierarchies among children, and the childlike devastation of grown men who tumble from the top, I’m puzzled by the taboo with which our society surrounds this issue. Most psychology textbooks do not even mention power and dominance, except in relation to abusive relationships. Everyone seems in denial. In one study on the power motive, corporate managers were asked about their relationship with power. They did acknowledge the existence of a lust for power, but never applied it to themselves. They rather enjoyed responsibility, prestige, and authority. The power grabbers were other men. Political candidates are equally reluctant. They sell themselves as public servants, only in it to fix the economy or improve education. Have you ever heard a candidate admit he wants power? Obviously, the word “servant” is doublespeak: does anyone believe that it’s only for our sake that they join the mudslinging of modern democracy? Do the candidates themselves believe this? What an unusual sacrifice that would be. It’s refreshing to work with chimpanzees: they are the honest politicians we all long for. When political philosopher Thomas Hobbes postulated an insuppressible power drive, he was right on target for both humans and apes. Observing how blatantly chimpanzees jockey for position, one will look in vain for ulterior motives and expedient promises. I was not prepared for this when, as a young student, I began to follow the dramas among the Arnhem chimpanzees from an observation window overlooking their island. In those days, students were supposed to be antiestablishment, and my shoulder-long hair proved it. We considered power evil and ambition ridiculous. Yet my observations of the apes forced me to open my mind to seeing power relations not as something bad but as something ingrained. Perhaps inequality was not to be dismissed as simply the product of capitalism. It seemed to go deeper than that. Nowadays, this may seem banal, but in the 1970s human behavior was seen as totally flexible: not natural but cultural. If we really wanted to, people believed, we could rid ourselves of archaic tendencies like sexual jealousy, gender roles, material ownership, and, yes, the desire to dominate. Unaware of this revolutionary call, my chimpanzees demonstrated the same archaic tendencies, but without a trace of cognitive dissonance. They were jealous, sexist, and possessive, plain and simple. I didn’t know then that I’d be working with them for the rest of my life or that I would never again have the luxury of sitting on a wooden stool and watching them for thousands of hours. It was the most revelatory time of my life. I became so engrossed that I began trying to imagine what made my apes decide on this or that action. I started dreaming of them at night and, most significant, I started seeing the people around me in a different light.

English at this time was very much the ‘poor relation’ of the three in terms of prestige, and this lowly status of English post-Norman conquest finds echoes in the modern English lexicon. When people say: ‘He uttered an Anglo-Saxon expression’ as a euphemism for ‘he swore’, they do so with good reason: much of our modern earthy or taboo vocabulary carries the stigma of low-status English in medieval England, while its socially acceptable equivalents have generally been borrowed from Norman French. The social divide between the new ruling class and the subjugated English is also evident elsewhere in the lexicon. Pork, mutton and beef, delicacies available only to the Norman-speaking élites in the Middle Ages, are terms of Anglo-Norman origin, but the names of the animals which provide them, pig, sheep and cow, all come from Anglo-Saxon, the language of the farmers who produced the meat for the rulers’ table.

In the end it decided that power was the opportunity to acquire riches and prestige, to be in a position to hand out benefits in the form of jobs, contracts, gifts of money etc. to relations and political allies.

Very early in our training, we are taught that a cool distance and inaccessibility contribute to prestige, and that if you’re too relatable, your credentials come into question.

Power—To gain social status and prestige Purpose—To have meaning and direction in my life Romance—To have intense, exciting love in my life Safety—To be safe and secure Security—To protect loved ones, my community, and/or my nation Self-control—To be disciplined in my own actions Self-esteem—To feel good about myself Self-sufficient—To take care of myself without being dependent on others Spirituality—To grow and mature spiritually by connecting to things bigger than myself Stability—To have a life that stays relatively consistent Stimulation—To actively seek out adventure and create a life filled with novelty and variety Tolerance—To accept other people, as well as opinions and beliefs differing from my own Tradition—To respect and preserve the past and maintain order through tradition and customs Universalism—To create a sense of harmony among different people and preventing war and conflict; to create a sense of unity with nature and protecting it Virtue—To live a morally pure and excellent life Wealth—To have plenty of money Insert your own unlisted value: Insert your own unlisted value:

A knight is in need of advice on how to slay a dragon. Who will he beseech? A wizard. A warrior is in need of arms and armor to defeat a foul daemon. Who does he contact? A wizard. A rogue is in need of enchantments to defeat a loathsome sorcerer. What agency will help his cause? A wizard. A magician is in search of new lore to guide his research and further his cause. What earthly power will avail him? A wizard. A family is in need of deliverance for an ailing relative. Who will they implore? A wizard. Less scrupulous but opportunistic knights, warriors, rogues, mages, and families are in need of enchantment, magical erudition, knowledge, prestige, advice, and riches to further their ends. Who will they besiege, rob, accost, threaten, imprison, or attack? A wizard.

One assumption that is already being shattered is the idea that only routine, semi-skilled jobs like taxi driving, food delivery, or household chores are susceptible. Even traditional professions like medicine and law are proving to be susceptible to platform models. We’ve already mentioned Medicast, which applies an Uber-like model to finding a doctor. Several platform companies are providing online venues where legal services are available with comparable ease, speed, and convenience. Axiom Law has built a $200 million platform business by using a combination of data-mining software and freelance law talent to provide legal guidance and services to business clients; InCloudCounsel claims it can process basic legal documents such as licensing forms and nondisclosure agreements at a savings of up to 80 percent compared with a traditional law firm.11 In the decades to come, it seems likely that the platform model will be applied—or at least tested—in virtually every market for labor and professional services. How will this trend impact the service industries—not to mention the working lives of hundreds of millions of people? One likely result will be an even greater stratification of wealth, power, and prestige among service providers. Routine and standardized tasks will move to online platforms, where an army of relatively low-paid, self-employed professionals will be available to handle them. Meanwhile, the world’s great law firms, medical centers, consulting partnerships, and accounting practices will not vanish, but their relative size and importance will shrink as much of the work they used to do migrates to platforms that can provide comparable services at a fraction of the cost and with far greater convenience. A surviving handful of world-class experts will increasingly focus on a tiny subset of the most highly specialized and challenging assignments, which they can tackle from anywhere in the world using online tools. Thus, at the very highest level of professional expertise, winner-take-all markets are likely to emerge, with (say) two dozen internationally renowned attorneys competing for the splashiest and most lucrative cases anywhere on the globe.

The four million Minangkabau living in West Sumatra consider themselves to be a matriarchal society. “While we in the West glorify male dominance and competition,” Sanday says, “the Minangkabau glorify their mythical Queen Mother and cooperation.” She reports that “males and females relate more like partners for the common good than like competitors ruled by egocentric self-interest,” and that as with bonobo social groups, women’s prestige increases with age and “accrues to those who promote good relations….”16

There are five key characteristics that will tend to explain how quickly an innovation is adopted. They are (in order of importance): 1.Relative advantage is whether the innovation is better than what is out there already. This can be in effectiveness, economic or even prestige terms. 2.Compatibility is the extent that an innovation is consistent with existing values and norms. 3.Simplicity is the degree to which innovations are perceived to be easy to understand and use. 4.Trialability is the extent to which innovations can be experimented with on a limited basis. Trialability is particularly important to early adopters, as they have no vicarious experience to draw on. 5.Observability is the extent to which the results of an innovation are visible to others.

Masstige: By creating a “junior” category range which offers relative prestige to the middle classes at a high but affordable price, they can now start to realise the dream of luxury. These products are still far cheaper and often inferior to ultra-luxury products. Premium products: Products with additional features or made from better materials, which typically commands a price premium of 10 to 50% above ordinary products within the same category, yet these products are far cheaper than ultra-luxury products. Luxury products: Typically, these products share some parity points with ordinary products, but are sufficiently distinguished and often demand a price premium of 50 to 500% over ordinary goods. Ultra luxury: These are exceptional products and services, which can hardly be compared to ordinary products and services. For example, a holiday to space or a private jet.

If one disagrees with the nomadism and violence of our society, then one is under an obligation to take up some permanent dwelling place and cultivate the possibility of peace and harmlessness in it. If one deplores the destructiveness and wastefulness of the economy then one is under an obligation to live as far out on the margin of the economy as one is able: to be economically independent of exploitive industries, to learn to need less, to waste less, to make things last, to give up meaningless luxuries, to understand and resist the language of salesmen and public relations experts, to see through attractive packages, to refuse to purchase fashion or glamour or prestige. If one feels endangered by meaninglessness, then one is under an obligation to resist meaningless pleasure and to resist meaningless work, and to give up the moral comfort and the excuses of the mentality of specialization.

The degree of relative advantage may be measured in economic terms, but social prestige, convenience, and satisfaction are also important factors.

Choice of profession also no longer guarantees a high social status. This is bound up, among other things, with fragmented processes of downward mobility within occupational groups. A senior teacher earns a relatively comfortable income and need not worry about the future; they may even be able to retire early. In the same school and in the same class, however, there is possibly also a younger teacher on a temporary contract who has to claim unemployment benefit during the summer vacation and has no prospects for permanent employment. (Many German states now rely on a growing number of flexible teachers who are no longer guaranteed permanent positions.) In the postal service, too, although there are still many permanent employees, newly hired staff generally are not offered any job security (cf. Chapter 5). Among certain occupational groups the differences can be tremendous, as with journalists, for example. Those who began working at major German publications like Stern, Spiegel or Die Zeit ten or twenty years ago could expect a secure future. In the big publishing houses today, on the other hand, not only have precarious jobs and poorly paid groups of online writers proliferated, but not even the established staff can feel secure any more. A growing share belong to the ‘media precariat’ and earn less than €30,000 per year.99 Another example is that of lawyers, formerly the very model of status and prosperity. This professional group now divides into those who continue to earn good money and enjoy a high social prestige while employed in large offices or working for corporations, and a growing flock of precarious self-employed legal professionals, who fail to gain a steady footing in an over-filled market.

The following fundamental question therefore arises: what is the importance of occupational upward mobility today? The last section discussed the difficulties of analysing occupational groups in relation to social stability. If the son of a skilled worker finishes secondary education and becomes a journalist, or the daughter of a commercial employee becomes a lawyer, then both have risen in relation to their parents, according to the traditional model. Their jobs bring greater social prestige—however, they may no longer automatically earn more money than their parents. Likewise, whether they are precariously employed and under constant threat of unemployment is generally not taken into account.

Taxi Driver" There is something strangely liberating about being just a taxi driver… The secret lies in the “just”! Because you’re just a taxi driver, nobody really sees you… But you see, hear, and feel the absurdities, the shallowness, the beauty, the sorrow, the joy, the heartbreak of every rider! Most treat you with half or totally fake respect, because you’re just a taxi driver… But they leave you alone They don’t find justifications or create crises to take over your seat… In fact, they want you to be exactly in that seat! After all, they only ride with you because - at least for that time – they don’t wish to occupy your seat… Yet, like every sense of liberation, Being a taxi driver, is a liberation kneaded with a strange sadness and disappointment when you realize that the motherfuckers only leave you alone when you run away from them and occupy a seat that they don’t desire during the their ride …. [Original poem published in Arabic on June 21, 2923 at ahewar.org]

the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions.

The Council that is usually cited as that which 'condemend Origen' is the fifth ecumenical council, the second Constantinopolitan Council, in 553 CE. First of all, its ecumenicity is in fact doubtful, since it was wanted by Justinian and not by Vigilius, the bishop of Rome, or other bishops; Vigilius was even brought to Constantinople by force, by the emperor's order, and moreover he did not accept to declare that the council was open (Justinian had to do so). The anathemas, fifteen in number, were already prepared before the opening of the council. Here, Origen is considered to be the inspirer of the so-called Isochristoi. This was the position of the Sabaite opponents of Origen, summarized by Cyril of Scythopolis who maintained that the Council issued a definitive anathema against Origen, Theodore, Evagrius, and Didymus concerning the preexistence of souls and apokatastasis, thus ratifying Sabas' position (V. Sab. 90). One of these previously formulated anathemas, which only waited to be ratified by the Council, was against the apokatastasis doctrine: 'If anyone supports the monstrous doctrine of apokatastasis [τὴν τερατώδη ἀποκατάστασιν], be it anathema.' Other anathemas concern the 'pre-existence of souls,' their union with bodies only after their fall, and the denial of the resurrection of the body. These doctrines have nothing to do with Origen; in fact, Origen is not the object of any authentic anathema. And Vigilius's documents, which were finally emanated by a council that was not wanted by him, most remarkably do not even contain Origen's name. Origen was never formally condemned by any Christian ecumenical council. [G.L.] Prestige once observed, inspiredly, that 'Origen is the greatest of that happily small company of saints who, having lived and died in grace, suffered sentence of expulsion from the Church on earth after they had already entered into the joy of their Lord.' We may add that Origen, strictly speaking, did not even suffer any formal expulsion from the church. One problem is that later Christian authors considered the aforementioned anathemas as referring to Origen; so, extraneous theories were ascribed to him. The condemnations were also ascribed to Didymus and Evagrius; indeed, the Isochristoi professed a radical form of Evagrianism and some anathemas seem to reflect some of Evagrius's Kaphalaia Gnostica, but it would be inaccurate to refer all of Justinian's accusations and of the Council's 'condemnations' to Evagrius. What is notable, these condemnations, however, were never connected with Nyssen, not even that concerning universal apokatastasis. There may be various explanations to this. One is that Nyssen, the theologian who inspired the Constantinople theology in 381 CE, enjoyed too high an authority to be criticized. Also, his ideas could by then be related – and indeed were related – to the Purgatory theory. And his manuscripts bristle with interpolations and glosses concerned with explaining that Gregory in fact did not support the theory of apokatastasis. Germanus of Constantinople, in the eighth century, even claimed that Gregory's works were interpolated by heretics who ascribed Origen's ideas to Gregory. But precisely from the time of Justinian an important confirmation of the presence of the doctrine in Gregory's and the other Cappadocians' writings is given in Barsanuphius's Letter 604. A monk has asked him how it is that Origen's doctrine, especially that of apokatastasis, was supported by orthodox authors, and even saints, such as the Cappadocians. Barsanuphius, far from trying to deny that the Cappadocians supported the doctrine of apokatastasis, simply observes that even saints can have a limited understanding of the mysteries of God and can be wrong. Therefore, neither the monk nor Barsanuphius, who heartily detested the doctrine of apokatastasis, thought that Gregory did not actually believe in apokatastasis and that his works were interpolated by heretics. (pp. 736-738)

The (nuclear proliferation) optimists emphasized the constraints on further proliferation and anticipate a relatively benign proliferation future, due in large part to the success of initiatives to materially strengthen the nonproliferation regime, including the development of far-reaching norms and processes. Proliferation pessimists, on the other hand, are convinced that there are powerful incentives to acquire nuclear weapons, for purposes of political prestige, regional security, and getting more "bang from the buck" relative to the economics of building and sustaining large conventional forces.

During the more than 70 years of independence of Pakistan, none of the governments established its resources to argue and defend its disputes and political and diplomatic relations in civilized societies. For that purpose, the English print and electronic media would have the appropriate and suitable ways to execute its concerns, for the security and economic achievements. Unfortunately, all institutions fail, to draw attention towards that insight and point. Pakistan has not a lack of talented figures, who may devote their services voluntarily, for that cause. It is a key to the state of Pakistan, for its advocacy of peace and harmony with other nations, and defending tool, to opponents, who try to damage the dignity and prestige of Pakistan, with negative propaganda. If we realize that, the small nations and political, or religious groups, have a hold on such tools, and ways, for their propaganda. While Pakistan is out of that picture; consequently, we face isolation, and humiliation by wrong elements.

The radical rhetoric of the early fascist movements led many observers, then and since, to suppose that once in power the fascist regimes would make sweeping and fundamental changes in the very bases of national life. In practice, although fascist regimes did indeed make some breathtaking changes, they left the distribution of property and the economic and social hierarchy largely intact (differing fundamentally from what the word revolution had usually meant since 1789). The reach of the fascist “revolution” was restricted by two factors. For one thing, even at their most radical, early fascist programs and rhetoric had never attacked wealth and capitalism as directly as a hasty reading might suggest. As for social hierarchy, fascism’s leadership principle effectively reinforced it, though fascists posed some threat to inherited position by advocating the replacement of the tired bourgeois elite by fascist “new men.” The handful of real fascist outsiders, however, went mostly into the parallel organizations. The scope of fascist change was further limited by the disappearance of many radicals during the period of taking root and coming to power. As fascist movements passed from protest and the harnessing of disparate resentments to the conquest of power, with its attendant alliances and compromises, their priorities changed, along with their functions. They became far less interested in assembling the discontented than in mobilizing and unifying national energies for national revival and aggrandizement. This obliged them to break many promises made to the socially and economically discontented during the first years of fascist recruitment. The Nazis in particular broke promises to the small peasants and artisans who had been the mainstay of their electoral following, and to favor urbanization and industrial production. Despite their frequent talk about “revolution,” fascists did not want a socioeconomic revolution. They wanted a “revolution of the soul,” and a revolution in the world power position of their people. They meant to unify and invigorate and empower their decadent nation—to reassert the prestige of Romanità or the German Volk or Hungarism or other group destiny. For that purpose they believed they needed armies, productive capacity, order, and property. Force their country’s traditional productive elements into subjection, perhaps; transform them, no doubt; but not abolish them. The fascists needed the muscle of these bastions of established power to express their people’s renewed unity and vitality at home and on the world stage. Fascists wanted to revolutionize their national institutions in the sense that they wanted to pervade them with energy, unity, and willpower, but they never dreamed of abolishing property or social hierarchy. The fascist mission of national aggrandizement and purification required the most fundamental changes in the nature of citizenship and in the relation of citizens to the state since the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first giant step was to subordinate the individual to the community. Whereas the liberal state rested on a compact among its citizens to protect individual rights and freedoms, the fascist state embodied the national destiny, in service to which all the members of the national group found their highest fulfillment. We have seen that both regimes found some distinguished nonfascist intellectuals ready to support this position. In fascist states, individual rights had no autonomous existence. The State of Law—the Rechtsstaat, the état de droit—vanished, along with the principles of due process by which citizens were guaranteed equitable treatment by courts and state agencies. A suspect acquitted in a German court of law could be rearrested by agents of the regime at the courthouse door and put in a concentration camp without any further legal procedure.

In general, the Fascist and Nazi regimes had no serious difficulty establishing control over public services. They largely protected civil servants’ turf from party intrusion and left their professional identity intact. Civil servants were frequently in broad sympathy with fascist regimes’ biases for authority and order against parliament and the Left, and they appreciated enhanced freedom from legal restraint. Eliminating Jews sometimes opened up career advancement. The police were the key agency, of course. The German police were very quickly removed from the normative state and brought under Nazi Party control via the SS. Himmler, supported by Hitler against rivals and the Ministry of the Interior, which traditionally controlled the police, ascended in April 1933 from political police commander of Bavaria (where he set up the first concentration camp at Dachau) to chief of the whole German police system in June 1936. This process was facilitated by the disgruntlement many German police had felt for the Weimar Republic and its “coddling of criminals,” and by the regime’s efforts to enhance police prestige in the eyes of the public. By 1937, the annual congratulatory “Police Day” had expanded from one day to seven. Initially the SA were deputized as auxiliary Exercising Power police in Prussia, but this practice was ended on August 2, 1933, and the police faced no further threat of dilution from party militants. They enjoyed a privileged role above the law as the final arbiters of their own form of unlimited “police justice.” While the German police were run more directly by Nazi Party chiefs than any other traditional state agency, the Italian police remained headed by a civil servant, and their behavior was little more unprofessional or partisan than under previous governments. This is one of the most profound differences between the Nazi and Fascist regimes. The head of the Italian police for most of the Fascist period was the professional civil servant Arturo Bocchini. There was a political police, the OVRA, but the regime executed relatively few political enemies. Another crucial instrument of rule was the judiciary. Although very few judges were Nazi Party members in 1933, the German magistracy was already overwhelmingly conservative. It had established a solid track record of harsher penalties against communists than against Nazis during the 1920s. In exchange for a relatively limited invasion of their professional sphere by the party’s Special Courts and People’s Court, the judges willingly submerged their associations in a Nazi organization and happily accepted the powerful role the new regime gave them.71 The Italian judiciary was little changed, since political interference had already been the norm under the liberal monarchy. Italian judges felt general sympathy for the Fascist regime’s commitment to public order and national grandeur.

Wikipedia: Unofficial Collaborator The great range of circumstances that led to collaboration with the Stasi makes any overall moral evaluation of the spying activities extremely difficult. There were those that volunteered willingly and without moral scruples to pass detailed reports to the Stasi out of selfish motives, from self-regard, or from the urge to exercise power over others. Others collaborated with the Stasis out of a sincerely held sense of duty that the GDR was the better Germany and that it must be defended from the assaults of its enemies. Others were to a lesser or greater extent themselves victims of state persecution and had been broken or blackmailed into collaboration. Many informants believed that they could protect friends or relations by passing on only positive information about them, while others thought that provided they reported nothing suspicious or otherwise punishable, then no harm would be done by providing the Stasi with reports. These failed to accept that the Stasi could use apparently innocuous information to support their covert operations and interrogations. A further problem in any moral evaluation is presented by the extent to which information from informal collaborators was also used for combating non-political criminality. Moral judgements on collaboration involving criminal police who belonged to the Stasi need to be considered on a case by case basis, according to individual circumstances. A belief has gained traction that any informal collaborator (IM) who refused the Stasi further collaboration and extracted himself (in the now outdated Stasi jargon of the time "sich dekonspirierte") from a role as an IM need have no fear of serious consequences for his life, and could in this way safely cut himself off from communication with the Stasi. This is untrue. Furthermore, even people who declared unequivocally that they were not available for spying activities could nevertheless, over the years, find themselves exposed to high-pressure "recruitment" tactics. It was not uncommon for an IM trying to break out of a collaborative relationship with the Stasi to find his employment opportunities destroyed. The Stasi would often identify refusal to collaborate, using another jargon term, as "enemy-negative conduct" ("feindlich-negativen Haltung"), which frequently resulted in what they termed "Zersetzungsmaßnahmen", a term for which no very direct English translation is available, but for one form of which a definition has been provided that begins: "a systematic degradation of reputation, image, and prestige in a database on one part true, verifiable and degrading, and on the other part false, plausible, irrefutable, and always degrading; a systematic organization of social and professional failures for demolishing the self-confidence of the individual.

(...) Is not true optimism to consider the world a fundamentally negative event, with many happy exceptions? By contrast, does not true pessimism consist in viewing the world as fundamentally good, leaving the slightest accident to make us despair of that vision? An ideal universe at the mercy of the slightest reverse and doomed, in any case, to death? And does not true superstition consist in regarding evil as an exception which ought to disappear? We judge everything today in terms of a real and rational sequence of events. But we could equally fully and reasonably view those events as part of an irrational sequence – we simply have to reverse the perspective and take a maleficent transcendence rather than a providential force as our reference. We would be less despairing if we regarded every misfortune as justified by a transcendent order of evil. Such is the rule of a radical optimism. We must make evil the basic rule. Then, the fortunate occurrence becomes the exception. Then, it is joy we would be fated to meet with. At any rate, in relation to an impossible truth, the two hypotheses are equally (im)plausible. But the hypothesis of evil has the advantage of restoring to the world its illegal character. Moreover, it lends a new prestige to good and happiness, the prestige of a miraculous exception.