Robert's Rules Of Order Quotes

Heinlein's Rules for Writers Rule One: You Must Write Rule Two: Finish What Your Start Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold

But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution.' 'What sort of tools?' 'More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason—or are manipulated into reasoning—that the entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted.

No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules?

Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of liberty.

Max Weber was right in subscribing to the view that one need not be Caesar in order to understand Caesar. But there is a temptation for us theoretical sociologists to act sometimes as though it is not necessary even to study Caesar in order to understand him. Yet we know that the interplay of theory and research makes both for understanding of the specific case and expansion of the general rule.

The government [...] cannot be anything other than the organization of a minority. It is the aim of this minority to impose upon the rest of society a 'legal order', which is the outcome of the exigencies of dominion and of the exploitation of the mass of helots effected by the ruling minority, and can never be truly representative of the majority.

Angry at his parents and all grown-ups who thought that school life was a lark, a good time, the best years of your life with a few test and quizzes thrown in to keep you on your toes. Bullshit. There was nothing good about it. Tests were daily battles in the larger war of school. School meant rules and orders and commands. To say nothing of homework.

There are six canons of conservative thought: 1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist," says Keith Feiling: "he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls. 2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"--a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated Conservatism." 3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives have been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom. 4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Economic levelling, they maintain, is not economic progress. 5) Faith in prescription and distrust of "sophisters, calculators, and economists" who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon the innovator's lust for power. 6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.

There can be no doubt whatsoever that the burning desire to obey only the call of one’s soul leaves infinite scope for action, a true state of anarchy, and there are cases of chemically pure souls actually committing crimes. But the minute a soul has morals, religion, philosophy, a well-grounded middle-class education, ideals in the spheres of duty and beauty, it has been equipped with a system of rules, conditions, and directives that it must obey before it can think of being a respectable soul, and its heat, like that of a blast furnace, is directed into orderly rectangles of sand. All that remains are only logical problems of interpretation, such as whether an action falls under this or that commandment, and the soul presents the tranquil panorama of a battlefield after the fact, where the dead lie still and one can see at once where a scrap of life still moves or groans.

Exoneration of Jesus Christ If Christ was in fact God, he knew all the future. Before Him like a panorama moved the history yet to be. He knew how his words would be interpreted. He knew what crimes, what horrors, what infamies, would be committed in his name. He knew that the hungry flames of persecution would climb around the limbs of countless martyrs. He knew that thousands and thousands of brave men and women would languish in dungeons in darkness, filled with pain. He knew that his church would invent and use instruments of torture; that his followers would appeal to whip and fagot, to chain and rack. He saw the horizon of the future lurid with the flames of the auto da fe. He knew what creeds would spring like poisonous fungi from every text. He saw the ignorant sects waging war against each other. He saw thousands of men, under the orders of priests, building prisons for their fellow-men. He saw thousands of scaffolds dripping with the best and bravest blood. He saw his followers using the instruments of pain. He heard the groans—saw the faces white with agony. He heard the shrieks and sobs and cries of all the moaning, martyred multitudes. He knew that commentaries would be written on his words with swords, to be read by the light of fagots. He knew that the Inquisition would be born of the teachings attributed to him. He saw the interpolations and falsehoods that hypocrisy would write and tell. He saw all wars that would be waged, and-he knew that above these fields of death, these dungeons, these rackings, these burnings, these executions, for a thousand years would float the dripping banner of the cross. He knew that hypocrisy would be robed and crowned—that cruelty and credulity would rule the world; knew that liberty would perish from the earth; knew that popes and kings in his name would enslave the souls and bodies of men; knew that they would persecute and destroy the discoverers, thinkers and inventors; knew that his church would extinguish reason’s holy light and leave the world without a star. He saw his disciples extinguishing the eyes of men, flaying them alive, cutting out their tongues, searching for all the nerves of pain. He knew that in his name his followers would trade in human flesh; that cradles would be robbed and women’s breasts unbabed for gold. And yet he died with voiceless lips. Why did he fail to speak? Why did he not tell his disciples, and through them the world: “You shall not burn, imprison and torture in my name. You shall not persecute your fellow-men.” Why did he not plainly say: “I am the Son of God,” or, “I am God”? Why did he not explain the Trinity? Why did he not tell the mode of baptism that was pleasing to him? Why did he not write a creed? Why did he not break the chains of slaves? Why did he not say that the Old Testament was or was not the inspired word of God? Why did he not write the New Testament himself? Why did he leave his words to ignorance, hypocrisy and chance? Why did he not say something positive, definite and satisfactory about another world? Why did he not turn the tear-stained hope of heaven into the glad knowledge of another life? Why did he not tell us something of the rights of man, of the liberty of hand and brain? Why did he go dumbly to his death, leaving the world to misery and to doubt? I will tell you why. He was a man, and did not know.

The essential point was that Cicero for the first time laid out his political credo in black and white, and I can summarise it in a sentence: that politics is the most noble of all callings (“there is really no other occupation in which human virtue approaches more closely the august function of the gods”); that there is “no nobler motive for entering public life than the resolution not to be ruled by wicked men”; that no individual, or combination of individuals, should be allowed to become too powerful; that politics is a profession, not a pastime for dilettantes (nothing is worse than rule by “clever poets”); that a statesman should devote his life to studying “the science of politics, in order to acquire in advance all the knowledge that it may be necessary for him to use at some future time”; that authority in a state must always be divided; and that of the three known forms of government—monarchy, aristocracy and people—the best is a mixture of all three, for each one taken on its own can lead to disaster: kings can be capricious, aristocrats self-interested, and “an unbridled multitude enjoying unwonted power more terrifying than a conflagration or a raging sea.

Lucy said, “The law is an adversarial contest that defines justice as staying within the rules and seeing the game to its conclusion. Justice is reaching a conclusion. It has very little to do with right and wrong. The law gives us order. Only men and women can give us what you want to call justice.

What underlies this [Benedictine] rule is the assumption that God is experienced most clearly in a well-ordered day. God is the God of order, not chaos. A chaotic day in which there is no purpose and intention leads to a troubled and dislocated life, irritated by the events of the day because they control and run one's life. The structure of the day gives purpose, intent, and meaning as God is encountered in the events of daily life. When the day is ordered, serendipitous events may change he course of he day, but God's presence in these events more readily is seen because the day has been ordered, and the eyes and the heart have been watching.

The market is itself a human creation—a set of laws and rules that define what can be owned and traded, and how. Government doesn’t “intrude” on the “free market.” It creates the market. Government officials—legislators, administrators, regulators, judges, and heads of state—must decide on and enforce such laws and rules in order for a market to exist. Without norms for the common good, officials have no way to make these decisions other than their own selfish interests.

In the event of total freedom, the desire to dominate rules just as tyrannically as it does with centrally-planned economies. Freedom gave us capitalism, which has come to mean bosses ordering workers about. Workers aren’t free; they are chained by their biological needs. Where is their freedom? Oh, the freedom of mobility? They can quit their jobs and work elsewhere? They can switch from one slave-owner to another? The capitalist vision ignores the capitalist reality, which is that bosses tells workers what to do under pain of death by starvation. Tell me that is freedom some more. Tell me another good one.

Robert held back in the press, letting others go after the rebels fleeing before the charge. Their orders were to slaughter anyone found in the streets to provoke a quick surrender, after which mercy would be granted to those left alive. He had seen death throughout his life, but the duel he’d had with Guy was the closest he’d come to ending someone’s life and even then there had been rules imposed. There were no such boundaries here. The freedom to kill was a dizzying, precipitous feeling. But the veteran knights were pushing in behind him, forcing the issue. With a snarl of frustration at his own hesitation, Robert fixed on one man darting away down an alley and spurred his horse out of the crush in pursuit.

There was no other occupied country during the second world war which contributed more to the initial efficiency of Nazi rule in Europe than France,’ is the estimation of one distinguished historian.80 There were millions of Frenchmen who made their private accommodations with Hitler’s New European Order, in circumstances varying between sullen cooperation, compromise and outright collaboration, but as a British writer has put it: ‘We who have not known hunger have no idea how empty bellies debilitate and dominate.’81 We cannot know how the British would have behaved under the same circumstances, and tragically it seems that human nature is such that every society has enough misfits, fanatics, sadists and murderers to run concentration camps.

With this single maneuver, Vincent engaged several important principles of influence. First, even those who did not take his suggestions felt Vincent had done them a favor by offering valuable information to help them order. Everyone felt grateful, and consequently, the rule of of reciprocation worked in his favor when it came time to decide on his gratuity. Besides hiking up the percentage of his tip, Vincent’s ploy also placed him in a position to increase the size of the party’s order. It established him as an authority on the current stores of the house: he clearly knew what was and wasn’t good that night. Moreover—and here is where seeming to argue against his own interests comes in—it proved him to be a trustworthy informant because he recommended dishes slightly less expensive than the one originally ordered. Rather than having appeared to try to line his own pockets, he seemed to have the customers’ best interests at heart.

The choice today is revolt. Igor Stravinsky wrote, “The old original sin was one of knowledge, the new original sin is one of non-acknowledgment.” It is the refusal to acknowledge anything outside the operation of the human will—most especially the good toward which the soul is ordered. The good is what must ultimately inform human justice. Therefore, moral relativism is inimical to justice, as it removes the epistemological ground for knowing the good. As Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, wrote, “Everything that is relative presupposes the existence of something that is absolute, and is meaningful only when juxtaposed to something absolute.”4 What happens if the absolute is absent? If what is good is relative to something other than itself, then it is not the good but the expression of some other interest that only claims to be the good. Claims of “good” then become transparent masks for self-interest. This is the surest path back to barbarism and the brutal doctrine of “right is the rule of the stronger”. The regression is not accidental. Relativism inevitably concludes in nihilism, and the ultimate expression of nihilism is the supremacy of the will.

Suppose Chaos was king and the order we thought we detected in the world about us a mere phantasm of the imagination; where would that lead us? In that case, Waldo decided, it was entirely possible that a ten-pound weight did fall ten times as fast as a one-pound weight until the day the audacious Galileo decided in his mind that it was not so. Perhaps the whole meticulous science of ballistics derived from the convictions of a few firm-minded individuals who had sold the notion to the world. Perhaps the very stars were held firm in their courses by the unvarying faith of the astronomers. Orderly Cosmos, created out of Chaos—by Mind! The world was flat before geographers decided to think of it otherwise. The world was flat, and the Sun, tub-size, rose in the east and set in the west. The stars were little lights, studding a pellucid dome which barely cleared the tallest mountains. Storms were the wrath of gods and had nothing to do with the calculus of air masses. A Mind-created animism dominated the world then. More recently it had been different. A prevalent convention of materialistic and invariable causation had ruled the world; on it was based the whole involved technology of a machine-served civilization. The machines worked, the way they were designed to work, because everybody believed in them. Until a few pilots, somewhat debilitated by overmuch exposure to radiation, had lost then-confidence and infected their machines with uncertainty—and thereby let magic loose in the world.

In the absence of expert [senior military] advice, we have seen each successive administration fail in the business of strategy - yielding a United States twice as rich as the Soviet Union but much less strong. Only the manner of the failure has changed. In the 1960s, under Robert S. McNamara, we witnessed the wholesale substitution of civilian mathematical analysis for military expertise. The new breed of the "systems analysts" introduced new standards of intellectual discipline and greatly improved bookkeeping methods, but also a trained incapacity to understand the most important aspects of military power, which happens to be nonmeasurable. Because morale is nonmeasurable it was ignored, in large and small ways, with disastrous effects. We have seen how the pursuit of business-type efficiency in the placement of each soldier destroys the cohesion that makes fighting units effective; we may recall how the Pueblo was left virtually disarmed when it encountered the North Koreans (strong armament was judged as not "cost effective" for ships of that kind). Because tactics, the operational art of war, and strategy itself are not reducible to precise numbers, money was allocated to forces and single weapons according to "firepower" scores, computer simulations, and mathematical studies - all of which maximize efficiency - but often at the expense of combat effectiveness. An even greater defect of the McNamara approach to military decisions was its businesslike "linear" logic, which is right for commerce or engineering but almost always fails in the realm of strategy. Because its essence is the clash of antagonistic and outmaneuvering wills, strategy usually proceeds by paradox rather than conventional "linear" logic. That much is clear even from the most shopworn of Latin tags: si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war), whose business equivalent would be orders of "if you want sales, add to your purchasing staff," or some other, equally absurd advice. Where paradox rules, straightforward linear logic is self-defeating, sometimes quite literally. Let a general choose the best path for his advance, the shortest and best-roaded, and it then becomes the worst path of all paths, because the enemy will await him there in greatest strength... Linear logic is all very well in commerce and engineering, where there is lively opposition, to be sure, but no open-ended scope for maneuver; a competitor beaten in the marketplace will not bomb our factory instead, and the river duly bridged will not deliberately carve out a new course. But such reactions are merely normal in strategy. Military men are not trained in paradoxical thinking, but they do no have to be. Unlike the business-school expert, who searches for optimal solutions in the abstract and then presents them will all the authority of charts and computer printouts, even the most ordinary military mind can recall the existence of a maneuvering antagonists now and then, and will therefore seek robust solutions rather than "best" solutions - those, in other words, which are not optimal but can remain adequate even when the enemy reacts to outmaneuver the first approach.

Can fascism still exist? Clearly Stage One movements can still be found in all major democracies. More crucially, can they reach Stage Two again by becoming rooted and influential? We need not look for exact replicas, in which fascist veterans dust off their swastikas. Collectors of Nazi paraphernalia and hard-core neo-Nazi sects are capable of provoking destructive violence and polarization. As long as they remain excluded from the alliances with the establishment necessary to join the political mainstream or share power, however, they remain more a law and order problem than a political threat. Much more likely to exert an influence are extreme Right movements that have learned to moderate their language, abandon classical fascist symbolism, and appear “normal.” It is by understanding how past fascisms worked, and not by checking the color of shirts, or seeking echoes of the rhetoric of the national-syndicalist dissidents of the opening of the twentieth century, that we may be able to recognize it. The well-known warning signals—extreme nationalist propaganda and hate crimes—are important but insufficient. Knowing what we do about the fascist cycle, we can find more ominous warning signals in situations of political deadlock in the face of crisis, threatened conservatives looking for tougher allies, ready to give up due process and the rule of law, seeking mass support by nationalist and racialist demagoguery. Fascists are close to power when conservatives begin to borrow their techniques, appeal to their “mobilizing passions,” and try to co-opt the fascist following. Armed by historical knowledge, we may be able to distinguish today’s ugly but isolated imitations, with their shaved heads and swastika tattoos, from authentic functional equivalents in the form of a mature fascist conservative alliance. Forewarned, we may be able to detect the real thing when it comes along.

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of “monopoly on the means of production.” Since man extends his nervous system through channels of communications like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual’s brain. Thus, in pre-literate societies taboos on the spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organization. With the invention of written speech — hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical — the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people say and more concern with what they write. (Some of the first societies to achieve literacy, such as Egypt and the Mayan culture of ancient Mexico, evidently kept a knowledge of their hieroglyphs a religious secret which only the higher orders of the priestly and royal families were allowed to share.) The same process repeats endlessly: Each step forward in the technology of communication is more heavily tabooed than the earlier steps. Thus, in America today (post-Lenny Bruce), one seldom hears of convictions for spoken blasphemy or obscenity; prosecution of books still continues, but higher courts increasingly interpret the laws in a liberal fashion, and most writers feel fairly confident that they can publish virtually anything; movies are growing almost as desacralized as books, although the fight is still heated in this area; television, the newest medium, remains encased in neolithic taboo. (When the TV pundits committed lèse majesté after an address by the then Dominant Male, a certain Richard Nixon, one of his lieutenants quickly informed them they had overstepped, and the whole tribe — except for the dissident minority — cheered for the reassertion of tradition.) When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.

Between economic growth and stable democracy The correlation between development and democracy was first noted by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset in the late 1950s, and ever since then there have been many studies linking development to democracy.25 The relationship between growth and democracy may not be linear—that is, more growth does not necessarily always produce more democracy. The economist Robert Barro has shown that the correlation is stronger at lower levels of income and weaker at middle levels.26 One of the most comprehensive studies of the relationship between development and democracy shows that transitions into democracy from autocracy can occur at any level of development but are much less likely to be reversed at higher levels of per capita GDP.27 Whereas growth appears to favor stable democracy, the reverse causal connection between democracy and growth is much less clear. This stands to reason if we simply consider the number of authoritarian countries that have piled up impressive growth records over recent years—South Korea and Taiwan while they were ruled dictatorially, the People’s Republic of China, Singapore, Indonesia under Suharto, and Chile under Augusto Pinochet. Thus, while having a coherent state and reasonably good governance is a condition for growth, it is not clear that democracy plays the same positive role.

I’m going to invite you to contemplate a fictional scenario. Say that we are all citizens in a New England town with a traditional town meeting. As usual, a modest proportion of the citizens eligible to attend have actually turned out, let’s say four or five hundred. After calling the meeting to order, the moderator announces: “We have established the following rules for this evening’s discussion. After a motion has been properly made and seconded, in order to ensure free speech under rules fair to everyone here, each of you who wishes to do so will be allowed to speak on the motion. However, to enable as many as possible to speak, no one will be allowed to speak for more than two minutes.” Perfectly fair so far, you might say. But now our moderator goes on: “After everyone who wishes to speak for two minutes has had the floor, each and every one of you is free to speak further, but under one condition. Each additional minute will be auctioned off to the highest bidder.” The ensuing uproar from the assembled citizens would probably drive the moderator and the board of selectman away from the town hall—and perhaps out of town. Yet isn’t this in effect what the Supreme Court decided in the famous case of Buckley v. Valeo? In a seven-to-one vote, the court held that the First Amendment–guarantee of freedom of expression was impermissibly infringed by the limits placed by the Federal Election Campaign Act on the amounts that candidates for federal office or their supporters might spend to promote their election.3 Well, we’ve had time to see the appalling consequences.

Handling Resignations   In the course of an organization’s work, boards and officers may be confronted with the resignation of a fellow officer, board member, or committee chairman. There are two reasons people resign from office. The first reason is that something arises in the personal life of the officer that demands his or her time and attention. The officer feels at this time that he or she can’t fulfill the duties of the office and do justice to the organization, so the officer submits a resignation. The second reason is that there is a rift or severe disagreement within the organization. An officer may become angry, disheartened, or vengeful, so he or she submits a resignation. The first thing that the organization should do after it receives a resignation is to figure out why the person is resigning. If the organization really needs this person’s active input, it should find a way to keep him or her. If the person is resigning because of lack of time, then perhaps the organization can appoint an assistant to help with the work. If the person is resigning because he or she can’t attend the meetings, the organization should consider changing the meeting date and time. If the person submits his or her resignation because of organizational problems, the organization needs to look at how its members communicate with each other. Perhaps the members need to be more willing to allow disagreements and hear what others are saying. If an organization strictly obeys the principle of majority rule while protecting the rights of the minority, it can resolve problems in an intelligent, kind, and civil way. A resignation should be a formal letter that includes the date, the name of the person to whom it is addressed, the reason for the resignation, and the person’s signature. The person resigning can mail his or her letter to the secretary or hand it to the secretary in person. Under no circumstance should the secretary or president accept an oral resignation. If a resignation is given to the officer this way, he or she should talk with the person and find out the reasons for the resignation. Perhaps just talking to the person can solve the problem. However, an officer who insists on resigning should put it in writing and submit it to the secretary. This gives the accepting body something to read and consider. Every resignation should be put to a vote. When it is accepted, the office is vacant and should be immediately filled according to the rules for filling vacancies stated in the bylaws. If an officer submits a resignation and then decides to withdraw it, he or she can do this until a vote is taken. It is unjust for a secretary or governing body not to allow a withdrawal of the resignation before a vote is taken. The only way a resignation can’t be withdrawn is if some rule of the organization or a state statute prohibits it. When submitting the resignation, the member resigning should give it to the secretary only and not mail it to everyone in the organization. (An e-mail resignation is not acceptable because it is not signed.) Sending the resignation to every member only confuses matters and promotes gossip and conjecture in the organization. If the member later decides to withdraw his or her resignation, there is much more explaining to do. The other members may see this person as unstable and not worthy of the position.

Professor Craig Franklin of the University of Queensland mounted a crocodile research partnership with Steve. The idea was to fasten transmitters and data loggers on crocs to record their activity in their natural environment. But in order to place the transmitters, you had to catch the crocs first, and that’s where Steve’s expertise came in. Steve never felt more content than when he was with his family in the bush. “There’s nothing more valuable than human life, and this research will help protect both crocs and people,” he told us. The bush was where Steve felt most at home. It was where he was at his best. On that one trip, he caught thirty-three crocs in fourteen days. He wanted to do more. “I’d really like to have the capability of doing research on the ocean as well as in the rivers,” he told me. “I could do so much more for crocodiles and sharks if I had a purpose-built research vessel.” I could see where he was heading. I was not a big fan of boats. “I’m going to contact a company in Western Australia, in Perth,” he said. “I’m going to work on a custom-built research vessel.” As the wheels turned in his mind, he became more and more excited. “The sky’s the limit, mate,” he said. “We could help tiger sharks and learn why crocs go out to sea. There is no reason why we couldn’t help whales, too.” “Tell me how we can help whales,” I said, expecting to hear about a research project that he and Craig had in mind. “It will be great,” he said. “We’ll build a boat with an icebreaking hull. We’ll weld a can opener to the front, and join Sea Shepherd in Antarctica to stop those whaling boats in their tracks.” When we got back from our first trip to Cape York Peninsula with Craig Franklin, Steve immediately began drawing up plans for his boat. He wanted to make it as comfortable as possible. As he envisioned it, the boat would be somewhere between a hard-core scientific research vessel and a luxury cruiser. He designed three berths, a plasma screen television for the kids, and air-conditioned comfort below deck. He placed a big marlin board off the back, for Jet Skis, shark cages, or hauling out huge crocs. One feature that he was really adamant about was a helicopter pad. He designed the craft so that the helicopter could land on the top. Steve’s design plans went back and forth to Perth for months. “I want this boat’s primary function to be crocodile research and rescue work,” Steve said. “So I’m going to name her Croc One.” “Why don’t we call it For Sale instead?” I suggested. I’m not sure Steve saw the humor in that. Croc One was his baby. But for some reason, I felt tremendous trepidation about this boat. I attributed my feelings of concern to Bindi and Robert. Anytime you have kids on a boat, the rules change--no playing hide-and-seek, no walking on deck without a life jacket on. It made me uncomfortable to think about being two hundred miles out at sea with two young kids. We had had so many wild adventures together as a family that, ultimately, I had to trust Steve. But my support for Croc One was always, deep down, halfhearted at best. I couldn’t shake my feeling of foreboding about it.

A person can trigger a feeling of indebtedness by doing us an uninvited favor (Paese & Gilin, 2000). Recall that the rule states only that we should provide to others the kind of actions they have provided us; it does not require us to have asked for what we have received in order to feel obligated to repay.

Referring to the opposition’s proposal to disband its factional organization and submit to the party majority’s decisions, subject only to the right to continue defending its views within the limits of the party rules, he rejected it on the ground that there was no place in the party for privileged “nobles” as against “peasants devoid of these privileges,” and “we do not want nobles in the party.”[611] His no-compromise attitude prevailed. A resolution reported out by a special commission under the chairmanship of Ordzhonikidze pronounced adherence to the Trotskyist opposition incompatible with party membership and ordered the expulsion of seventy-five prominent oppositionists, including Kamenev and Piatakov.

The European states resembled each other rather closely in their luxuriant growth of antiliberal criticism as the twentieth century opened. Where they differed was in those political, social, and economic preconditions that seem to distinguish the states where fascism, exceptionally, was able to become established. One of the most important preconditions was a faltering liberal order. Fascisms grew from back rooms to the public arena most easily where the existing government functioned badly, or not at all. One of the commonplaces of discussions of fascism is that it thrived upon the crisis of liberalism. I hope here to make that vague formulation somewhat more concrete. On the eve of World War I the major states of Europe were either governed by liberal regimes or seemed headed that way. Liberal regimes guaranteed freedoms both for individuals and for contending political parties, and allowed citizens to influence the composition of governments, more or less directly, through elections. Liberal government also accorded a large measure of freedom to citizens and to enterprises. Government intervention was expected to be limited to the few functions individuals could not perform for themselves, such as the maintenance of order and the conduct of war and diplomacy. Economic and social matters were supposed to be left to the free play of individual choices in the market, though liberal regimes did not hesitate to protect property from worker protests and from foreign competition. This kind of liberal state ceased to exist during World War I, for total war could be conducted only by massive government coordination and regulation. After the war was over, liberals expected governments to return to liberal policies. The strains of war making, however, had created new conflicts, tensions, and malfunctions that required sustained state intervention. At the war’s end, some of the belligerent states had collapsed...What had gone wrong with the liberal recipe for government? What was at stake was a technique of government: rule by notables, where the wellborn and well-educated could rely on social prestige and deference to keep them elected. Notable rule, however, came under severe pressure from the “nationalization of the masses." Fascists quickly profited from the inability of centrists and conservatives to keep control of a mass electorate. Whereas the notable dinosaurs disdained mass politics, fascists showed how to use it for nationalism and against the Left. They promised access to the crowd through exciting political spectacle and clever publicity techniques; ways to discipline that crowd through paramilitary organization and charismatic leadership; and the replacement of chancy elections by yes-no plebiscites. Whereas citizens in a parliamentary democracy voted to choose a few fellow citizens to serve as their representatives, fascists expressed their citizenship directly by participating in ceremonies of mass assent. The propagandistic manipulation of public opinion replaced debate about complicated issues among a small group of legislators who (according to liberal ideals) were supposed to be better informed than the mass of the citizenry. Fascism could well seem to offer to the opponents of the Left efficacious new techniques for controlling, managing, and channeling the “nationalization of the masses,” at a moment when the Left threatened to enlist a majority of the population around two non-national poles: class and international pacifism. One may also perceive the crisis of liberalism after 1918 in a second way, as a “crisis of transition,” a rough passage along the journey into industrialization and modernity. A third way of looking at the crisis of the liberal state envisions the same problem of late industrialization in social terms.

Bearing in mind these lessons from success in Colombia, the next time an American president is urged to intervene in a Third World country’s internal conflict, stabilize the situation, or improve governance, he or she should ask these questions: Do we have a strong, competent, reasonably honest local leader committed to democracy and the rule of law with whom to partner? Are there existing indigenous institutions and capabilities on which to build? With our help, can the country’s military and police be strengthened sufficiently to carry the burden of the fight? Is the effort likely to be protracted, and if so, what is the prospect for long-term U.S. public and congressional support? Can we bring to bear a wide array of U.S. instruments of power in order to achieve our objectives without American forces being directly engaged in combat? Will we have the discipline to keep the number of U.S. military in-country small, forcing the locals to carry the burden of the fight?

The post-Lenin Bolshevik situation shows how intractable the problem of succession can be after the death of the founder of a revolutionary new order. Max Weber theorized, with the history of religions primarily in mind, that the charisma inhering in the original leader as a personal quality subsequently undergoes “routinization,” meaning its institutionalization in an office and its transmission from bearer to bearer, irrespective of personal qualities, according to established rules of succession.[493] No such development occurred, however, in the case before us.

Nazi officials felt free to take more violent action than they had done in the western campaigns of 1940, first against the enemies of the regime, then against fascism’s conservative allies, and eventually against the German people themselves, in an ecstasy of terminal destruction. Whereas in traditional authoritarian war regimes, the army tends to extend its control, as it did in the German Reich during 1917–18 and in Franco’s Spain, the German army lost control of occupation policy in the east after 1941, as we have seen, to the Nazi Party’s parallel organizations. Party radicals felt free to express their hatreds and obsessions in ways that were foreign to the traditions of the state services. The issue here is not simply one of moral sensitivity; some officers and civil servants were appalled by SS actions in the conquered territories, while others went along because of group solidarity or because they had become hardened. It was to some degree an issue of turf. It would be unthinkable for a traditional military dictatorship to tolerate the incursions of amateurish party militias into military spheres that Hitler—and even, in Ethiopia, Mussolini—permitted. Here we enter a realm where the calculations of interest that arguably governed the behavior of both the Nazis and their allies under more ordinary circumstances in the exercise of power no longer determined policy. At this ultimate stage an obsessed minority is able to carry out its most passionate hatreds implacably and to the ultimate limit of human experience. Liberation from constraints permitted a hard core of the movement’s fanatics to regain the upper hand over their bourgeois allies and carry out some of the initial radical projects. At the outposts of empire, fascism recovered the face-to-face violence of the early days of squadrismo and SA street brawling. One must resist the temptation at this final stage to revert to a highly personalized way of looking at the exercise of power in fascist regimes, with its discredited notions of hoodlums kidnapping the state. The Nazi regime was able to pursue the war with ever mounting intensity only with the continued complicity of the state services and large sectors of the socially powerful. Fascist radicalization, finally, cannot be understood as a rational way to persuade a people to give their all to a war effort. It led Nazi Germany into a runaway spiral that ultimately prevented rational war making, as vital resources were diverted from military operations to the murder of the Jews. Finally radicalization denies even the nation that is supposed to be at fascism’s heart. At the end, fanatical fascists prefer to destroy everything in a final paroxysm, even their own country, rather than admit defeat. Prolonged fascist radicalization over a very long period has never been witnessed. It is even hard to imagine. Can one suppose that even Hitler could keep up the tension into old age? Arranging the succession to a senescent fascist leader is another intriguing but, so far, hypothetical problem. The more normal form of succession to a fascist regime is likely to be decay into a traditional authoritarianism. At that point, there can be progressive liberalization as in post-Franco Spain or perhaps revolution (as in post-Salazar Portugal). But orderly succession is clearly far more of a problem with fascism than with other forms of rule, even communism. Fascism is, in the last analysis, destabilizing. In the long run, therefore, it was not really a solution to the problems of frightened conservatives or liberals. The final outcome was that the Italian and German fascist regimes drove themselves off a cliff in their quest for ever headier successes. The fascisms we know seem doomed to destroy themselves in their headlong, obsessive rush to fulfill the “privileged relation with history” they promised their people.

In the programs and statements of these parties one hears echoes of classical fascist themes: fears of decadence and decline; assertion of national and cultural identity; a threat by unassimilable foreigners to national identity and good social order; and the need for greater authority to deal with these problems. Even though some of the European radical Right parties have full authoritarian-nationalist programs (such as the Belgian Vlaams Blok’s “seventy points” and Le Pen’s “Three Hundred Measures for French Revival” of 1993), most of them are perceived as single-issue movements devoted to sending unwanted immigrants home and cracking down on immigrant delinquency, and that is why most of their voters chose them. Other classical fascist themes, however, are missing from the programmatic statements of the most successful postwar European radical Right parties. The element most totally absent is classical fascism’s attack on the liberty of the market and economic individualism, to be remedied by corporatism and regulated markets. In a continental Europe where state economic intervention is the norm, the radical Right has been largely committed to reducing it and letting the market decide. Another element of classical fascist programs mostly missing from the postwar European radical Right is a fundamental attack on democratic constitutions and the rule of law. None of the more successful European far Right parties now proposes to replace democracy by a single-party dictatorship. At most they advocate a stronger executive, less inhibited forces of order, and the replacement of stale traditional parties with a fresh, pure national movement. They leave to the skinheads open expressions of the beauty of violence and murderous racial hatred. The successful radical Right parties wish to avoid public association with them, although they may quietly share overlapping membership with some ultraright action squads and tolerate a certain amount of overheated language praising violent action among their student branches. No western European radical Right movement or party now proposes national expansion by war—a defining aim for Hitler and Mussolini. Indeed the advocates of border changes in postwar Europe have mostly been secessionist rather than expansionist, such as the Vlaams Blok in Belgium and (for a time) Umberto Bossi’s secessionist Northern League (Lega Nord) in northern Italy. The principal exceptions have been the expansionist Balkan nationalisms that sought to create Greater Serbia, Greater Croatia, and Greater Albania.

Nothing is more stultifying than running a meeting by Robert’s Rules of Order and to impose the political process of majority rule on small working groups where total commitment is needed.

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.

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.

Personally, I’d be willing to sacrifice some of the benefits I get as a consumer and investor in order to achieve these social ends—as long as I knew everyone else was, too. Yet how to create new rules of the game? The market is adept at catering to us as consumers and investors, but democracy has become less responsive to us in our roles as citizens seeking to make the rules of the game fairer. That’s mainly because, as I will show in these pages, supercapitalism has spilled over into politics. The money Wal-Mart and other companies are pouring into Washington and every other major capital gets in the way.

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of “monopoly on the means of production.” Since man extends his nervous system through channels of communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual’s brain. Thus, in pre-literate societies taboos on the spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organization. With the invention of written speech—hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical —the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people say and more concern with what they write. (Some of the first societies to achieve literacy, such as Egypt and the Mayan culture of ancient Mexico, evidently kept a knowledge of their hieroglyphs a religious secret which only the higher orders of the priestly and royal families were allowed to share.) The same process repeats endlessly: Each step forward in the technology of communication is more heavily tabooed than the earlier steps. Thus, in America today (post-Lenny Bruce), one seldom hears of convictions for spoken blasphemy or obscenity; prosecution of books still continues, but higher courts increasingly interpret the laws in a liberal fashion, and most writers feel fairly confident that they can publish virtually anything; movies are growing almost as desacralized as books, although the fight is still heated in this area; television, the newest medium, remains encased in neolithic taboo. (When the TV pundits committed lèse majesté after an address by the then Dominant Male, a certain Richard Nixon, one of his lieutenants quickly informed them they had overstepped, and the whole tribe—except for the dissident minority—cheered for the reassertion of tradition.) When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.

In the United States, those with power and resources rarely directly bribe public officials in order to receive specific and visible favors, such as advantageous government contracts. Instead, they make campaign contributions and occasionally hold out the promise of lucrative jobs at the end of government careers. And the most valuable things they get in exchange are market rules that seem to apply to everyone and appear to be neutral, but that systematically and disproportionately benefit them. To state the matter another way, it is not the unique and perceptible government “intrusions” into the market that have the greatest effect on who wins and who loses; it is the way government organizes the market. Power

Martyn Robert, late of the Army Corps of Engineers and author of Robert’s Rules of Order,

Carl Page had his own idea about how to go about it. He posited that procedures contained in Robert’s Rules of Order, a late-nineteenth-century manual for running effective meetings, could provide the basis for building AI.

As a general rule, researchers should assume an unobtrusive stance in public settings. A researcher should strive to blend into his or her surroundings in order to reduce his or her impact on the research setting. The art of blending into a research setting entails conscious decisions about how to dress in a research setting, what mannerisms to exhibit, whether to take notes openly or in a concealed manner, and other strategies that allow a researcher to become invisible in the field.

But there's always choice. Following orders is a choice. Using the rules as an excuse not to act is a choice.

56:8      In order to give the organization the greatest freedom to act within its object, bylaws should be made no more restrictive nor more detailed in specification than necessary.

Informal Procedure in Small Boards + Board members may raise a hand instead of standing when seeking to obtain the floor, and may remain seated while making motions or speaking. + Motions need not be seconded. + A board member may speak any number of times (not just twice) on a debatable question, except that the regular rules apply to appeals (see pp. 90–91). + Informal discussion of a subject is permitted while no motion is pending. + Votes can be taken initially by a show of hands. + If a proposal is perfectly clear to everyone, it may be voted on even though no formal motion has been made. + In putting questions to a vote, the chairman need not stand. + If the chairman is a member of the board, he or she can, without giving up the chair, participate in debate, make motions, and vote on all questions. E. VALIDITY OF BOARD ACTION

It seemed to Caro that Trevor had been right when she’d asked him about his blog post on Christianity: religion reflected humanity’s need to codify natural impulses of curiosity about nature and a desire for order, plus perhaps gratitude for life itself. Start with feelings and then build up around it beliefs and strictures that got thicker and thicker, like layers of nacre around a grain of sand. You ended up with rigid laws—cover your hair, no meat on Fridays, sit this way during meditation even if it hurts your spine, build points on roofs to keep out evil spirits. Or else. The original impulse to worship life was smothered in rules and fear.

Looking for fears, indeed, may be a more fruitful research strategy than a literal-minded quest for thinkers who “created” fascism. One such fear was the collapse of community under the corrosive influences of free individualism. Rousseau had already worried about this before the French Revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century and after, the fear of social disintegration was mostly a conservative concern. After the turbulent 1840s in England, the Victorian polemicist Thomas Carlyle worried about what force would discipline “the masses, full of beer and nonsense,” as more and more of them received the right to vote. Carlyle’s remedy was a militarized welfare dictatorship, administered not by the existing ruling class but by a new elite composed of selfless captains of industry and other natural heroes of the order of Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great. The Nazis later claimed Carlyle as a forerunner. Fear of the collapse of community solidarity intensified in Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century, under the impact of urban sprawl, industrial conflict, and immigration. Diagnosing the ills of community was a central project in the creation of the new discipline of sociology. Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), the first French holder of a chair in sociology, diagnosed modern society as afflicted with “anomie”—the purposeless drift of people without social ties—and reflected on the replacement of “organic” solidarity, the ties formed within natural communities of villages, families, and churches, with “mechanical” solidarity, the ties formed by modern propaganda and media such as fascists (and advertisers) would later perfect. The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies regretted the supplanting of traditional, natural societies (Gemeinschaften) by more differentiated and impersonal modern societies (Gesellschaften) in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), and the Nazis borrowed his term for the “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) they wanted to form. The early twentieth-century sociologists Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Roberto Michels contributed more directly to fascist ideas.

Thrasymachus's hypothesis that people deliberately seek to rule for reasons of self-interest has been restated many times. Hobbes, for example, held that people were impelled by their passions and guided by their reason. Passion is the wind that fills the sails, reason the hand on the rudder. A human being, to use another metaphor, is a chariot pulled by the wild horses of passion and steered by reason. Human desires are insatiable, but reason dictates prudence. With the aid of reason, people can discover the general rules or precepts that will enable them to improve their chances of gaining the ends their passions dictate. All people, then, seek power in order to satisfy their passions. But reasons tells them how to seek power to reduce frustration, defeat, and the chances of violent death.

What I want you to understand, Miss Taggart, is the full evil of those who claim to have become convinced that this earth, by its nature, is a realm of malevolence where the good has no chance to win. Let them check their premises. Let them check their standards of value. Let them check—before they grant themselves the unspeakable license of evil-as-necessity—whether they know what is the good and what are the conditions it requires. Robert Stadler now believes that intelligence is futile and that human life can be nothing but irrational. Did he expect John Galt to become a great scientist, willing to work under the orders of Dr. Floyd Ferris? Did he expect Francisco d’Anconia to become a great industrialist, willing to produce under the orders and for the benefit of Wesley Mouch? Did he expect Ragnar Danneskjöld to become a great philosopher, willing to preach, under the orders of Dr. Simon Pritchett, that there is no mind and that might is right? Would that have been a future which Robert Stadler would have considered rational? I want you to observe, Miss Taggart, that those who cry the loudest about their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logic—are those who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas they preached, so mercilessly logical that they dare not identify it. In a world that proclaims the non-existence of the mind, the moral righteousness of rule by brute force, the penalizing of the competent in favor of the incompetent, the sacrifice of the best to the worst—in such a world, the best have to turn against society and have to become its deadliest enemies. In such a world John Galt, the man of incalculable intellectual power, will remain an unskilled laborer—Francisco d’Anconia, the miraculous producer of wealth, will become a wastrel—and Ragnar Danneskjöld, the man of enlightenment, will become the man of violence. Society—and Dr. Robert Stadler—have achieved everything they advocated. What complaint do they now have to make? That the universe is irrational? Is it?

But in order after order, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration most of what it wanted without endorsing principles that the justices would be bound to apply to future presidents, so that the justices could (and ultimately did) refuse to provide the same relief when a Democratic president took office. Looking at the cases as a whole, the conclusion is all but inescapable that the Court was just as responsible for enabling the rise of the shadow docket as the Trump administration -- and that it did so in a manner that specifically tended to advance Republican policies rather than conservative legal principles.

Note on Procedure in Changing the Quorum Provision in Bylaws. If it becomes necessary to change the quorum provision in a society’s bylaws, care should be taken, because if the rule is struck out first, the quorum will instantly become a majority of the membership, so that in many cases a quorum could not be obtained to adopt a new rule. The proper procedure is to strike out the old provision and insert the new provision, which is moved and voted on as one question.

The function of the university is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train students in the processes whereby truth is to be made known. To convert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty.Where it becomes necessary in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined, not taught, and the conclusion left, with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts. . . . Essentially the freedom of a university is the freedom of competent persons in the classroom. In order to protect this freedom, the University assumed the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda. —Rule APM 0-10, University of California, Berkeley, Academic Personnel Manual. Inserted by UC President Robert Gordon Sproul, 1934. Removed by a 43–3 vote of the UC Academic Senate, July 30, 2003.

As a rule, arrogance and humility go together. He who in power compels his fellow-man to kneel, will himself kneel when weak. The tyrant is a cringer in power; a cringer is a tyrant out of power. Great men stand face to face. They meet on equal terms. The cardinal who kneels in the presence of the pope, wants the bishop to kneel in his presence; and the bishop who kneels demands that the priest shall kneel to him; and the priest who kneels demands that they in lower orders shall kneel; and all, from pope to the lowest—that is to say, from pope to exorcist, from pope to the one in charge of the bones of saints—all demand that the people, the laymen, those upon whom they live, shall kneel to them. The man of free and noble spirit will not kneel. Courage has no knees.

One way time is wasted is to be in a meeting with no agenda, when everybody is the chairperson or everybody has a flow and the meeting flows in all the directions.

Nothing you can't handle," he repeats and slowly shakes his head. "You'll run your body right into the ground, given half a chance. I wondered if that first night was the exception, but it's not, is it? That's the rule." I flinch, guilt flickering through me even as I tell myself I have no reason to feel guilty. It's my body. I can do with it what I need to in order to survive. If sometimes my flesh bears the cost? That's the price of life.

Robert’s Rules of Order becomes the guiding text rather than the pattern of the apostolic church.

Pole, his right foot to the (unseen) South Pole. leaving his third step to fall on the head of Bali (in this version, Orion). Here Vamana would have arrived at Bali’s sacrifice on the winter solstice, when the sun is a “dwarf” because he cannot stretch his feet (rays) all the way to the North Pole. The three steps could also apply to the system of reckoning which takes one human year to equal one day and night of the devas. When during this period the Sun moves from the vernal equinox to the autumnal equinox (during which time it appears above the celestial equator in the sky), it is day for the devas and night for the asuras, and when the Sun moves from the autumnal equinox to the vernal equinox (during which time it appears below the celestial equator in the sky), it becomes night tor the devas and day for the asuras. While the asuras rule during their day the devas are discomfited, but with the coming of the vernal equinox (sunrise on the day of the devas) the order of the universe is renewed through noon (the summer solstice) until sunset (the autumnal equinox), after which the asuras again get their chance to play about. Bali

In nineteenth-century India, under British colonial rule, authorities decided there were too many venomous cobras in the streets of Delhi, making life uncomfortable for the British residents and their families. To solve this they offered a reward for every dead cobra residents would bring in. Soon enterprising locals began to breed cobras in order to make a living from the bounty. The government caught on to this and canceled the program. The breeders, resentful of the rulers and angered by their actions, decided to release their cobras back on the streets, thereby tripling the population from before the government program.

Robert’s Rules of Order.

In fact, in alcoholic families it was found that 80 percent of the children are incredibly compliant. In order to comply, however, you have to go along with many rules which are not healthy. For example, the good son syndrome requires the boy to: identify more with his parents’ dysfunctional feelings than his own healthy ones; assume responsibility for things he is not prepared to do; act as counselor/confidant to his parents; pretend that everything is fine; not bring any of his own problems home; be happy all the time; develop a sense of maturity beyond his years; exchange his spontaneity and spirit for seriousness and tension.

And the hundred million cowards,’ Abdul Ghani continued, pinching the handle of the teacup between his plump fingers, ‘they are the bureaucrats and paper shufflers and pen-pushers who permit the rule of the evil men, and look the other way. They are the head of this department, and the secretary of that committee, and the president of the other association. They are managers, and officials, and mayors, and officers of the court. They always defend themselves by saying that they are just following orders, or just doing their job, and it’s nothing personal, and if they don’t do it, someone else surely will. They are the hundred million cowards who know what is going on, but say nothing, while they sign the paper that puts one man before a firing squad, or condemns one million men to the slower death of a famine.

Voting by Proxy Without specific expression in the bylaws, members may never vote by proxy, or by telephone or email. This reflects the fact that in order to make an informed decision, voters must have all of the available facts, and the same facts presented to the rest of the attending organization. When absent, there is no way that their opinions can be held in the same regard as those in attendance.

After hovering in the ethereal world of mathematics and geometry, economics was forced to crash-land and take its place in the real world of political debate. Do economists wish to pursue the Good Society in the spirit of the social contract tradition which started some time in ancient Greece, reasserted itself in Europe with J.-J.Rousseau and found its apotheosis in John Rawls? Or do they wish for a social contract which effectively rules the State out as anything other than a provider of order and security—a tradition which began with Thomas Hobbes and culminated in Robert Nozick’s theory? Or, indeed can economists think of something in between? Thus economics is back into the mire courtesy of Arrow’s third theorem, which dispels any hopes of a Rational Society springing from some form of advanced utility maximisation. Economics can no longer escape the political, philosophical debates which resonate across the humanities—from literature to sociology and from politics to moral philosophy. This is a good thing. At last, economics can become interesting again after a century of continuous pedantry.