“
Just because I'm choosy about what I want - in this case, enlightenment, or peace, instead of money or prestige or fame or any of those things - doesn't mean I'm not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else.
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J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)
“
Don't you think I have sense enough to worry about my motives for saying the prayer? That's exactly what's bothering me so. Just because I'm choosy about what I want - in this case, enlightenment or peace, instead or money or prestige or game or any of those things, doesn't mean I'm not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. If anything, I'm more so!
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”
J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)
“
Some people think they can find satisfaction in good food, fine clothes, lively music, and sexual pleasure. However, when they have all these things, they are not satisfied. They realize happiness is not simply having their material needs met. Thus, society has set up a system of rewards that go beyond material goods. These include titles, social recognition, status, and political power, all wrapped up in a package called self-fulfillment. Attracted by these prizes and goaded on by social pressure, people spend their short lives tiring body and mind to chase after these goals. Perhaps this gives them the feeling that they have achieved something in their lives, but in reality they have sacrificed a lot in life. They can no longer see, hear, act, feel, or think from their hearts. Everything they do is dictated by whether it can get them social gains. In the end, they've spent their lives following other people's demands and never lived a life of their own. How different is this from the life of a slave or a prisoner?
”
”
Liezi (Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living (Shambhala Dragon Editions))
“
As Jesus explained, the right things have to die so the right things can live—we die to selfishness, greed, power, accumulation, prestige, and self-preservation, giving life to community, generosity, compassion, mercy, brotherhood, kindness, and love. The gospel will die in the toxic soil of self.
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Jen Hatmaker (7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess)
“
But when you are week the best way to fortify yourself is to strip the people you fear of the last bit of prestige you’re still inclined to give them. Learn to consider them they are, worse than they are in fact and from every point of view. That will release you, set you free, protect you more than you can possibly imagine. It will give you another self. There will be two of you.
That will strip their words and deeds of the obscene mystical fascination that weakens you and makes you waste your time. From then on you’ll find their act no more amusing, no more relevant to your inner progress than that of the lowliest pig.
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night)
“
For Hegel, freedom was not just a psychological phenomenon, but the essence of what was distinctively human. In this sense, freedom and nature are diametrically opposed. Freedom does not mean the freedom to live in nature or according to nature; rather, freedom begins only where nature ends. Human freedom emerges only when man is able to transcend his natural, animal existence, and to create a new self for himself. The emblematic starting point for this process of self-creation is the struggle to the death for pure prestige.
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Francis Fukuyama (The End of History and the Last Man)
“
Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship. For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.
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Edward W. Said
“
I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important
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Iris Murdoch (The Sovereignty of Good)
“
The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.
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Naomi Wolf
“
Lord, make me childlike. Deliver me from the urge to compete with another for place or prestige or position. I would be simple and artless as a little child. Deliver me from pose and pretense. Forgive me for thinking of myself. Help me to forget myself and find my true peace in beholding Thee. That Thou mayest answer this prayer I humble myself before Thee. Lay upon me Thy easy yoke of self-forgetfulness that through it I may find rest. Amen.
”
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A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
“
For sense gratification, a man in the mode of passion wants some honor in society, or in the nation, and he wants to have a happy family, with nice children, wife and house. These are the products of the mode of passion. As long as one is hankering after these things, he has to work very hard. Therefore it is clearly stated here that he becomes associated with the fruits of his activities and thus becomes bound by such activities. In order to please his wife, children and society and to keep up his prestige, one has to work. Therefore the whole material world is more or less in the mode of passion.
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His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (Bhagavad-Gita As It Is)
“
It Hurts To Be Alive and Obsolete:
Often when men are attracted to me, they feel ashamed and conceal it. They act as if it were ridiculous. If they do become involved, they are still ashamed and may refuse to appear publicly with me. Their fear of mockery is enormous. There is no prestige attached to having sex with me.
Since we are all far more various sexually than we are supposed to be, often, in fact, younger men become aware of me sexually. Their response is similar to what it is when they find themselves feeling attracted to a homosexual: they turn those feelings into hostility and put me down.
Listen to me! Think what it is like to have most of your life ahead and be told you are obsolete! Think what it is like to feel attraction, desire, affection towards others, to want to tell them about yourself, to feel that assumption on which self-respect is based, that you are worth something, and that if you like someone, surely he will be pleased to know that. To be, in other words, still a living woman, and to be told that every day that you are not a woman but a tired object that should disappear. That you are not a person but a joke. Well, I am a bitter joke. I am bitter and frustrated and wasted, but don’t you pretend for a minute as you look at me, forty-three, fat, and looking exactly my age, that I am not as alive as you are and that I do not suffer from the category into which you are forcing me.
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Zoe Moss (Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement)
“
Four types of people seek a connection with Me: One, the world-weary — people who worship God for the alleviation of physical or mental agony, or to be released from fears and adversity; two, the seekers of happiness through worldly things — people who pray to God to obtain wealth, family, power, prestige, and so forth; three, the seekers of spiritual advancement — people whose motive for connecting with Divinity is to gain knowledge and experience to aid their self-realization; four,
the wise — people who truly know the Atma (Self), who know that God alone exists, and whose only impulse is for the Divine and nothing else.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
“
Some people collect out of a desire for an aesthetic, others for prestige, and still others for a sense of mastery. But most theories of collecting elaborate on attempts to define, protect, or enhance the self.
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Randy O. Frost (Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things)
“
You talk about piling up treasure - money, property, culture, knowledge, and so on and so on. In going ahead with the Jesus Prayer - just let me finish, now please - in going ahead with the Jesus Prayer, aren't you trying to lay up some kind of treasure? Something that's every goddam bit as negotiable as all those other, more material things? Or does the fact that it's a prayer make all the difference?
. . . There's something about the way you're going at this prayer that gives me the willies . . . but I would like you to clear up for me just what the hell your motives are for saying it . . . As a matter of simple logic, there's no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who's greedy for material treasure - or even intellectual treasure - and the man who's greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure's treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are."
Don't you think I have sense enough to worry about my motives for saying the prayer? That's exactly what's bothering me so. Just because I'm choosy about what I want - in this case, enlightenment, or peace, instead of money or prestige or fame or any of those things - doesn't mean I'm not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. If anything, I'm more so!
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J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)
“
I think I should learn to get along better with people," he explained to Miss Benson one day, when she came upon him in the corridor of the literature building and asked what he was doing wearing a fraternity pledge pin (wearing it on the chest of the new V-neck pullover in which his mother said he looked so collegiate). Miss Benson's response to his proposed scheme for self-improvement was at once so profound and so simply put that Zuckerman went around for days repeating the simple interrogative sentence to himself; like Of Times and the River, it verified something he had known in his bones all along, but in which he could not placed his faith until it had been articulated by someone of indisputable moral prestige and purity : "Why," Caroline Benson asked the seventeen-year-old boy, "should you want to learn a thing like that?
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Philip Roth (My Life as a Man)
“
Esteem needs. Maslow classified these into two categories: Esteem for oneself (dignity, achievement, mastery, independence). The desire for reputation or respect from others (e.g., status, prestige). Maslow indicated that the need for respect or reputation is most important for children and adolescents and precedes real self-esteem or dignity.
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Ross Edgley (The Art of Resilience)
“
I know that money, power, prestige and fame do not bring happiness. If history teaches us anything it teaches us that. You know it. Everybody agrees this to be a manifest truth so self-evident as to need to repetition. What is strange to me is that, despite the fact that the world knows this, it does not want to know it and it chooses almost always to behave as if it were not true. It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading the high life, an enviable life, a privileged life are as miserable most days as anybody else, despite the fact that it must be obvious they would be - given that we are all agreed that money and fame do not bring happiness. Instead the world would prefer to enjoy the idea, against what it knows to be true, that wealth and fame do in fact insulate and protect against misery and it would rather we shut up if we are planning to indicate otherwise.
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Stephen Fry
“
But what if the silence between commercials begins to whisper? What if he came to realize that his bosses, parents, and teachers, despite their prestige, know nothing?
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Lyam Thomas Christopher (Kabbalah, Magic & the Great Work of Self Transformation: A Complete Course)
“
Let’s take a little quiz. 1. Do you define your self-worth in terms of your job title or professional position? 2. Do you quantify your own success in terms of money, power, or prestige? 3. Do you fail to see clearly—or are you uncomfortable with—what comes after your last professional successes? 4. Is your “retirement plan” to go on and on without stopping? 5. Do you dream about being remembered for your professional successes?
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Arthur C. Brooks (From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life)
“
Is your job title your identity? When you introduce yourself, do you also include what you do for a living? If so, you may be meeting people who want to know what you do, because they want to know what you can do for them.
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Jarod Kintz (Eggs, they’re not just for breakfast)
“
This is an age-old fantasy. I remember reading a quote from the apologist Edward John Carnell in Ian Murray’s biography of the Welsh preacher David Martyn Lloyd-Jones. During the formative years of Fuller Theological Seminary, Carnell said regarding evangelicalism, “We need prestige desperately.” Christians have worked hard to position themselves in places of power within the culture. They seek influence academically, politically, economically, athletically, socially, theatrically, religiously, and every other way, in hopes of gaining mass media exposure. But then when they get that exposure—sometimes through mass media, sometimes in a very broad-minded church environment—they present a reinvented designer pop gospel that subtly removes all of the offense of the gospel and beckons people into the kingdom along an easy path. They do away with all that hard-to-believe stuff about self-sacrifice, hating your family, and so forth. The illusion is that we can preach our message more effectively from lofty perches of cultural power and influence, and once we’ve got everybody’s attention, we can lead more people to Christ by taking out the sting of the gospel and nurturing a user-friendly message. But to get to these lofty perches, “Christian” public figures water down and compromise the truth; then, to stay up there, they cave in to pressure to perpetuate false teaching so their audience will stay loyal.
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John F. MacArthur Jr. (Hard to Believe: The High Cost and Infinite Value of Following Jesus)
“
The way they were treated should make you angry,” Richard said as he started away, “but not because you share an attribute with them.” Taken aback by his words, even looking a little hurt, Jennsen didn’t move. “What do you mean?” Richard paused and turned back to her. “That’s how the Imperial Order thinks. That’s how Owen’s people think. It’s a belief in granting disembodied prestige, or the mantle of guilt, to all those who share some specific trait or attribute. “The Imperial Order would like you to believe that your virtue, your ultimate value, or even your wickedness, arises entirely from being born a member of a given group, that free will itself is either impotent or nonexistent. They want you to believe that all people are merely interchangeable members of groups that share fixed, preordained characteristics, and they are predestined to live through a collective identity, the group will, unable to rise on individual merit because there can be no such thing as independent, individual merit, only group merit. “They believe that people can only rise above their station in life when selected to be awarded recognition because their group is due an indulgence, and so a representative, a stand-in for the group, must be selected to be awarded the badge of self-worth. Only the reflected light off this badge, they believe, can bring the radiance of self-worth to others of their group. “But those granted this badge live with the uneasy knowledge that it’s only an illusion of competence. It never brings any sincere self-respect because you can’t fool yourself. Ultimately, because it is counterfeit, the sham of esteem granted because of a connection with a group can only be propped up by force. “This belittling of mankind, the Order’s condemnation of everyone and everything human, is their transcendent judgment of man’s inadequacy. “When you direct your anger at me for having a trait borne by someone else, you pronounce me guilty for their crimes. That’s what happens when people say I’m a monster because our father was a monster. If you admire someone simply because you believe their group is deserving, then you embrace the same corrupt ethics. “The Imperial Order says that no individual should have the right to achieve something on his own, to accomplish what someone else cannot, and so magic must be stripped from mankind. They say that accomplishment is corrupt because it is rooted in the evil of self-interest, therefore the fruits of that accomplishment are tainted by its evil. This is why they preach that any gain must be sacrificed to those who have not earned it. They hold that only through such sacrifice can those fruits be purified and made good. “We believe, on the other hand, that your own individual life is the value and its own end, and what you achieve is yours. “Only you can achieve self-worth for yourself. Any group offering it to you, or demanding it of you, comes bearing chains of slavery.
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Terry Goodkind (Naked Empire (Sword of Truth, #8))
“
I planned to waste away and die, but there is a spirit of life, even in one such as myself, that stands in the way of such decisions. I thought that if I did not eat and drink then death would simply follow, but in practice I found that thirst becomes such a frantic obsession that it takes a greater resolve than mine to resist it. Every time I took a few drops to slake it, I postponed my demise a little more. The same was true with food. Hunger is a monster. After a while I came to an accommodation with this and stayed alive, a pathetic denizen of a half-world that was as much of my own making as it had been of Borden’s, or so I came to believe. I went through the winter in this miserable state, a failure even at self-destruction.
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Christopher Priest (The Prestige)
“
It matters to me little whether they're on the Mongolian steppe, the deserts of West Africa, the Australian Outback, the marshlands of Southeast Asia... I can't escape the feeling of nausea...
And this is just the tip of the iceberg - the ongoing spectacle of humans blissfully ignorant, boisterous, over-confident, scheming, and talking big about their dominion overthe world - a suffocating, self-absorbed, vacuous place called the wrold-for-us - to say nothing of how human culture has legitimized the most horrific actions against itself, a sickening and banal drama of the exchange of bodies, the breeding of spe ies, the struggle for power, prosperity and prestige. It just keeps going on and on, no matter how many films or TV shows imagine -like a myth - the disappearance of the human.
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Eugene Thacker (Infinite Resignation)
“
There is a paradox at the heart of contemporary Western feminism. Ideological feminists insist on grandiose goals such as “ending the patriarchy.” Yet campaigns against men-only clubs or for female representation on corporate boards are elitist concerns far removed from the daily existence of the average woman. If we think back to the sociologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, the issues Western feminists prioritize today are in the realm of self-actualization: enhancing conditions at work, having access to state-sponsored child care, joining all-male associations, balancing housework duties with male partners, and gaining prestige. This is not to say that we should forgo laudable goals such as smashing the glass ceiling. But the freedom for all women to live free from violence should come first.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights)
“
Architecture without pain, art looked at in undiluted pleasure, enjoyment without anxiety, compunction, heartache: there is no beggar woman in the church door, no ragged child or sore animal in the square. The water is safe and the wallet is inside the pocket. There will be no missed plane connection. We are in a country where the curable ills are taken care of. We are in a country where the mechanics of living from transport to domestic heating (alack, poor Britain!) function imaginatively and well; where it goes without saying that the sick are looked after and secure and the young well educated and well trained; where ingenuity is used to heal delinquents and to mitigate at least the physical dependence of old age; where there is work for all and some individual seizure, and men and women have not been entirely alienated yet from their natural environment; where there is care for freedom and where the country as a whole has rounded the drive to power and prestige beyond its borders and where the will to peace is not eroded by doctrine, national self-love, and unmanageable fears; where people are kindly, honest, helpful, sane, reliable, resourceful, and cool-headed; where stranger–shyly–smiles to stranger. "Portrait Sketch of a Country: Denmark 1962
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Sybille Bedford (Pleasures and Landscapes)
“
Soka Gakkai positions are not positions of prestige but of responsibility. The most important duty leaders have is to devote themselves to serving the members and fully discharging their responsibilities for kosen-rufu. Consequently, the more responsibility the position entails, the more resolute the person’s inner determination must be to put aside interests of “self” and work tirelessly for the Law, for kosen-rufu and for the members.
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Daisaku Ikeda (The New Human Revolution - Volume 2)
“
I depend on my son because I want him to be something that I am not. He is the fulfillment of all my hopes, my desires; he is my immortality, my continuation. So my relationship with my son, with my wife, with my children, with my neighbors, is a state of psychological dependency, and I am fearful of being in a state in which there is no dependence. I do not know what that means, therefore I depend on books, on relationship, on society, I depend on property to give me security, position, prestige. And if I do not depend on any of these things, then I depend on the experiences that I have had, on my own thoughts, on the greatness of my own pursuits.
The problem is not how not to depend, but just to see the fact that we do depend. Where there is attachment there is no love. Because you do not know how to love, you depend, and…where there is dependency there is fear. I am talking of psychological dependency, not of your dependence on the milkman to bring you milk, or your dependence on the railway, or on a bridge. It is this inward psychological dependency—on ideas, on people, on property that breeds fear. So, you cannot be free from fear as long as you do not understand relationship, and relationship can be understood only when the mind watches all its relationships, which is the beginning of self-knowledge.
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J. Krishnamurti (Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World)
“
In “My Adventures in the Ozone Layer,” he cast the scientific community as dominated by self-interest. “It’s not difficult to understand some of the motivations behind the drive to regulate CFCs out of existence,” he wrote. “For scientists: prestige, more grants for research, press conferences, and newspaper stories. Also the feeling that maybe they are saving the world for future generations.”69 (As if saving the world would be a bad thing!)
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Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
“
Washington is an example of the citizen-politician who goes to the capital of his state or nation, serves a few terms, and returns to civilian life – just as the Founding Fathers practiced and intended. Sadly, this has been almost completely disregarded by the pervasive career politicians of later generations. The current practice of politicians is to gain elected government positions and then refuse to honor voluntary term limits, thus obtaining lifetime security and prestige, exemption from laws legislated on others, and inappropriate padding of personal income through gifts from lobbyists, self-initiated increases in benefits, and lifetime pensions. Their lifestyles would shock and embarrass a selfless man like George Washington, who served eight years as commander in chief, accepting only expense reimbursements as his compensation. (See the stories on Haym Salomon and Dave Roever similar examples). On
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Douglas Feavel (Uncommon Character: Stories of Ordinary Men and Women Who Have Done the Extraordinary)
“
tear. Short and nebbishy, he had a charmingly awkward persona that concealed a big ambition: to establish Condé Nast as the most prestigious magazine company in the world. Within a year of his father’s death in 1979, Si, in rapid succession, bought the most important publishing house in America, Random House, whose imprints included Alfred A. Knopf, the prestige literary house; oversaw the successful start-up of a pioneering health and fitness magazine, Self; and bought and revamped Gentleman’s Quarterly, better known as GQ. And he was always on the lookout for more. Si was the aesthete in the Newhouse family. He combined an eye for business opportunity with a passion for art, design, and high gloss. Intellectually insecure, he relied on the self-confident baron of taste and flair he had inherited from his father’s circle: Alexander Liberman, Condé Nast’s editorial director. Liberman—Russian-born, like Alexey Brodovitch, his
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Tina Brown (The Vanity Fair Diaries: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade)
“
The effect on all individuals, which one would like to see realized, may not set in for hundreds of years, for the spiritual transformation of mankind follows the slow tread of the centuries and cannot be hurried or held up by any rational process of reflection, let alone brought to fruition in one generation. What does lie within our reach, however, is the change in individuals who have, or create for themselves, an opportunity to influence others of like mind. I do not mean by persuading or preaching—I am thinking, rather, of the well-known fact that anyone who has insight into his own actions, and has thus found access to the unconscious, involuntarily exercises an influence on his environment. The deepening and broadening of his consciousness produce the kind of effect which the primitives call “mana.” It is an unintentional influence on the unconscious of others, a sort of unconscious prestige, and its effect lasts only so long as it is not disturbed by conscious intention.
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C.G. Jung (The Undiscovered Self/Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams)
“
Authority does not have to be a person or institution which says: you have to do this, or you are not allowed to do that. While this kind of authority may be called external authority, authority can appear as internal authority, under the name of duty, conscience, or super-ego. As a matter of fact, the development of modern thinking from Protestantism to Kant's philosophy, can be characterized as the substitution of internalized authority for an external one. With the political victories of the rising middle class, external authority lost prestige and man's own conscience assumed the place which external authority once had held. This change appeared to many as the victory of freedom. To submit to orders from the outside (at least in spiritual matters) appeared to be unworthy of a free man; but the conquest of his natural inclinations, and the establishment of the domination of one part of the individual, his nature, by another, his reason, will or conscience, seemed to be the very essence of freedom. Analysis shows that conscience rules with a harshness as great as external authorities, and furthermore that frequently the contents of the orders issued by man's conscience are ultimately not governed by demands of the individual self but by social demands which have assumed the dignity of ethical norms. The rulership of conscience can be even harsher than that of external authorities, since the individual feels its orders to be his own; how can he rebel against himself?
In recent decades "conscience" has lost much of its significance. It seems as though neither external nor internal authorities play any prominent role in the individual's life. Everybody is completely "free", if only he does not interfere with other people's legitimate claims. But what we find is rather that instead of disappearing, authority has made itself invisible. Instead of overt authority, "anonymous" authority reigns.It is disguised as common sense, science, psychic health, normality, public opinion. It does not demand anything except the self-evident. It seems to use no pressure but only mild persuasion. Whether a mother says to her daughter, "I know you will not like to go out with that boy", or an advertisement suggests, "Smoke
this brand of cigarettes--you will like their coolness", it is the same atmosphere of subtle suggestion which actually pervades our whole social life. Anonymous authority is more effective than overt authority, since one never suspects that there is any order which one is expected to follow. In external authority it is clear that there is an order and who gives it; one can fight against the authority, and in this fight personal independence and moral courage can develop.But whereas in internalized authority the command, though an internal one, remains visible, in anonymous authority both command and commander have become invisible.It is like being fired at by an invisible enemy. There is nobody and nothing to fight back against.
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Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom)
“
will hear this advice over and over again. Repeated ad nauseam from the pulpit and prestige publications, like The Atlantic, where Arthur Brooks chides couples to see marriage not as a “me” but a “we” and not to get all caught up on who is doing more of the work, because sometimes marriage is like that. You just have to work. But whose work? Who is responsible for the repair and maintenance of a marriage? Who buys the self-help books? Who goes to the conferences and pushes their partner into therapy? In a 2019 study, sociologist Allison Daminger found that women carry the majority of the cognitive load in their relationships. Meaning women are the ones noticing, analyzing, and monitoring the issues in a marriage. Daminger broke down the concept of mental load into four parts: anticipating, identifying, deciding, and monitoring. The aspects of cognitive load where Daminger noticed that women do most of the work was in anticipation and monitoring. Women are thinking of the problems, working to solve them, and monitoring them for success.
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Lyz Lenz (This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life)
“
Jesus’ harshest words are aimed at hypocrites, and the second harshest at the people who are primarily concerned with possessions. He says that power, prestige, and possessions are the three things that prevent us from recognizing and receiving the reign of God. . . . The only ones who can accept the proclamation of the reign are those who have nothing to protect, not their own self-image or their reputation, their possessions, their theology, their principles, or their certitudes. And these are called “the poor,” anawim in Hebrew.
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Jen Hatmaker (Interrupted: When Jesus Wrecks Your Comfortable Christianity)
“
the recent changes in our reading habits suggest that the “era of mass [book] reading” was a brief “anomaly” in our intellectual history: “We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.” The question that remains to be answered, they went on, is whether that reading class will have the “power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital” or will be viewed as the eccentric practitioners of “an increasingly arcane hobby.
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Anonymous
“
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.
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Francis Fukuyama (The End of History and the Last Man)
“
The false self is looking for fame, power, wealth, and prestige. The unconscious is very powerful until the divine light of the Holy Spirit penetrates to its depths and reveals its dynamics. Here is where the great teaching of the dark nights of St. John of the Cross corresponds to depth psychology, only the work of the Holy Spirit goes far deeper. Instead of trying to free us from what interferes with our ordinary human life, the Spirit calls us to transformation of our inmost being, and indeed of all our faculties, into the divine way of being and acting.
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Thomas Keating (The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation)
“
. This theory, based on Latin-American constructs, classify delusional beliefs in terms of “self-deceptions of feats” (grandiosity, erotomania, possession) and “self-deceptions of shield feats” (persecution, jealousy, somatoform).
The shield feats would be ego-defensive behaviors that are created to make precedent a cushion on the impact on pride and social prestige that make a possible future that
causes much fear for their shameful character. One of the most important shield feats is the shield feat of “awareness” where the anticipation of a future defeat or shameful fact
operate as a credit to support the blow.
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Martin Ross (THE SHIELD FEATS THEORY: a different hypothesis concerning the etiology of delusions and other disorders.)
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If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it. But truth is a character of judgements and so one would suppose that its value lay in the judgements it characterizes rather than in itself. A bridge that joined two great cities would be more important than a bridge that led from one barren field to another. And if truth is one of the ultimate values, it seems strange that no one seems quite to know what it is. Philosophers still quarrel about its meaning and the upholders of rival doctrines say many sarcastic things of one another. In these circumstances the plain man must leave them to it and content himself with the plain man's truth. This is a very modest affair and merely asserts something about particular existents. It is a bare statement of the facts. If this is a value one must admit that none is more neglected. The books on ethics give long lists of occasions on which it may be legitimately withheld; their authors might have saved themselves the trouble. The wisdom of the ages has long since decided that toutes vérités ne sont pas bonnes á dire. Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe, and his idealism, it has sometimes seemed to me, is merely his effort to attach the prestige of truth to the fictions he has invented to satisfy his self-conceit.
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W. Somerset Maugham
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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.
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Edward F. Edinger (Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche)
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our species’ most basic needs (food, shelter, safety) must be met before we can pursue more sophisticated emotional or social desires like prestige and creative fulfillment. Initially, marriage provided a way for people to secure resources and fulfill those basic needs. Later, the companionate marriage redefined the institution as one that met higher needs such as belonging, love, and self-esteem. Now, in the twenty-first century, we don’t just want reliable co-parents and monogamous sex; we want our partners to support our self-expression and foster our personal growth—the things at the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy. Increasingly, we see marriage as an important tool in constructing a fulfilling life.
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Mandy Len Catron (How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays)
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Yet historians still start their books with a ritual lament about 'the sources' and their inadequacy. The lament is not entirely insincere (though it is something of a self-constructed problem): the sources often are inadequate for the particular questions that historians choose to pose. But that is part of the ancient-historical game: first pick your question, then demonstrate the appalling difficulty of finding an answer given the paucity of the evidence, finally triumph over that difficulty by scholarly 'skill'. Prestige in this business goes to those who outwit their sources, prising unexpected answers from unexpected places, and who play the clever (sometimes too clever) detective against an apparent conspiracy of ancient silence.
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Mary Beard (Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations)
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There is one thing that—even if it were considered essential—no student movement or urban revolt or global protest or what have you would ever be able to do. And that is to occupy the football field on a Sunday.The very idea sounds ironic and absurd; try saying it in public and people will laugh in your face. Propose it seriously and you will be shunned as a provocateur. Not for the obvious reason, which is that, while a horde of students can fling Molotov cocktails on the jeeps of any police force, and at most (because of the laws, the necessity of national unity, the prestige of the state), no more than forty students will be killed; an attack on a sports field would surely cause the massacre of the attackers, indiscriminate, total slaughter carried out by self-respecting citizens aghast at the outrage.
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Umberto Eco (Travels In Hyperreality (Harvest Book))
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found myself constantly drawn to the subject of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), which I have concluded is inextricably linked to psychopathy, although this link is rarely mentioned in medical papers or among the psychiatric profession generally. As with psychopathy, people with NPD make up approximately 1 per cent of the population with rates greater in men. Another direct comparison between those suffering with NPD and psychopathy/sociopathy is that both types are characterised by exaggerated feelings of self-importance. In its moderate to extreme forms these people are excessively preoccupied with personal adequacy, power, prestige and vanity; mentally unable to see the destructive damage they are causing themselves and others. Symptoms of the NPD disorder include seeking constant approval from others who are successful in positions of power in whatever form it may be. Many are selfish, grandiose pathological liars; their egos and sense of self-esteem over-inflated, while at once they are torn between exaggerated self-appraisal and the reality that they might never amount to much.
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Christopher Berry-Dee (Talking With Psychopaths - A journey into the evil mind)
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But M. de Charlus liked to show that he loved Morel and to persuade others, perhaps to persuade himself, that Morel loved him. He must always have him near him, in spite of the damage the boy might do to his reputation in society: it seemed to be a matter of pride. For (and we often see men who have achieved a good social position throw it away out of vanity in order to be seen everywhere with a mistress, a semi-whore or lady of tarnished reputation, who is not received anywhere, but with whom it seems to them flattering to be connected) he had reached the point where self-regard applies all its energy to destroying the ends it had previously attained, whether because, under the influence of love, one finds a new prestige, which one is alone in perceiving, in an ostentatious relationship with the object of one’s affection, or whether the ebbing of worldly ambitions, now satisfied, and the rising tide of curiosity about other forms of life, all the more absorbing the more academic it is, now make it seem that one’s social ascent has not only reached but passed the level where other people have difficulty in clinging on.
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Marcel Proust (The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition))
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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.
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Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
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So you’re saying, Jack, that death would be just as threatening even if you’d accomplished all you’d ever hoped to accomplish in your life and work.” “Are you crazy? Of course. That’s an elitist idea. Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?” “Well said.” “This is death. I don’t want it to tarry awhile so I can write a monograph. I want it to go away for seventy or eighty years.” “Your status as a doomed man lends your words a certain prestige and authority. I like that. As the time nears, I think you’ll find that people will be eager to hear what you have to say. They will seek you out.” “Are you saying this is a wonderful opportunity for me to win friends?” “I’m saying you can’t let down the living by slipping into self-pity and despair. People will depend on you to be brave. What people look for in a dying friend is a stubborn kind of gravel-voiced nobility, a refusal to give in, with moments of indomitable humor. You’re growing in prestige even as we speak. You’re creating a hazy light about your own body. I have to like it.
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Don DeLillo (White Noise)
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The typical example of shield feat would be the metaphor of the race where the runner walks. In a race, one of the competitors feels inferior to others during that competition and believes that he will lose (future anti-feat). However the anti-feat finds it intolerable for both self-esteem and his social prestige; then implements a shield feat strategy of "trying to fail." While others all run with all their might to "win" this player walks hand in his pocket trying to "lose" (shield feat). When he finally loses, it is a fact that he can tell himself "I did not care to win, and that's true because I walked while the others ran" (shield feat protecting pride) and so can tell all viewers of the race "I did not mind losing ... did you not see me walk?" (shield feat protecting the social prestige).
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Martin Ross (THE SHIELD FEATS THEORY: a different hypothesis concerning the etiology of delusions and other disorders.)
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THE “AWARENESS” SHIELD FEAT.
According to the Bible, Joseph obtained enormous prestige in Egypt, when he was able to divine the dreams of the pharaoh,
As Joseph earned that feat with a great social prestige, in different traditions the "awareness" of the future, or an inaccessible present, always proved a merit that produces social honor. Weber (1922) considers the prophets, along with the priests and magicians, as examples of charismatic leaders, and this is because "predict " or " perceive" the future has been, in different traditions, a strong feat that has given pride and social prestige those who perform.
It postulates a "shield feat of awareness" that is intended to offset the impact on the pride of some future anti-feat. When the firepower that a possible future anti-feat has about pride and social prestige is too high and becomes unbearable, the person can go into that future equipped with a shield feat that will compensate. From that strategy, thinking badly of the future is a way of ensuring the "consolation prize" of having the merit of "prediction”.
According to Steele (1988 ), when a person experiences a negative assessment of himself in a particular field, they can initiate a process of self-affirmation activating positive beliefs in another area, thus achieving a positive overall assessment of itself. The pessimistic shield feat "awareness of future failure”, would be a merit that safeguards to offset the impact of that failure on self- concept , an achievement an overall assessment that is not so negative.
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Martin Ross (THE SHIELD FEATS THEORY: a different hypothesis concerning the etiology of delusions and other disorders.)
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I found myself constantly drawn to the subject of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), which I have concluded is inextricably linked to psychopathy, although this link is rarely mentioned in medical papers or among the psychiatric profession generally. As with psychopathy, people with NPD make up approximately 1 per cent of the population with rates greater in men. Another direct comparison between those suffering with NPD and psychopathy/sociopathy is that both types are characterised by exaggerated feelings of self-importance. In its moderate to extreme forms these people are excessively preoccupied with personal adequacy, power, prestige and vanity; mentally unable to see the destructive damage they are causing themselves and others. Symptoms of the NPD disorder include seeking constant approval from others who are successful in positions of power in whatever form it may be. Many are selfish, grandiose pathological liars; their egos and sense of self-esteem over-inflated, while at once they are torn between exaggerated self-appraisal and the reality that they might never amount to much.
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Christopher Berry-Dee (Talking With Psychopaths - A journey into the evil mind)
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Page 8:
In addition to size, political power also distinguishes minority and majority peoples. Minority groups suffer limited social mobility, political disadvantage, restricted access to material well-being, and government policies have directly or indirectly perpetuated these conditions. According to Messina, minorities may be described as ‘groups that are underrepresented in positions of authority and control in the major institutions of society. They are limited to ineffectual, low prestige, poorly paid positions within major institutions or excluded from the institutions altogether.’ In that case, political minorities need not be numerical minorities. Moreover, a nation differs from a minority insofar as, according to Gurr, the minority has a defined status within a larger society, and it seeks to improve upon that status, while the nation seeks some form of autonomy from the state. In other words, the minority wants to improve its position within the system, while the nation strives for exit from the system.
While nationalism is simply defined by a dictionary as ‘the devotion to one’s nation; patriotism or chauvinism’, it does in fact connote more, embodying culture, ethnicity, language. Indeed, according to Smith, nationalism is a’a doctrine of autonomy, unity and identity, whose members conceive it to be an actual or potential nation’. Just as the term nation is submerged in contradictory terminology, so too is nationalism. Connor has attempted to rectify the semantic sources of misunderstanding by clarifying words: a sloppy use of the term nationalism connotes loyalty to the state. It is, in fact, loyalty to the nation. Loyalty to the state is patriotism. In the case of nation-states, the two forms of loyalty coincide, but they must be treated separately in the literature. To avoid this confusion, Connor introduced the term ethno-nationalism. The mix of ethnicity and nationalism leads to ethno-nationalism, which according to Connor and Shiels, is ‘the sentiment of an ethnic minority in a state or living across state boundaries that propels the group to unify and identify itself as having the capacity for self-government’.
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Milica Zarkovic Bookman (The Demographic Struggle for Power: The Political Economy of Demographic Engineering in the Modern World)
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One of the reasons it is so hard to change careers—or why we change, only to end up in the same boat—is that we can so fully internalize our institutional identities, relying on them to convey our worth and accomplishments to the outside world. Even when we can honestly admit that the external trappings of success—titles, perks, and other markers of prestige—don’t matter much, we can, like Harris, hide from the need for change by telling ourselves how much the company needs us. Like Dan, who postponed vacations and overrode family obligations when the organization needed him, most working adults organize at least some portion of their working lives according to the principle that self-sacrifice is OK when it’s for the good of the institution. Since basic assumptions tend to exist in interlocking clusters, what may often appear to be a work-life balance problem, or an inability to extricate ourselves from unrewarding or overly political working relationships, is in fact our inability to separate our commitment to an organization from being the organization.
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Herminia Ibarra (Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career)
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theory led to Horney’s hypothesis of 10 neurotic needs, which she saw as so overwhelming and all-encompassing as to define a person. She classified the neurotic needs into three categories: those that compel us to comply (the need for affection, the need for a partner, and the need for simplifying life), those that lead us to withdraw (the need for independence and the need for perfection), and those that make us aggressive and turn us against other people (the need for power, the need to exploit, the need for prestige, and the need for personal achievement). These needs become neurotic only when they exist at dysfunctional levels or come into play too indiscriminately and too extremely in daily life. Most of us, Horney believed, can navigate these needs in healthy ways and reduce our interpersonal conflicts. And the more secure, tolerant, loving, and respectful our family life has been, the greater our chances of doing so. On the other hand, for a person who has developed neurotic needs, dysfunctional behavior can beget still more dysfunctional behavior and lead to the creation of vicious circles (or cycles). Moreover, Horney felt that healthy people see themselves as they are, while a neurotic person’s identity is split into a despised self and an ideal self. It’s the gap between these two concepts of self that continues to perpetuate anxiety and neurosis. Horney
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Andrea Bonior (Psychology: Essential Thinkers, Classic Theories, and How They Inform Your World)
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If what we advocate in this handbook is so good and has such a significant impact on how officers perform on the street, then why is it not common across law enforcement agencies? Because, it’s the culture, stupid! Cultures are unique to each organization and/or profession. These cultures take shape over time, eventually becoming so entrenched that people resist any change, even change that is positive and valuable to the organization. Many organizations get stuck by the current way they do things, simply because it’s the way they have always done it. They resist mainly because they fear losing something such as traditional methods of training, or operating how they have learned and developed over their careers. They fear they will lose control of their influence, their authority or prestige within the organization, and potentially their positions or jobs. Much of this is ego and individually driven and entirely self-serving, just hiding behind a smokescreen of leadership.
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
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Blind Gods! Hear my words. If there is truth in my art, let what I say be true eternally. The sweat and blood of Naga women built this city, but you banished them. From today, may no woman feel safe in this city. May corrupt and evil people forever rule this wretched place. May every man be possessed with lust – for woman, money, position, prestige, and power. May each man fight another. May brothers butcher brothers and rape their own sisters. Every time a woman steps outside her home, may she feel the fear of violation. Let this be the asylum of evil men and woman. May the high and mighty ever fear for their lives and live in self-imposed jails for security. May the ruled despise their rulers and may the rulers fear the ruled. May this be a city of graveyards. May invaders from across the borders ransack the city repeatedly, changing the roles of oppressor and oppressed without end. May invaders plunder the city of her wealth again and again. May this be a city without trust, a city of anger and violent passions. May the blood of holy men fall here. May her citizens pollute this sacred river, making it into a sewer. May the air be poisonous and the streets filthy and crowded. May this city be damned forever.
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Anand Neelakantan (Ajaya: Roll of the Dice (Epic of the Kaurava Clan #1))
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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:
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Todd Kashdan (Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life)
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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
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Christopher Ryan (Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships)
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Feminism is based on the wrong premise. It assumes that “patriarchy” is the ultimate cause of woman’s pain. It proposes the wrong solution. It says that women have the right, the knowledge, and the power to redefine and rectify the male-female relationship. It’s fueled by the wrong attitude. It encourages anger, bitterness, resentment, self-reliance, independence, arrogance, and a pitting of woman against man. It exalts the wrong values. Power, prestige, personal attainment, and financial gain are exalted over service, sacrifice, and humility. Manhood is devalued. Morality is devalued. Marriage is devalued. Motherhood is devalued. In sum, feminism promotes ways of thinking that stand in direct opposition to the Word of God and to the beauty of His created order.
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Mary A. Kassian (True Woman 101: Divine Design: An Eight-Week Study on Biblical Womanhood (True Woman))
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It is a the belief of many brooding minds that almost as great as the direct guilt of the German war lords was the guilt of the whole political society of Europe, whose secret diplomacy (unrevealed to the peoples) was based upon hatred and fear and rivalry, in play for imperial power and the world's markets, as common folk play dominoes for penny points, and risking the lives of common folk in a gamble for enormous stakes of territory, imperial prestige, the personal vanity of politicians, the vast private gain of trusts and profiteers. To keep the living counters quiet, to make them jump into the pool of their own free will at the word "Go," the statesmen, diplomats, trusts, and profiteers debauch the name of patriotism, raise the watchword of liberty, and play upon the ignorance of the mob easily, skillfully, by inciting them to race hatred, by inflaming the brute-passion in them, and by concocting a terrible mixture of false idealism and self-interest, so that simple minds quick to respond to sentiment, as well as those quick to hear the call of the beast, rally shoulder to shoulder and march to the battlegrounds under the spell of that potion.
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Philip Gibbs (Now It Can Be Told)
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In the world of premium, flame broils there are basically two roads that the makers appear to seek after. We have the do everything models and the particular objective models. Do everything flame broils concentrate on presenting to you a wide range of highlights for a better than average taste of close everything a barbecue can do while alternate concentrate on things like infrared barbecuing, warm maintenance or self-cleaning. This Weber Summit show is a do everything flame broil that matches premium stainless steel with different cooking alternatives, great power, and a cost around $1899 on the lower end for premium barbecues.
Weber Summit 7170001 S-470 Stainless-Steel 580-Square-Inch 48,800-BTU Liquid-Propane Gas Grill
With a ton of experience in grill design Weber brings to market this heavy duty premium grill. Here we have four main burners pumping 48,800 BTU’s of cooking power over propane gas. It doesn’t stop there though the highlight of this model is all of its grilling utility.
Features
580-square-inch 48,800-BTU gas grill with stainless-steel cooking grates and Flavorizer bars
Front-mounted controls; 4 stainless-steel burners; Snap-Jet individual burner ignition system
Side burner, Sear Station burner, smoker burner, and rear-mounted infrared rotisserie burner
Enclosed cart; built-in thermometer; requires a 20-pound LP tank (sold separately); LED fuel gauge - LP models only
Measures 30 inches long by 66 inches wide by 57 inches high; 5-year limited warranty
SABER SS 500 Premium Stainless Steel 3 Burner Gas Grill
Silver is a valuable mineral and also an extravagant color as the natural color of stainless steel why would you not want to go all out. With that in mind, we have this Saber SS 500 premium gas grill. This grill features a completely stainless steel build housing three infrared burners for precise temperature contro
Features
Constructed with commercial grade 304 stainless steel for lasting durability
Uses a patented infrared cooking system for even temperature, no flare-ups and 30% less propane consumption
Dual tube side burner is ideal for greater versatility of using woks, skillets and pots, as well as boiling and frying side dishes and sauces
2 internal halogen lights so you can grill at any time of day
Napoleon Grills PRO500RSIBPSS-2 Prestige Pro Series Gas Grills Propane
The grilling extends beyond your basic setup with a heavy duty rear infrared rotisserie burner and a side infrared burner for searing purposes so whether you want a succulent roast of a hibachi style feast, burgers and hot dogs are just the beginning.
Features
80, 000 BTU's
Six burners
900 in total cooking area
Premium stainless Steel construction
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PremiumGasGrills
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Similarly, a comprehensive 1977 study by McKinlay and McKinlay, formerly required reading in almost all American medical schools, found that all medical interventions, including vaccines, surgeries, and antibiotics, contributed only about 1 percent of the decline and at most 3.5 percent.17 Both CDC and the McKinlays attributed the disappearance of infectious disease mortalities not to doctors and health officials, but to improved nutrition and sanitation—the latter credited to strict regulation of food preparation, electric refrigerators, sewage treatment, and chlorinated water. The McKinlays joined Harvard’s iconic infectious disease pioneer, Edward Kass, in warning that a self-serving medical cartel would one day try to claim credit for these public health improvements as a pretense for imposing unwarranted medical interventions (e.g., vaccines) on the American public. As the McKinlays and Kass18 had predicted, vaccinologists successfully hijacked the astonishing success story—the dramatic 74 percent decline in infectious disease mortalities of the first half of the twentieth century—and deployed it to claim for themselves, and particularly for vaccines, a revered and sanctified—and scientifically undeserving—prestige beyond criticism, questioning, or debate.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Social status among humans actually comes in two flavors: dominance and prestige.12 Dominance is the kind of status we get from being able to intimidate others (think Joseph Stalin), and on the low-status side is governed by fear and other avoidance instincts. Prestige, however, is the kind of status we get from being an impressive human specimen (think Meryl Streep), and it’s governed by admiration and other approach instincts. Of course, these two forms of status aren’t mutually exclusive; Steve Jobs, for example, exhibited both dominance and prestige. But the two forms are analytically distinct strategies with different biological expressions. They are, as some researchers have put it, the “two ways to the top.
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Kevin Simler (The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)
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As a group of Northwestern University professors wrote in a 2005 article in the Annual Review of Sociology, the recent changes in our reading habits suggest that the “era of mass [book] reading” was a brief “anomaly” in our intellectual history: “We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.” The question that remains to be answered, they went on, is whether that reading class will have the “power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital” or will be viewed as the eccentric practitioners of “an increasingly arcane hobby.”20
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Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains)
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Without it, no one would ever have understood what God had revealed of himself and of his wisdom in the public arena. Our obtuseness, our deep self-centeredness, our love of pomp and power and prestige, simply would not have allowed us to understand the cross or our need of it. In short, our very lostness demanded the work of the Spirit of God, to the end that we might “understand what God has freely given us” (2:12).
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D.A. Carson (The Cross and Christian Ministry: An Exposition of Passages from 1 Corinthians)
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For the writer, the microcomputer was an unexpected liberation: it was not really a return to the flexibility and userfriendliness of the manuscript, but it became possible, all the same, to engage in serious work on a text. During the same years, various indicators suggested that literature might regain some of its former prestige – albeit less on its own merits than through the self-effacement of rival activities. Rock music and cinema, subjected to the formidable levelling power of television, gradually lost their magic. The previous distinctions between films, music videos, news, advertising, human testimonies and reporting tended to fade in favour of the notion of a generalized spectacle.
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Michel Houellebecq (Interventions 2020)
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Jesus’ understanding of his vocation came out of wrestling with God, himself and the devil in the solitude of the wilderness.8 Resisting the temptations to a false self based on power, prestige or possessions, Jesus chose his true identity as the deeply loved Son of God.
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David G. Benner (The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery (The Spiritual Journey, #2))
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If I know that I belong to a self-satisfied elite who are sacrificing the common good through an excess of arrogance, this liberates me from criticism, and I come out with twice the prestige.
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Muriel Barbery (The Elegance of the Hedgehog)
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A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist – that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating – but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the up-grade and some hated rival is on the down-grade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self- deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also – since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself – unshakably certain of being in the right.
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George Orwell (Notes on Nationalism)
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Roughgarden had a twenty-five year career in ecology as a man before she transitioned to being a woman, giving her unique insight into the world of sexism in academia. She sees the prevailing theories in biology as a way to 'naturalize male prowess' and believes that in a field dominated by straight white men, research has become a self-reinforcing cycle of sexism. 'The purpose of their theories is often to buy them prestige, and prestige is found in agreement from other straight white men,' she says. 'All the other straight white men are in on the racket. [For women] there's no entrée, there's no avenue to make the truth count.
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Keely Savoie
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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.
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Oliver Nachtwey (Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe)
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The lead partners of consulting firms, by the way, understand this self-subordination thing well. They are well into the “meta” level of this particular development in organizational psychology. To paraphrase a comment passed along from Roland Berger, a McKinsey alumnus who built up his own large consulting firm, consulting is really a branch of the lemonade business. You find anxious overachievers and bring them in with what they think is a lot of money and a few tokens of prestige. Then you squeeze them like lemons and toss out the rinds.
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Matthew Stewart (The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture)
“
Jeremy was driven by what psychologist Jessica Tracy and her coauthors call “authentic pride,” the self-esteem gained from being a conscientious and caring person who accomplishes good things by treating others well. And who earns their admiration and respect as a result. Jessica’s research also found that authentic pride has an evil twin, “hubristic pride,” where people feel endowed with enduring qualities such as being really smart, athletic, or gorgeous that anoint them as superior to others—which unleashes their arrogance, conceit, and self-aggrandizement. Authentic pride depends on working to earn and sustain prestige over the long haul. Hubristic pride “is more immediate but fleeting and, in some cases, unwarranted.” It depends more on taking shortcuts and less on doing hard work.
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Robert I. Sutton (The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder)
“
They Are Rigid and Single-Minded As long as there’s a clear path to follow, emotionally immature people can do very well, sometimes reaching high levels of success and prestige. But when it comes to relationships or emotional decisions, their immaturity becomes evident. They are either rigid or impulsive, and try to cope with reality by narrowing it down to something manageable. Once they form an opinion, their minds are closed. There’s one right answer, and they can become very defensive and humorless when people have other ideas.
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Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
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More important, her curated self was a person she would admire—a hugely successful, hardworking executive. And she succeeded! But nothing is permanent, and now she felt like every hour of work was giving her less than the last, and not just less happiness—less power and prestige, too. Her problem was that the “special one” she had created was less than a full person. She had traded herself for a symbol of herself, you might say.
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Arthur C. Brooks (From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life)
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but in this stage the Hindu philosophers find one of life’s most common traps: People become attached to its earthly rewards—money, power, sex, prestige—and thus try to make this stage last a lifetime. Sound familiar? This is another description of being stuck on the fluid intelligence curve, chasing Aquinas’s four idols—money, power, pleasure, and honor—that lead to self-objectification, but that never satisfy. To break the attachment to these idols requires movement to a new stage of life, with a new set of skills—spiritual skills. The change can be painful, Acharya said, like becoming an adult for a second time. And it means letting go of things that defined us in the eyes of the world.
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Arthur C. Brooks (From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life)
“
One variant of what I have been calling the "standard view" is the "safety-valve theory." The claim is sometimes made that women's emotional caregiving does more than secure psychological benefits to individual men: This caregiving is said to shore up the patriarchal system as a whole by helping to stabilize the characteristic institutions of contemporary patriarchal society. These institutions, it is claimed, are marked by hierarchy, hence by unequal access to power, and by impersonality, alienated labor, and abstract instrumental rationality. Now men pay a heavy price for their participation in such a system, even though the system as such allows men generally to exercise more power than women generally. The disclosure of a person's deepest feelings is dangerous under conditions of competition and impersonality: A man runs the risk of displaying fear or vulnerability if he says too much. Hence, men must sacrifice the possibility of frank and intimate ties with one another; they must abandon the possibility of emotional release in one another's company. Instead, they must appear tough, controlled, and self sufficient, in command at all times.
Now, so the argument goes, the emotional price men pay for participation in this system would be unacceptable high, were women not there to lower it. Women are largely excluded from the arenas wherein men struggle for prestige; because of this and by virtue of our socialization into patterns of nurturance, women are well situated to repair the emotional damage men inflict on one another. Women's caregiving is said to function as a "safety valve" that allows the release of emotional tensions generated by a fundamentally inhuman system. Without such release, these tensions might explode the set of economic and political relationships wherein they are now uneasily contained. Hence, women are importantly involved in preventing the destabilization of a system in which some men oppress other men and men generally oppress women generally.
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Sandra Lee Bartky
“
One variant of what I have been calling the "standard view" is the "safety-valve theory." The claim is sometimes made that women's emotional caregiving does more than secure psychological benefits to individual men: This caregiving is said to shore up the patriarchal system as a whole by helping to stabilize the characteristic institutions of contemporary patriarchal society. These institutions, it is claimed, are marked by hierarchy, hence by unequal access to power, and by impersonality, alienated labor, and abstract instrumental rationality. Now men pay a heavy price for their participation in such a system, even though the system as such allows men generally to exercise more power than women generally. The disclosure of a person's deepest feelings is dangerous under conditions of competition and impersonality: A man runs the risk of displaying fear or vulnerability if he says too much. Hence, men must sacrifice the possibility of frank and intimate ties with one another; they must abandon the possibility of emotional release in one another's company. Instead, they must appear tough, controlled, and self sufficient, in command at all times.
Now, so the argument goes, the emotional price men pay for participation in this system would be unacceptable high, were women not there to lower it. Women are largely excluded from the arenas wherein men struggle for prestige; because of this and by virtue of our socialization into patterns of nurturance, women are well situated to repair the emotional damage men inflict on one another. Women's caregiving is said to function as a "safety valve" that allows the release of emotional tensions generated by a fundamentally inhuman system. Without such release, these tensions might explode the set of economic and political relationships wherein they are now uneasily contained. Hence, women are importantly involved in preventing the destabilization of a system in which some men oppress other men and men generally oppress women generally.
”
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Boston Women's Health Book Collective
“
Are these people who call themselves warriors simple and austere, or dependent on and attached to material things, living unnecessarily complicated lives? Simple lifestyles, disciplined surroundings, and a healthy existence characterized by cleanliness and organization are the traits of a warrior.
• Are they kind and generous, living for others, especially the poor, in what Buddhist teachers call accepting responsibility for being “the strength of the weak” instead of living a showy, braggart, and arrogant life?
• Are they accustomed to self-sacrifice? Do they have a fit body, do physical training, and eat a moderate and healthy diet of natural foods, as oppose to living the slovenly and poisoned lives expected of colonized beings?
• Do they benefit from some form of spiritual introspection that deepens their existence beyond the fast-paced, frenetic, and essentially meaningless modern lifestyle of the mainstream?
• Do they have self-control and self-discipline?
• Have they conquered their rage and do they engage challenges without anger but with non-violence, forbearance, and the oft-derided but very warrior-like trait of stoicism?
• Are they honest people who keep their word? Do they believe in and practice integrity and democracy and all dealings with other people?
• Are they incorruptible in public affairs and sincere in their private lives? In contrast to the hypocritical self-serving ethic of contemporary politics, do they truly serve the people?
• Do they understand and respect the power of words? Or do they tell lies, speak maliciously, use sharp or harsh words, or engage in useless gossip? Colonial beings use words to harm, destroy, and divide; warriors use words to restore harmony to situations.
• Are they moral? Or are they, like for too many of our people, abusive or prone to stealing? Does the use of drugs or alcohol caused them to lose control, leading to further abuses of their senses and a crazed or obsessively damaging sexuality?
• Are they humble? Warriors are students in search of knowledge and recognize that the world is full of teachers and mentors. Warriors seek to place themselves as humble learners in the care of learned elders and mentors, recognizing that the mentor knows more than they do. Unlike the precocious, the know-it-all , and the smart ass, the knowledge-seekers lead exemplary lives based on their growing understanding and do not hoard or profit from what they have gained on the warrior’s journey.
• Is their life-goal spiritual enlightenment and empowerment? Not money, not revenge, not prestige and status, but the cultivation of the ability to bring enlightenment and power to others, to have the capacity to bring back balance in the world and in people.
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Taiaike Alfred
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The Museum's function, like the Library's, is not entirely beneficent. It certainly enables us to see dead productions scattered about the world and engulfed in cults or civilizations they sought to ornament as unified aspects of a single effort. In this sense our consciousness of painting as painting is based upon the Museum, But painting exists first of all in each painter who works, and it is there in a pure state, whereas the Museum compromises it with the somber pleasures of retrospection. One should go to the Museum as the painters go there, in the sober joy of work; and not as we go there, with a somewhat spurious reverence. The Museum gives us a thieves' conscience. We occasionally sense that these works were not after аll intended to end up between these morose walls, for the pleasure of
Sunday strollers or Monday "intellectuals." We are well aware that something has been lost and that this self-communion with the dead is not the true milieu of art—that so many joys and sorrows, so much anger, and so many labors were not destined to reflect one day the Museum's mournful light...The Museum adds a false prestige to the true value of the works by detaching them from the chance circumstances they arose from and making us believe that the artist's hand was guided from the start by fate. Whereas the style of each painter throbbed in his life like his heart beat, and was just what enabled him to recognize every effort which differed from his own, the Museum converts this secret, modest, non-deliberated, involuntary, and, in short, living historicity into official and pompous history.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Signs)
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14 August -Independence Day
Pakistan need not, to be new, or its institutions should stay under the Constitution, Pakistan turns into new Pakistan until our collective and mutual thinking, as long as, becomes capable, to match with the world's decent societies and communities, adopting within its religious, cultural and social values, and welfare's boundaries; then the change can be possible. The slogan of a new Pakistan can be just a slogan; however, our collective status, shape, and thought will stay unchanged, collapsing as the earthquake, and Pakistani people will remain the victim of it; indeed, no one else. As a fact, Pakistan's prestige and also beauty situates and depends upon its stronghold, independent, prosperous, self-sufficient, stable, and compatible with all its institutions. Long live, Pakistan. (Pakistan Zinda-o-Paindabad.)
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Ehsan Sehgal
“
His speeches were long and loud: praises of Karhide, disparagements of Orgoreyn, vilifications of “disloyal factions,” discussions of the “integrity of the Kingdom’s borders,” lectures in history and ethics and economics, all in a ranting, canting, emotional tone that went shrill with vituperation or adulation. He talked much about pride of country and love of the parentland, but little about shifgrethor, personal pride or prestige. Had Karhide lost so much prestige in the Sinoth Valley business that the subject could not be brought up? No; for he often talked about the Sinoth Valley. I decided that he was deliberately avoiding talk of shifgrethor because he wished to rouse emotions of a more elemental, uncontrollable kind. He wanted to stir up something that the whole shifgrethor-pattern was a refinement upon, a sublimation of. He wanted his hearers to be frightened and angry. His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate. He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, “cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization.
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Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness)
“
Good stories are thematic and thought provoking. Every story has a meaning to the teller; sometimes the actual meaning of the story is latent. Is storytelling evidence of how we go about taking measure of our action-filled lives? Do stories tell how we hunker down in a foxhole in an all-out effort to survive? Does storytelling also pay homage to how the mind is predisposed to roam about in a cloudbank while we are belly crawling on the battlefield of time? Does the sprawl of our stories delve into what cinematic themes we find worthy of living for and risk death chasing? What does the synecdoche of our stories tell us about people and how does this knowledge assist us fit into this diverse world as individuals? Do self-selected stories guide us in choosing how to go about life? Does the hard kernel of our personal story allow us to reconcile how we actually live with how other well-meaning people coached us to live? Do poignant stories of our generation tell us whether we should aim for a life of leisure, aspire to acquire wealth, pine to take pleasurable junkets, maneuver to climb the ladder of social prestige, altruistically give to charity, or stoically sacrifice personal delight in order to mollify a religious deity? What does the sanctified marrow of cherished stories tell us about life?
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
During the nearly two years of separation from her husband and the society of the Viennese court, the Empress had changed. She had become very self-confident and brisk and had learned to assert her interests vigorously. The Emperor living in constant fear that at the first sign of discord she might run off again and do further damage to the prestige of the August House, treated her circumspectly, showing infinite patience.
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Brigitte Hamann (The Reluctant Empress)
“
[Self-actualizers] have become strong enough to be independent of the good opinion of other people, or even their affection. The honors, the status, the rewards, the popularity, the prestige, and the love they can bestow must have become less important than self-development and inner growth.
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Abraham Maslow
“
If the consumer society no longer produces myth, this is because it is itself its own myth. The Devil, who brought Gold and Wealth (the price of which was our soul), has been supplanted by Affluence pure and simple. And the pact with the Devil has been supplanted by the contract of Affluence. Moreover, just as the most diabolical aspect of the Devil has never been his existing, but his making us believe that he exists, so Affluence does not exist, but it only has to make us believe it exists to be an effective myth.
Consumption is a myth. That is to say, it is a statement of contemporary society about itself, the way our society speaks itself. And, in a sense, the only objective reality of consumption is the idea of consumption; it is this reflexive, discursive configuration, endlessly repeated in everyday speech and intellectual discourse, which has acquired the force of common sense.
Our society thinks itself and speaks itself as a consumer society. As much as it consumes anything, it consumes itself as consumer society, as idea. Advertising is the triumphal paean to that idea.
This is not a supplementary dimension; it is a fundamental one, for it is the dimension of myth. If we did nothing but consume (getting, devouring, digesting), consumption would not be a myth, which is to say that it would not be a full, self-fulfilling discourse of society about itself, a general system of interpretation, a mirror in which it takes supreme delight in itself, a utopia in which it is reflected in advance. In this sense, affluence and consumption – again, we mean not the consumption of material goods, products and services, but the consumed image of consumption – do, indeed, constitute our new tribal mythology – the morality of modernity.
Without that anticipation and reflexive potentialization of enjoyment in the ‘collective consciousness’, consumption would merely be what it is and would not be such a force for social integration. It would merely be a richer, more lavish, more differentiated mode of subsistence than before, but it would no more have a name than ever it did before, when nothing designated as collective value, as reference myth what was merely a mode of survival (eating, drinking, housing and clothing oneself) or the sumptuary expenditure (finery, great houses, jewels) of the privileged classes. Neither eating roots nor throwing feasts was given the name ‘consuming’. Our age is the first in which current expenditure on food and ‘prestige’ expenditure have both been termed consumption by everyone concerned, there being a total consensus on the matter. The historic emergence of the myth of consumption in the twentieth century is radically different from the emergence of the technical concept in economic thinking or science, where it was employed much earlier. That terminological systematization for everyday use changes history itself: it is the sign of a new social reality. Strictly speaking, there has been consumption only since the term has ‘passed into general usage’. Though it is mystifying and analytically useless – a veritable ‘anti-concept’ indeed – it signifies, nonetheless, that an ideological restructuring of values has occurred. The fact that this society experiences itself as a consumer society must be the starting point for an objective analysis
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Jean Baudrillard (The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures)
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We are shaped, in a way, by our earliest primitive memories and sensations that come through the skin. Later in life, the skin becomes not only the receptor of rich and constant sensory input, it also serves as a kind of organ of communication through which we both experience and express tenderness and pleasure and, alternatively, hurtfulness and pain. And in a thousand different societies—ancient and modern, technological and preliterate—the skin has been manipulated, decorated, scarred, revealed, hidden, tattooed, cut, and branded to communicate standing, prestige, status as a warrior or wife or slave, and attainment of adulthood. Skin communicates. Skin signals. Skin tells a story.
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Marilee Strong (A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain)
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Someone whose heart is at peace is blessed. Peace of mind comes when we let go of our attachments. Attachments come from foolishness, and foolishness develops when we don't know the purpose of our lives. We become attached to money, prestige, and people When we doubt know why we live, why we've come to the Earth and what we should live for.
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Ilchi Lee (I've Decided to Live 120 Years: The Ancient Secret to Longevity, Vitality, and Life Transformation)
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Much ink has been spilled over whether fascism represented an emergency form of capitalism, a mechanism devised by capitalists by which the fascist state—their agent—disciplined the workforce in a way no traditional dictatorship could do. Today it is quite clear that businessmen often objected to specific aspects of fascist economic policies, sometimes with success. But fascist economic policy responded to political priorities, and not to economic rationale. Both Mussolini and Hitler tended to think that economics was amenable to a ruler’s will. Mussolini returned to the gold standard and revalued the lira at 90 to the British pound in December 1927 for reasons of national prestige, and over the objections of his own finance minister.
Fascism was not the first choice of most businessmen, but most of them preferred it to the alternatives that seemed likely in the special conditions of 1922 and 1933—socialism or a dysfunctional market system. So they mostly acquiesced in the formation of a fascist regime and accommodated to its requirements of removing Jews from management and accepting onerous economic controls. In time, most German and Italian businessmen adapted well to working with fascist regimes, at least those gratified by the fruits of rearmament and labor discipline and the considerable role given to them in economic management. Mussolini’s famous corporatist economic organization, in particular, was run in practice by leading businessmen.
Peter Hayes puts it succinctly: the Nazi regime and business had “converging but not identical interests.” Areas of agreement included disciplining workers, lucrative armaments contracts, and job-creation stimuli. Important areas of conflict involved government economic controls, limits on trade, and the high cost of autarky—the economic self-sufficiency by which the Nazis hoped to overcome the shortages that had lost Germany World War I. Autarky required costly substitutes—Ersatz— for such previously imported products as oil and rubber.
Economic controls damaged smaller companies and those not involved in rearmament. Limits on trade created problems for companies that had formerly derived important profits from exports. The great chemical combine I. G. Farben is an excellent example: before 1933, Farben had prospered in international trade. After 1933, the company’s directors adapted to the regime’s autarky and learned to prosper mightily as the suppliers of German rearmament.
The best example of the expense of import substitution was the Hermann Goering Werke, set up to make steel from the inferior ores and brown coal of Silesia. The steel manufacturers were forced to help finance this operation, to which they raised vigorous objections.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
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In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.
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Joan Didion (Collected Essays: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry)
“
We have trained ourselves to be fearful and anxious when presented with problems. If we choose, we can retrain ourselves to be calm and to allow God to express God’s self in us once again. As I discussed in chapter one, problems begin, unequivocally, in our minds. We may have to remind ourselves that our mind is where the problem exists, nowhere else. Thus the “illusion” which I mentioned earlier. Correct the error, and the illusion disappears. Our conditioning has led us to the error of thinking of ourselves in terms of finite beings. James Carse, in his book Finite and Infinite Games, describes a world of finite games in which winners and losers, rules, boundaries, and time are all extremely important. In the world of finite games, titles, acquisitions, and prestige are of paramount significance. Planning, strategy, and secrecy are all crucial. To become a master player in the world of finite games you have an audience who knows the rules and who will grant you a reputation. Being identified with losers in the finite game is frightening and dangerous. The finite game values bodies, things, and reputations. The ultimate loss is death. In his book, Carse explains that the final result of the finite game is self-annihilation because the machines that we invent to assist us in this finite game of winners and losers will destroy those who rely upon them. Technology, marketing, productivity are all terms to encourage players to buy more machines and one’s worth is dependent on how many machines players have and how well they operate them. There is also the infinite game, which you can begin to play if you so choose. In this game there are no boundaries; the forces are infinite that allow the flowers to grow and those forces cannot be tamed or controlled. The purpose of the infinite game is to get more people to play, to laugh, love, dance and sing. Life itself is infinitely non-understandable. These forces were here before we were and will continue beyond the boundaries of death and time. While the finite player must debate and learn the language/rules to operate all the machines, the infinite player speaks from the heart and knows that answers are beyond words and explanations. This is not to imply that players of the infinite game cannot also play finite games, it’s just that they don’t know how to take the finite games seriously. This is a choice.
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Wayne W. Dyer (There's a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem)
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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.
”
”
Wikipedia Contributors
“
Pakistan need not, to be new, or its institutions should stay under the Constitution, Pakistan stays new Pakistan until our collective and mutual thinking, as long as, becomes capable to match with the world's decent societies and communities, adopting within its religious, cultural and social values, and welfare's boundaries; then the change can be possible. The slogan of a new Pakistan can be just a slogan; however, our collective status, shape, and thought will stay unchanged, collapsing as the earthquake, and Pakistani people will remain the victim of it; indeed, no one else. As a fact, Pakistan's prestige and also beauty situates and depends, upon its stronghold, independent, prosperous, self-sufficient, stable, and compatible with all its institutions. Long live, Pakistan. (Pakistan Zinda-o-Paindabad.)
”
”
Ehsan Sehgal
“
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.
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”
Thomas J. Stanley (Stop Acting Rich: ...And Start Living Like A Real Millionaire)