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Though civil discourse may be especially challenging to facilitate during fractured times, the process itself has stood the test of time for centuries.
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Milan Kordestani (I'm Just Saying: A Guide to Maintaining Civil Discourse in an Increasingly Divided World)
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We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.
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Bill Hicks
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The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
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Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
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Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma's essential insult. And, by facilitating reconnection to ordinary life, the public testimony helps survivors restore basic trust in a just world and overcome feelings of isolation. But the talking cure is predicated on the existence of a community willing to bear witness. 'Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships,' write Judith Herman. 'It cannot occur in isolation.
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Lawrence N. Powell (Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana)
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The detection of a person as safe or dangerous triggers neurobiologically determined pro-social or defensive behaviors.
Even though we may not always be aware of danger on a cognitive level, on a neurophysiological level, our body has already started a sequence of neural processes that would facilitate adaptive defense behaviors such as fight, flight or freeze.
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Stephen W. Porges (The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation)
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Investors are facilitators of social progress.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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This is modern liberalism in action: an unregulated virtue-exchange in which representatives of one class of humanity ritually forgive the sins of another class, all of it convened and facilitated by a vast army of well-graduated American professionals, their reassuring expertise propped up by bogus social science, while the unfortunate objects of their high and noble compassion sink slowly back into a preindustrial state.
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Thomas Frank (Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People)
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The next industrial revolution is toward decentralized, autonomous, and resilient systems where individuals and communities control their own destinies. This requires a transformation of our economic model from privatized control to co-operative models of ownership, which the social technologies of the Internet can facilitate.
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Russell Brand (Revolution)
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وجد العلماء (1) أن قراءة الروايات الأدبية، لها الكثير من الفوائد النفسية!
فالقصص والروايات من أقدم أساليب التواصل بين البشر، وأمخاخنا مجهزة بحيث تنتبه للحكايات أكثر من انتباهها لأي حديث آخر.. والاندماج في قراءة القصص، يجعل كل أجزاء المخ تقريبا تعمل.
وقراءة الروايات -يقول العلماء- وسيلة ممتازة لاكتساب مهارات اجتماعية وخبرات حياتية مختلفة، فمثلا :
>> في القصص يري القارئ تعدد وجهات النظر المختلفة وكيف أن كل شخصية تفكر بشكل مختلف.. وهو ما ينمي عند القارئ القدرة علي فهم دوافع الناس.
>> حين تواجه المرء مشكلة في حياته، قد يلجأ لحل قرأ عنه في قصة ما، علي اعتبار أن القصص التي قرأها أصبحت جزءا من خبراته الشخصية وتجاربه في الحياة.. فلا تكون هذه المشكلة جديدة عليه يواجهها لأول مرة، بل يشعر أنها حدثت من قبل وعنده فكرة عن كيفية التعامل معها.
- عند تصوير مخ شخص يقرأ بالرنين المغناطيسي، وجدوا أنه يشعر به بطل القصة التي يقرأها، بفعل التقمص العاطفي. فحين تقرأ قصة، تندمج عاطفيا مع أبطالها فتفتح بابا غير محدود للتجارب الإنسانية المتنوعة.
"أهوي القراءة لأن عندي حياة واحدة، وحياة واحدة لا تكفيني"
عباس محمود العقاد
- قراءة روايات الشعوب الأخري يوسع مدارك المرء فيتعرف علي الثقافات المختلفة وحياة أهلها وطريقة تفكيرهم وأولوياتهم.. يتقرب من أناس لم يكن ليقابل مثلهم في حياته.. ويلمس المشترك الإنساني بوضوح حين يندمج مع شخصيات القصة المختلفين عنه.
قراءة الروايات والدخول في عالم الأدب لون مهم من ألوان الثقافة بلا شك.. ويفتح الباب للتعرف علي مجالات أخري والانفتاح علي حضارات العالم.
لذلك قال عالم النفس د. يحيى الرخاوي يوما، إنه يتعلم من أدب نجيب محفوظ، أكثر مما يتعلم من كتب علم النفس!
__د. شريف عرفة، كيف تصبح إنسانا؟ (ما بعد التنمية الذاتية)
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(1) Whalen, L. (2010). The Neuroscience of Teaching Narratives: Facilitating Social and Emotional Development. BRAN. Broad Research in Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience, I(2), pp-143.
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Sherif Arafa (كيف تصبح إنساناً؟ .. ما بعد التنمية الذاتية)
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Trust is a seed that grows with attention and space. The facilitator can be a gardener, or the sun, the water.
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Adrienne Brown
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Nature appears to act directly upon our autonomic systems, calming us, but it also works indirectly, through facilitating social contact and through encouraging exercise and physical movement. (p,166)
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Florence Williams (The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative)
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We deem it opportune to remind our children of their duty to take an active part in public life and to contribute toward the attainment of the common good of the entire human family as well as to that of their own political community. They should endeavor, therefore, in the light of their Christian faith and led by love, to insure that the various institutions—whether economic, social, cultural or political in purpose—should be such as not to create obstacles, but rather to facilitate or render less arduous man’s perfecting of himself in both the natural order and the supernatural.... Every believer in this world of ours must be a spark of light, a center of love, a vivifying leaven amidst his fellow men. And he will be this all the more perfectly, the more closely he lives in communion with God in the intimacy of his own soul
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Pope John XXIII (Pacem in Terris: On Establishing Universal Peace)
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When you post your vacation plans on social media and burglars pay a visit, it was your decision to share that helped facilitate their criminal activity.
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Marc Goodman (Future Crimes)
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teachers are not tellers of information who "give it" to students but are coaches and facilitators who arrange conditions (personal, social, and cognitive) so that students can "get it" for themselves.
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Ruth Schoenback
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But Carol Gill says that it is differential treatment—disability discrimination—to try to prevent most suicides while facilitating the suicides of ill and disabled people. The social science literature suggests that the public in general, and physicians in particular, tend to underestimate the quality of life of disabled people, compared with our own assessments of our lives. The case for assisted suicide rests on stereotypes that our lives are inherently so bad that it is entirely rational if we want to die.
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Alice Wong (Disability Visibility : First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century)
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The underlying power in social media is not the technology. It’s the power that comes from human beings connecting from all around the globe. If the gospel message (or any message, for that matter) is transmitted along relational lines, churches can confidently head in the direction of social because of the volume of relationships it can facilitate.
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Justin Wise (The Social Church: A Theology of Digital Communication)
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This is what one of the founding fathers of sociology, Emile Durkheim, meant when he wrote in 1895 that the establishment of a sense of community is facilitated by a class of actors who carry a stigma and sense of stigmatization and are termed 'deviant.' Unity is provided to any collectivity by uniting against those who are seen as a common threat to the social order and morality of a group. Consequently, the stigma and the stigmatization of some persons demarcates a boundary that reinforces the conduct of conformists. Therefore, a collective sense of morality is achieved by the creation of stigma and stigmatization and deviance.
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Gerhard Falk (Stigma: How We Treat Outsiders)
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I am trying to imagine under what novel features despotism may appear in the world. In the first place, I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest….
Over this kind of men stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble parental authority if, fatherlike, it tried to prepare charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood. It likes to see the citizens enjoy themselves, provided that they think of nothing but enjoyment. It gladly works for their happiness but wants to be sole agent and judge of it. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasure, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living?
Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties. Equality has prepared men for all this, predisposing them to endure it and often even regard it as beneficial.
Having thus taken each citizen in turn in its powerful grasp and shaped him to its will, government then extends its embrace to include the whole of society. It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.
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Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America)
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The concept of reconciliation is not irretrievable, but I am convinced that before we theologians can interpret the depths of the divine action of reconciliation we must first articulate the profound deformities of Christian intimacy and identity in modernity. Until we do, all theological discussions of reconciliation will be exactly what they tend to be: (a) ideological tools for facilitating negotiations of power; or (b) socially exhausted idealist claims masquerading as serious theological accounts. In truth, it is not at all clear that most Christians are ready to imagine reconciliation.
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Willie James Jennings (The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race)
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From Hobbes’s theory of the sovereign ruling by authority to Max Weber 250 years later, defining the state in terms of a monopoly of force is a slow loss of civil sensitivity. The term “democracy” is strictly a constitutional belief about how authority is generated, but today it most commonly commends rather than names a government that serves some particular interest, such as that of “the people.” The drift of these and other confusions of our political talk has always been to transform the subtle and balanced features attributed to the state in the past into an enterprise that facilitates our political preferences. It would be hard to deny that political sophistication has given way to a kind of partisan brutishness, some elements of which Oakeshott thought had already been recognized by Tocqueville in 1848: “… the passions of man, from being political, have now become social.” And this means that men care now far more about “the satisfaction of substantive wants” and the power of government needed to supply them than about freedom and constitutionality.
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Kenneth Minogue
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the socially-marginalized must teach the other socially-marginalized; because we are able to facilitate, hold space, and support one another from some of our shared experiences.
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Lee Harrington (Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries)
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That social organism is embryonic. That firmly to believe is to impede development. That only temporarily to accept is to facilitate.
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Charles Fort (The Book of the Damned)
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Though a person might not realize it, groups have a very powerful and dramatic effect on human behavior. Everyone acts differently when they are around people versus than when they are alone. SOCIAL FACILITATION The most basic theory regarding social psychology is that when a person is alone, he or she is more relaxed and not concerned about the appearance of their behavior.
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Paul Kleinman (Psych 101: Psychology Facts, Basics, Statistics, Tests, and More! (Adams 101 Series))
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There are two kinds of people in the world: those who attempt to dichotomise a diverse human population to facilitate their limited understanding of complex social dynamics, and those who don't.
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Graham Stull
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Many forces conspire to make for uniformity in modern communities—schools, newspapers, cinema, radio, drill, etc. Density of population has the same effect. The position of momentary equilibrium between the sentiment of independence and the love of power tends, therefore, under modern conditions, to shift further and further in the direction of power, thus facilitating the creation and success of totalitarian States.
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Bertrand Russell (Power: A New Social Analysis (Routledge Classics))
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Pure capitalism is great at rewarding the creative utilization of capital by one group of people in service to another according to present gross utility and refined use cases. But pure capitalism does not address the intentional placement of boundaries or the intentional facilitation of productive interactions accounting for net utility and holistic use cases. This is why pure capitalism at times is threatened by or presents threats to a variety of social and ecological ecosystems. And this is why permaculture economics is superior to pure capitalism, as it contains all of the benefits of capitalism plus some benefits that capitalism does not provide .
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Principles of a Permaculture Economy)
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Girls in virtual networks are subjected to hundreds of times more social comparison than girls had experienced for all of human evolution. They are exposed to more cruelty and bullying because social media platforms incentivize and facilitate relational aggression. Their openness and willingness to share emotions with other girls espouses them to depression and other disorders. The twisted incentive structures of social media reward the most extreme presentations of symptoms.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness)
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Science has developed a certain technique, which is essentially a technique of discovery, that is to say, of change. The scientific frame of mind is, broadly speaking, that which facilitates discovery, not that which causes a man to have an unwavering belief in the present tenets of science. A well-educated citizen is likely to be incapable of discovery, since he will respect his elders and betters, reverence the great men of the past generation, and look with horror upon all subversive doctrines.
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Bertrand Russell (Education and the Social Order)
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Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design. They were not primarily marketers or salesmen or financial types; when such folks took over companies, it was often to the detriment of sustained innovation. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off,” Jobs said. Larry Page felt the same: “The best leaders are those with the deepest understanding of the engineering and product design.”34 Another lesson of the digital age is as old as Aristotle: “Man is a social animal.” What else could explain CB and ham radios or their successors, such as WhatsApp and Twitter? Almost every digital tool, whether designed for it or not, was commandeered by humans for a social purpose: to create communities, facilitate communication, collaborate on projects, and enable social networking. Even the personal computer, which was originally embraced as a tool for individual creativity, inevitably led to the rise of modems, online services, and eventually Facebook, Flickr, and Foursquare. Machines, by contrast, are not social animals. They don’t join Facebook of their own volition nor seek companionship for its own sake. When Alan Turing asserted that machines would someday behave like humans, his critics countered that they would never be able to show affection or crave intimacy. To indulge Turing, perhaps we could program a machine to feign affection and pretend to seek intimacy, just as humans sometimes do. But Turing, more than almost anyone, would probably know the difference. According to the second part of Aristotle’s quote, the nonsocial nature of computers suggests that they are “either a beast or a god.” Actually, they are neither. Despite all of the proclamations of artificial intelligence engineers and Internet sociologists, digital tools have no personalities, intentions, or desires. They are what we make of them.
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Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
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Longino argues that in order to be able to distinguish rationality from irrationality we should take the social group as our basic unit. Science is rational to the extent that it chooses theories from a diverse pool of options reflecting different points of view, and makes its choice via a critical dialogue that reaches consensus without coercion. Diversity in the ideas in the pool is facilitated by diversity in the backgrounds of those participating in the discussion. Epistemology becomes a field that tries to distinguish good community-level procedures from bad ones.
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Peter Godfrey-Smith (Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series))
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All it takes is common sense to understand that the Rajapaksa administration has vandalised every layer of the country’s resources to get rid of political obstacles while minimising the space available to facilitate the sharing of authentic political dissent. At the same time the opposition appears to be caged.
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Nilantha Ilangamuwa
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Over the course of minutes to hours, hormonal effects are predominantly contingent and facilitative. Hormones don’t determine, command, cause, or invent behaviors. Instead they make us more sensitive to the social triggers of emotionally laden behaviors and exaggerate our preexisting tendencies in those domains.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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This extreme treatment was among the proliferating regimens developed in response to the stunning increase in nervous disorders diagnosed around the turn of the century. Commentators and clinicians cited a number of factors related to the stresses of modern civilization: the increased speed of communication facilitated by the telegraph and railroad; the “unmelodious” clamor of city life replacing the “rhythmical” sounds of nature; and the rise of the tabloid press that exploded “local horrors” into national news. These nervous diseases became an epidemic among “the ultracompetitive businessman and the socially active woman.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism)
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Unlike acts of war or catastrophic storms, pandemic-causing pathogens don’t build trust and facilitate cooperative defenses. On the contrary, due to the peculiar psychic experience of new pathogens, they’re more likely to breed suspicion and mistrust among us, destroying social bonds as surely as they destroy bodies.
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Sonia Shah (Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond)
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Benefit fraud – costing an annual £1.2 billion, or 0.7 per cent of social security spending – is treated as a despicable crime, while tax avoidance – worth an estimated £25 billion a year – is even facilitated by the state, with accountancy firms that promote such tax avoidance seconded to government to draw up tax laws.
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Owen Jones (The Establishment: And how they get away with it)
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Another example of reactive heritability centers on the trait of extraversion, which is highly correlated with both physical strength and physical attractiveness (Lukaszewski & Roney, 2011; see also Lukaszewski et al., 2015). Strength and attractiveness apparently facilitate the success of extraverted social strategies, which involve initiating multiple social relationships, broadcasting desired qualities to others, ascending the status hierarchy, and pursuing multiple sex partners. These examples illustrate that personality can be condition dependent—an approach that is gaining increasing attention in the field (Lewis, 2015; Lewis et al., 2015).
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David M. Buss (Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind)
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Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information. Our strong ties tend to travel in the same social circles and know about the same opportunities as we do. Weak ties are more likely to open up access to a different network, facilitating the discovery of original leads.
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Adam M. Grant (Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success)
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The existing criminal justice model poses two main questions in the face of social harm: Who did it? How can we punish them? (And increasingly, how can we make money from it?). Creating safe and healthy communities requires a different set of questions: Who was harmed? How can we facilitate healing? How can we prevent such harm in the future? --S. Lamble
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Eric A. Stanley (Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex)
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Anybody with martial training and engineering skills can be a superhero, but that doesn’t make them a hero. Superhero culture is dangerous, for it facilitates a paradigm of secret identity. And consistent practice of such secrecy eventually ruins an individual's accountability. You don't see soldiers hiding their identity do you, no matter how much they've got to lose!
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Abhijit Naskar (Karadeniz Chronicle: The Novel)
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If, in the name of Reason, you summon a man to alter his fundamental purposes—to pursue, say, the general happiness rather than his own power—you will fail, and you will deserve to fail, since Reason alone cannot determine the ends of life. And you will fail equally if you attack deep-seated prejudices while your argument is still open to question, or is so difficult that only men of science can see its force. But if you can prove, by evidence which is convincing to every sane man who takes the trouble to examine it, that you possess a means of facilitating the satisfaction of existing desires, you may hope, with a certain degree of confidence, that men will ultimately believe what you say. This, of course, involves the proviso that the existing desires which you can satisfy are those of men who have power or are capable of acquiring it.
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Bertrand Russell (Power: A New Social Analysis (Routledge Classics))
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Social conservatives from the right wing of the Republican party, who do not like globalization or closer integration with the world because it brings too many foreigners and foreign cultural mores into America, might align themselves with unions from the left wing of the Democratic Party, who don't like globalization for the way it facilitates the outsourcing and offshoring of jobs. They might be called the Wall Party...
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Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
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Oxytocin and vasopressin facilitate mother-infant bond formation and monogamous pair-bonding, decrease anxiety and stress, enhance trust and social affiliation, and make people more cooperative and generous. But this comes with a huge caveat—these hormones increase prosociality only toward an Us. When dealing with Thems, they make us more ethnocentric and xenophobic. Oxytocin is not a universal luv hormone. It’s a parochial one.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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Through a process of social conditioning, however, White children are increasingly taught to associate only positive qualities with their own race and negative ones with other racial groups. The process of our cultural conditioning occurs through significant others (Sue, 2003), our educational curriculum (Minow, Shweder, & Markus, 2008), the mass media (Cortes, 2008), and institutions in society (APA Presidential Task Force, 2012; J. M. Jones, 1997).
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Derald Wing Sue (Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race)
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Either way, I suspect that it’s less effective to aim at the Gini index as a deeply buried root cause of many social ills than to zero in on solutions to each problem: investment in research and infrastructure to escape economic stagnation, regulation of the finance sector to reduce instability, broader access to education and job training to facilitate economic mobility, electoral transparency and finance reform to eliminate illicit influence, and so on.
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Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
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We can be inspired by leaders we’ve never met and devoted to organizations with no fixed membership, such as nations, churches, corporations, and schools. Jonathan Haidt has argued that this capacity for devotion to leaders, organizations, and more abstract ideals might have evolved to facilitate cooperation in large groups, just as romantic love evolved to facilitate cooperative parenting. This capacity may depend on our ability to experience awe—to be moved by, and devoted to, things larger than ourselves and our familiar social circles. WATCHFUL
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Joshua Greene (Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them)
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Opioid circuits and dopamine pathways are important components of what has been called the limbic system, or the emotional brain. The circuits of the limbic system process emotions like love, joy, pleasure, pain, anger and fear. For all their complexities, emotions exist for a very basic purpose: to initiate and maintain activities necessary for survival. In a nutshell, they modulate two drives that are absolutely essential to animal life, including human life: attachment and aversion. We always want to move toward something that is positive, inviting and nurturing, and to repel or withdraw from something threatening, distasteful or toxic. These attachment and aversion emotions are evoked by both physical and psychological stimuli, and when properly developed, our emotional brain is an unerring, reliable guide to life. It facilitates self-protection and also makes possible love, compassion and healthy social interaction. When impaired or confused, as it often is in the complex and stressed circumstances prevailing in our “civilized” society, the emotional brain leads us to nothing but trouble. Addiction is one of its chief dysfunctions.
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Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
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The internet’s prime purpose is to facilitate uniformity of thought (always a good starting point for the bluffer when discussing social media). The rules for what you’re allowed to think online change all the time, but they’re usually something like this: 1. Julian Assange is the victim of a CIA and media conspiracy aimed at causing his eventual death. 2. Rupert Murdoch is Satan. 3. You are compelled to say RIP about the death of strangers. 4. You are not allowed to offend anyone, ever. 5. Anything someone else says can be taken as offensive. 6. Being offensive is illegal. 7. Cats do the cutest things.
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Susie Boniface (Bluffer's Guide to Social Media (Bluffer's Guides))
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To be ridiculously sweeping: baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lowercase gods of our private devising. We are concerned with leading less a good life than the good life. In contrast to our predecessors, we seldom ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask ourselves if we are happy. We shun self-sacrifice and duty as the soft spots of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and we’re not especially bothered by what happens once we’re dead. As we age—oh, so reluctantly!—we are apt to look back on our pasts and question not did I serve family, God and country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat? We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun.
If that package sounds like one big moral step backward, the Be Here Now mentality that has converted from sixties catchphrase to entrenched gestalt has its upsides. There has to be some value in living for today, since at any given time today is all you’ve got. We justly cherish characters capable of living “in the moment.”…We admire go-getters determined to pack their lives with as much various experience as time and money provide, who never stop learning, engaging, and savoring what every day offers—in contrast to the dour killjoys who are bitter and begrudging in the ceaseless fulfillment of obligation. For the role of humble server, helpmate, and facilitator no longer to constitute the sole model of womanhood surely represents progress for which I am personally grateful. Furthermore, prosperity may naturally lead any well-off citizenry to the final frontier: the self, whose borders are as narrow or infinite as we make them.
Yet the biggest social casualty of Be Here Now is children, who have converted from requirement to option, like heated seats for your car. In deciding what in times past never used to be a choice, we don’t consider the importance of raising another generation of our own people, however we might choose to define them. The question is whether kids will make us happy.
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Lionel Shriver
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Other groups of color need to acknowledge the courage of Black America, and our indebtedness to them for what we have learned from their struggles. Although all groups can recount their own unique struggles for equal rights, African Americans have always been in the forefront in advocating for social justice. Many other groups of color (and other marginalized groups—women and LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer] individuals) have learned much from the Black movement, including the importance of group identity, and have profited from the work, struggle, and sacrifice of African American brothers and sisters.
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Derald Wing Sue (Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race)
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The Bolsheviks did not intend to sit back and wait for these revolutions to unfold. As the revolutionary vanguard, they hoped to facilitate the coming turmoil through propaganda, subterfuge, and even warfare.61 In the spring of 1919 they had set up the Communist International, popularly known as the Comintern, a body officially dedicated to the overthrow of capitalist regimes according to a Leninist blueprint, as outlined in books such as What Is to Be Done? (Lenin’s furious denunciation of social democracy and left-wing pluralism, published in 1902).62 In practice, as Richard Pipes has written, the Comintern constituted a “declaration of war on all the existing governments.”63
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Anne Applebaum (Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956)
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Neoliberalism doesn’t want to do away with politics – neoliberalism wants to put politics at the service of the market. Neoliberals don’t think that the economy should be left in peace, but rather they are for the economy being guided, supported and protected through the spreading of social norms that facilitate competition and rational behaviour. Neoliberal economic theory isn’t built on keeping the hands of politics off the market, it’s built on keeping the hands of politics busy with satisfying the needs of the market. It’s not true that neoliberalism doesn’t want to pursue monetary, fiscal, family or criminal policies. It is rather that monetary, fiscal, family and criminal policies should all be used to procure what the market needs.
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Katrine Kielos (Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?: A Story of Women and Economics)
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There's a larger social justice reason for sex educators' fighting against the myth of sex as a drive for more than a hundred years. A far worse consequence is that when sex is conceptualized as a need, it creates an environment that fosters men's sense of sexual entitlement. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book Half the Sky illustrates how the assumption that boys require outlets to "relieve their sexual frustrations" facilitates the sexual enslavement of impoverished girls. If you think of sex as a drive, like hunger or thirst, that has to be fed for survival, if you think that men in particular- with their 75 percent spontaneous desire- need to relieve their pent-up sexual energy, then you can invent justifications for any strategy a man might use to relieve himself.
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Emily Nagoski (Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life)
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Until today, Marcos has denied any connection to “trolls,”22 despite the data that we at Rappler exposed in a three-part Marcos propaganda series in 2019. Not so subtly, the messaging on his social media accounts began with changing the past. To begin with, he repeatedly lied about his education at Oxford University and Wharton. After being caught in the lie by a Rappler exclusive,23 his Senate office quietly changed his résumé on the Senate website, but he doubled down on the lie,24 a lesson many people, including Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg, have learned is easily facilitated by social media. His disinformation network also hijacked popular pages and news groups with copied-and-pasted comments that slowly chipped away at the legacy of the Aquino family, long seen as his family’s nemesis—all
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Maria Ressa (How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future)
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The cannabinoid receptor system matures most rapidly, not during childhood, not during adulthood, but during adolescence. So it wouldn’t be surprising if cannabinoid activity is meant to be functional during adolescence, more functional than at any other period of the lifespan. As far as evolution is concerned, adolescents might well benefit from following their own grandiose thoughts, goals, and plans. By doing so, and by ignoring the weight of evidence—or sheer inertia—piled up against them, they would greatly amplify their tendency to explore, to try things, to imbue their plans with more confidence than they deserve. The evolutionary goals of adolescents are to become independent, to make new connections, and to find new territory, new social systems, and most of all new mates. The distortions of adolescent thinking might be precisely poised to facilitate those goals.
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Marc Lewis (Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs)
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The UK office for National Statistics has identified the things that matter most for happiness as "health, relationships, work, and the environment" - a list that tallies closely with our basic goods. Given that our lives have not noticeably improved in these respects since 1974 it is hardly surprising that we do not feel any happier.
Are we then suggesting a return to living standards of 1974? Not necessarily, for the luxuries acquired since then may, even if they have added nothing to our real well-being, be painful to forgo. This is an instance of the general truth that damaging social changes cannot always be rectified simply by being reversed, any more than a man flattened by a steamroller can be restored to life by being run over backwards. What we are saying is that the long-term goal of economic policy should henceforth not be growth, but the restructuring of our collective existence so as to facilitate the good life.
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Robert Skidelsky (How much is enough?: The love of money and the case for the good life)
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...moderate social deviance or class non-conformism I have imputed to the first generation of pedestrians. Improved roads, after all, were one of the principal means by which the country was building a national communications network that would underpin the huge commercial and industrial expansion of the nineteenth century; changing the landscape of the country to produce the arterial interconnection of the modern state in place of a geography of more or less self-enclosed local communities; consolidating the administrative structures of the state and facilitating political hegemony over a rapidly growing and potentially unstable population; and promulgating a 'national' culture in the face of regional diversity and independence. With the main roads such powerful instruments of change, the walker's decision to exploit his freedom to resist the imperative of destination and explore instead by lanes, by-roads and fieldpaths, could well be interpreted as an act of denial, flight or dissent vis-a-vis the forces that were ineradicably transforming British society.
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Robin Jarvis (Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel)
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Agnes, who had once thought days existed merely for identification purposes, temporal name-tags to facilitate social confluence, came to know each one as a prisoner does her jailers. Of course Monday was the worst, a jack-booted Nazi of a day; people did suicidal things on Mondays, like start diets and watch documentaries. Fear of Monday also tended to ruin Sunday, an invasion which Agnes resented deeply. Moreover, it made her suspicious of Tuesday; a day whose unrelenting tedium was deceptively camouflaged by the mere fact of its not being Monday. Wednesday, on the other hand, was touch and go, delicately balanced between the memory of the last weekend and the thought of the weekend to come. Wednesday was a plateau and dangerous things could happen on plateaux. For example, one could forget one was in prison at all. Thursday was Agnes’s favourite, a day dedicated to pure anticipation. By then she was on the home stretch, sprinting in glorious slow-motion towards the distant flutter of Friday’s finishing line; which, however, when reached, often felt to her like nothing but a memento mori of the next incarceration.
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Rachel Cusk (Saving Agnes)
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Dii Nvwati (Cherokee). Translation: Skunk medicine. The skunk asks us to defend ourselves effectively, without causing further conflict. Self-protection but do no harm. Gangsterish peace-making. That is the kind of masculinity that I try to embody. With my leadership, with my poise, with my privileges. As my body continues on a journey of thickening, muscle hardening, limbs lengthening, Ayurvedic drying, shorter synapse pathways, fuzzier intuition, and choppier verbal articulation all facilitated by weekly testosterone injections these are poignant lessons to forward. The objective is for men and masculine people to not yield our power to others… Women and femme people don’t need our paternalistic sickle to swath as we ‘tap out.’ We must figure out power without domination. The skunk asks us to use our powers effectively, without wiping ourselves out. Without recapitulating top down, give-less-to-get-more social structures. Just as the skunk does not seek to be the bear, let us not attempt to trade places with the oppressor. Let us navigate a road of paradigm shifting that seeks to salve both current social and economic injuries, but also prepare a sustainable method of being for seven generations to come.
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Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
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More than anything, we have lost the cultural customs and traditions that bring extended families together, linking adults and children in caring relationships, that give the adult friends of parents a place in their children's lives. It is the role of culture to cultivate connections between the dependent and the dependable and to prevent attachment voids from occurring. Among the many reasons that culture is failing us, two bear mentioning. The first is the jarringly rapid rate of change in twentieth-century industrial societies. It requires time to develop customs and traditions that serve attachment needs, hundreds of years to create a working culture that serves a particular social and geographical environment. Our society has been changing much too rapidly for culture to evolve accordingly.
There is now more change in a decade than previously in a century. When circumstances change more quickly than our culture can adapt to, customs and traditions disintegrate. It is not surprising that today's culture is failing its traditional function of supporting adult-child attachments. Part of the rapid change has been the electronic transmission of culture, allowing commercially blended and packaged culture to be broadcast into our homes and into the very minds of our children. Instant culture has replaced what used to be passed down through custom and tradition and from one generation to another.
“Almost every day I find myself fighting the bubble-gum culture my children are exposed to,” said a frustrated father interviewed for this book. Not only is the content often alien to the culture of the parents but the process of transmission has taken grandparents out of the loop and made them seem sadly out of touch. Games, too, have become electronic. They have always been an instrument of culture to connect people to people, especially children to adults. Now games have become a solitary activity, watched in parallel on television sports-casts or engaged in in isolation on the computer.
The most significant change in recent times has been the technology of communication — first the phone and then the Internet through e-mail and instant messaging. We are enamored of communication technology without being aware that one of its primary functions is to facilitate attachments. We have unwittingly put it into the hands of children who, of course, are using it to connect with their peers. Because of their strong attachment needs, the contact is highly addictive, often becoming a major preoccupation. Our culture has not been able to evolve the customs and traditions to contain this development, and so again we are all left to our own devices.
This wonderful new technology would be a powerfully positive instrument if used to facilitate child-adult connections — as it does, for example, when it enables easy communication between students living away from home, and their parents. Left unchecked, it promotes peer orientation.
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Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
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As we’ll explain in the coming chapters, these everyday parenting challenges result from a lack of integration within your child’s brain. The reason her brain isn’t always capable of integration is simple: it hasn’t had time to develop. In fact, it’s got a long way to go, since a person’s brain isn’t considered fully developed until she reaches her mid-twenties. So that’s the bad news: you have to wait for your child’s brain to develop. That’s right. No matter how brilliant you think your preschooler is, she does not have the brain of a ten-year-old, and won’t for several years. The rate of brain maturation is largely influenced by the genes we inherit. But the degree of integration may be exactly what we can influence in our day-to-day parenting. The good news is that by using everyday moments, you can influence how well your child’s brain grows toward integration. First, you can develop the diverse elements of your child’s brain by offering opportunities to exercise them. Second, you can facilitate integration so that the separate parts become better connected and work together in powerful ways. This isn’t making your children grow up more quickly—it’s simply helping them develop the many parts of themselves and integrate them. We’re also not talking about wearing yourself (and your kids) out by frantically trying to fill every experience with significance and meaning. We’re talking about simply being present with your children so you can help them become better integrated. As a result, they will thrive emotionally, intellectually, and socially. An integrated brain results in improved decision making, better control of body and emotions, fuller self-understanding, stronger relationships, and success in school. And it all begins with the experiences parents and other caregivers provide, which lay the groundwork for integration and mental health.
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Daniel J. Siegel (The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind)
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Within the West, the big social inventions have always been happy to define the individual. At various times and to various degrees, social programming has had a ready answer to the question of what the good life meant: being a good Christian, a good citizen, rich, an A student, or a good manager or employee. Imagine defining yourself instead as someone who defines institutions rather than being defined by them. Then imagine what sort of social invention you would have to engage in to create something akin to a school, a church, a government, or a business that would facilitate the person you aspire to be. No Lutheran will ever be as fully expressed as Martin Luther. No Mormon will ever realize her potential the way that Joseph Smith did. No Muslim will ever be more righteous than Mohammed. No Christian will ever be more perfect than Christ, no Jew more law abiding than Moses. Millions – even billions – of people do honor these amazing men by following their example, trying to emulate them. Yet what is interesting is that if a person were really intent on following their example they would refuse to be constrained by their example. That is, if you really want to imitate Joseph Smith or Mohammed or Martin Luther you would never become a Mormon or Muslim or Lutheran. You would, instead, start your own religion in which you subordinate tradition to your own convictions and revelations. You would trust in yourself enough to create rather than imitate. If that sounds irreligious to you, you are wrong. No follower of these men is more religious than they were. (And of course at the time, most people thought of these men as heretics, not true prophets.) Progress is the product of invention. Specifically, progress depends on social invention that subordinates the past to the future, that changes what has been created by past generations in order to realize what is possible for future generations.
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Ron Davison (The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization)
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An implicit assumption in many normative debates is that private solutions cannot be relied upon for complex problems. Can private governance facilitate cooperation in sophisticated transactions, in large groups, in heterogeneous populations, under conditions of anonymity, or across long distances? Or will problems such as free riding and prisoners’ dilemmas lead to market failure? All of these are empirical questions whose answers are usually assumed rather than investigated. Yet mechanisms of private governance are far more ubiquitous and far more powerful than commonly assumed. Mechanisms of private governance work in small and large groups, among friends and strangers, in ancient and modern societies, and for simple and extremely complex transactions. They often exist alongside, and in many cases in spite of, government legal efforts, and most of the time they are totally missed. The more that private governance solves problems behind the scenes, the more people overlook it and misattribute order to the state. Milton Friedman, for example, recognizes that private rule enforcement could work, but considers it rare: “I look over history, and outside of perhaps Iceland, where else can you find any historical examples of that kind of a system developing?” (Doherty and Friedman, 1995).3 After reading this book, I hope Friedman would answer instead that private order is all around us. Private governance is everywhere and responsible for creating order not just in basic markets but also in the world’s most sophisticated markets, including futures and advanced derivatives markets. If the success of private governance were limited to the examples in this book, the track record should be rated superb. Yet they are a fraction of what has worked and will work in the future. I hope this research inspires others to document some of the countless mechanisms that have made markets as robust as they are. Research in private governance not only
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Edward P. Stringham (Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life)
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This and Rothbard’s own life-long cultural conservatism notwithstanding, however, from its beginnings in the late 1960s and the founding of a libertarian party in 1971, the libertarian movement had great appeal to many of the counter-cultural left that had then grown up in the U.S. in opposition to the war in Vietnam. Did not the illegitimacy of the state and the non-aggression axiom imply that everyone was at liberty to choose his very own non-aggressive lifestyle, no matter what it was? Much of Rothbard’s later writings, with their increased emphasis on cultural matters, were designed to correct this development and to explain the error in the idea of a leftist multi-counter-cultural libertarianism, of libertarianism as a variant of libertinism. It was false—empirically as well as normatively—that libertarianism could or should be combined with egalitarian multiculturalism. Both were in fact sociologically incompatible, and libertarianism could and should be combined exclusively with traditional Western bourgeois culture; that is, the old-fashioned ideal of a family-based and hierarchically structured society of voluntarily acknowledged rank orders of social authority. Empirically, Rothbard did not tire to explain, the left-libertarians failed to recognize that the restoration of private-property rights and laissez-faire economics implied a sharp and drastic increase in social “discrimination.” Private property means the right to exclude. The modern social-democratic welfare state has increasingly stripped private-property owners of their right to exclude. In distinct contrast, a libertarian society where the right to exclude was fully restored to owners of private property would be profoundly unegalitarian. To be sure, private property also implies the owner’s right to include and to open and facilitate access to one’s property, and every private-property owner also faces an economic incentive of including (rather than excluding) so long as he expects this to increase the value of his property.
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Anonymous
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advance US global interests. This memo, from policy aide Brian Hook to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, explicitly reminds Tillerson to make sure to treat allies and adversaries differently when it comes to expressing human rights concerns.1 As Hook explains to Tillerson: In the case of US allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasizing good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights. It is not as though human rights practices will be improved if anti-American radicals take power in those countries. Moreover, this would be a severe blow to our vital interests. We saw what a disaster Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood turned out to be in power. After eight years of Obama, the US is right to bolster US allies rather than badger or abandon them. One useful guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently—and better—than adversaries. Otherwise, we end up with more adversaries, and fewer allies. The classic dilemma of balancing ideals and interests is with regard to America’s allies. In relation to our competitors, there is far less of a dilemma. We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically. Meanwhile, Hook criticizes the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter which he sees as an outlier amongst US presidents in the postwar era: President Carter upended Cold War policies by criticizing and even undermining governments, especially in cases such as Nicaragua and Iran. The results were unfortunate for American interests, as for the citizens of those countries. Carter’s badgering of American allies unintentionally strengthened anti-American radicals in both Iran and Nicaragua. As Jeanne Kirkpatrick wrote in 1979 criticizing Carter’s foreign policy, “Hurried efforts to force complex and unfamiliar political practices on societies lacking the requisite political culture, tradition, and social structures not only fail to produce the desired outcomes; if they are undertaken at a time when the traditional regime is under attack, they actually facilitate the job of the insurgents.
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Dan Kovalik (The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran)
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Institutions are “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior,” as Huntington put it, the most important function of which is to facilitate collective action. Without some set of clear and relatively stable rules, human beings would have to renegotiate their interactions at every turn. Such rules are often culturally determined and vary across different societies and eras, but the capacity to create and adhere to them is genetically hard-wired into the human brain. A natural tendency to conformism helps give institutions inertia and is what has allowed human societies to achieve levels of social cooperation unmatched by any other animal species.
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Anonymous
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By the late 1950s millions of Americans were enjoying the bounties of affluence and the consumer culture, the likes of which they had scarcely imagined before. In the process they were developing larger expectations about life and beginning to challenge things that had seemed set in stone only a few years earlier. Older cultural norms, however, still remained strong until the 1960s, when expectations ascended to new heights and helped to facilitate social unrest on a new and different scale.
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James T. Patterson (Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10))
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This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system. Mass incarceration - not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement - is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. The popular narrative that emphasizes the death of slavery and Jim Crow and celebrates the nation's 'triumph over race' with the election of Barack Obama, is dangerously misguided. The colorblind public consensus that prevails in American today - i.e., the widespread belief that race no longer matters - has blinded us to the realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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Note, however, that a community’s supply of social rewards is limited, so we’re often competing to show more loyalty than others—to engage in a “holier than thou” arms race. And this leads, predictably, to the kind of extreme displays and exaggerated features we find across the biological world. If the Hajj seems extravagant, remember the peacock’s tail or the towering redwoods. But note, crucially, that sacrifice isn’t a zero-sum game; there are big benefits that accrue to the entire community. All these sacrifices work to maintain high levels of commitment and trust among community members, which ultimately reduces the need to monitor everyone’s behavior.38 The net result is the ability to sustain cooperative groups at larger scales and over longer periods of time.39 Today, we facilitate trust between strangers using contracts, credit scores, and letters of reference. But before these institutions had been invented, weekly worship and other costly sacrifices were a vital social technology. In 1000 a.d., church attendance was a pretty good (though imperfect) way to gauge whether someone was trustworthy. You’d be understandably wary of your neighbors who didn’t come to church, for example, because they’re not “paying their dues” to the community. Society can’t trust you unless you put some skin in the game.
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Kevin Simler (The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)
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The Pertussis vaccine itself was awarded a big part in this ongoing drama when, in 1959, it was found to have a particularly powerful allergenic effect on all sorts of laboratory animals. Experiments to produce anaphylactic shock are facilitated by addition of pertussis vaccine to the solution: the mice (or rabbits, or hamsters, or whatever) die more rapidly, and in larger numbers. By the same token, addition of the vaccine to the sterile brain and spinal cord solution greatly enhances it's ability to generate an allergic encephalitis. For these reasons pertussis vaccine is the preferred "adjuvant" in experiments to produce allergic encephalomyelitis.
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Harris Coulter (Vaccination, Social Violence, and Criminality: The Medical Assault on the American Brain)
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Joseph Grinkorn is a founder of The Morris Group Companies who provides the help in social networking and robust applications, using his expertise to help facilitate some of the biggest deals on the private market.
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josephgrinkorn
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Electronic virtual communities represent flexible, lively, and practical adaptations to the real circumstances that confront persons seeking community ... They are part of a range of innovative solutions to the drive for sociality--a drive that can be frequently thwarted by the geographical and cultural realities of cities increasingly structured according to the needs of powerful economic interests rather than in ways that encourage and facilitate habitation and social interaction in the urban context. In this context, electronic virtual communities are complex and ingenious strategies for survival.
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Allucquère Rosanne Stone
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As a career college teacher, I want our coddling, authoritarian universities to end all involvement with or surveillance of students’ social lives and personal interactions, verbal or otherwise. If a real crime is committed, it should be reported to the police. Otherwise, college administrations should mind their own business and focus on facilitating and funding education in the classroom.
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Camille Paglia (Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism)
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Furthermore, we suggest a fractal self is capable of growth and a kind of metamorphosis. Daoists refer to a seasoned human cooperator and facilitator, working adroitly, with a natural ease in the smooth, orderly, adaptive spirit of wuwei, as a sage. Such an individual is typically embedded in a particular affinitive complex system. An affinitive system is virtually anything in nature or human endeavor that is avidly sought by an individual in pursuit of vocation or avocation-a business, social, educational, artistic, scientific, or governmental enterprise, and so forth. Such systems typically develop chaotic structures and behaviors; envisioned as geometrical forms, they often constitute complicated attractors; around the edges of their coherent existence they would tend to be fractally organized, transcending classic dimensionality (see introduction). The sage tends to develop into a leader or catalyst within his or her affinitive system as he or she progressively "evolves" over time into increasing levels of intimacy and coherence with the system.
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David Jones (The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation)
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Irrespective of whether the antisemitic manifestations were religious, political, social, racial, or some amalgam of them all, the same themes or tropes remain embedded in them. We know them well: Jews may be small in number, but they have the ability to compel far more powerful entities to do their bidding. That bidding invariably involves aiding Jews at the expense of non-Jews. Jews, over the course of millennia, irrespective of whether they lived in close proximity to one another or were separated by continents, have honed a cosmopolitan alliance that facilitates their evil deeds.
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Deborah E. Lipstadt (Antisemitism: Here and Now)
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a time when students would benefit developmentally from close relationships with teachers, the size and structure of middle schools often does not facilitate a sense of connectedness and may instead lead to greater feelings of alienation. In middle schools, students have multiple teachers and spend limited time each day with any one teacher. Furthermore, the emphasis in many middle schools is on management and control rather than on supporting students’ social and emotional needs. This can make it even more difficult for teachers and students to develop these connections.
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Jennifer A. Fredricks (Eight Myths of Student Disengagement: Creating Classrooms of Deep Learning (Classroom Insights from Educational Psychology))
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The mind's well-being was the well that was poisoned. One doesn't own a little anti-Semitism as if it were a puppy that isn't big enough yet to poop a lot. One yap from the pooch is already too much. Nor is saying "it was only social" a successful excuse. Only social, indeed ... only a mild case. The mild climate renders shirt-sleeves acceptable, loosens ties and collars, allows extremes to seem means, makes nakedness normal, facilitates the growth of weeds. Since the true causes of anti-Semitism do not lie with the Jews themselves (for if they did, anti-Semitism might bear some semblance of reason), they must lie elsewhere--so, if not in the hated, then in the hater, in another mode of misery.
Rationalist philosophers, from the beginning, regarded ignorance and error as the central sources of evil, and the conditions of contemporary life have certainly given their view considerable support. We are as responsible for our beliefs as for our behavior. Indeed, they are usually linked. Our brains respond, as well as our bodies do, to exercise and good diet. One can think of hundreds of beliefs--religious, political, social--which must be as bad for the head as fat is for the heart, and whose loss would lighten and enliven the spirit; but inherently silly ones, like transubstantiation, nowadays keep their consequences in control and relatively close to home. However, anti-Semitism does not; it is an unmitigated moral catastrophe. One can easily imagine how it might contaminate other areas of one's mental system. But is it the sickness or a symptom of a different disease? Humphrey Carpenter's level headed tone does not countenance Pound's corruption. It simply places the problem before us, permitting out anger and our pity.
-- From "Ezra Pound
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William H. Gass (Finding a Form)
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1. Self-awareness: Knowledge of one’s internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions 2. Self-regulation: Management of one’s internal states, impulses, and resources 3. Motivation: Emotional tendencies that guide or facilitate reaching goals 4. Empathy: Awareness of others’ feelings, needs, and concerns 5. Social skills: Adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others Salovey
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Chade-Meng Tan (Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (And World Peace))
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The social institutions and attitudes inherited from earlier times and maintained with increasing rigidity made it difficult to adapt to changing circumstances or to create new political and economic institutions which would facilitate such an adaption. An attitude towards unbelievers that varied from condescension in good times, to hostility and mistrust in bad times, made it difficult to learn from them, or even to understand them, at a time when it was the West, and not as previously the Islamic world, that had something to teach.
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Bernard Lewis (The Arabs in History)
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Man's sole Magic Wand in Science is observation using the five senses; any other function/tool used to produce illusions to the same data and information is that of the Occult using Esotery. After all, processing the data (i.e., mental activity that produces information) is an upper layer to that of its radiation (i.e., emission/active or reception/passive); and since esotery erroneously claim to transcend the lower layers (of data transfer and information assembly/disassembly) and enables access directly onto the spiritual realms (termed as, Consciousness) without resorting to that authentic Magic Wand for acquiring 'objects of study', the data needed will ultimately be rendered into self-generated artifacts using such a shenanigan. In other words, the Occult comprises practices and techniques using artifacts delivered by the use of Esotery for the aim of constructing some delusion of Science; this is when innocent Magic turns into Sorcery. It is the process of enforcing subjectivity rather than objectivity onto its participants and accomplices for maintaining a discipline that facilitates for spirituality to lurk into the public domain (including that of secret societies) under the pretense of being part of some universal reality rather than an individual experience confined to each person's private sphere separately. Politically speaking, it is the nastiest flavor of Socialism in action; the assault on the ownership of souls to socially modify man instead of scientifically modify the environment. It is hence just another ideology of Social Engineering which is specifically shared by the children of Gaia/Isis/whatever, and only by holding onto the principle of 'Family' as an abstract model of an atomic element in society, is one able to escape this unscientific spiritual redistribution of souls. Remember that Science is the tool which man her-/himself has developed to harvest nature for her/his own service and not vice versa!
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Ibrahim Ibrahim (Quotable: My Worldview)
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All religions have core beliefs that confound these innate expectations about the world, such as faith in physically powerful but essentially bodiless deities. These beliefs grab attention, activate intuition, and mobilize inference in ways that facilitate their social transmission, cultural selection, and historical persistence. New experiments suggest that such beliefs, in small doses, are optimal for memory. This greatly favors their cultural survival. Mature
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Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Evolution and Cognition))
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No organism in nature is separate from the system in which it lives, functions and dies, and no natural process can be understood in isolation from its physical and biological context. From an ecological perspective, the addiction process doesn’t happen accidentally, nor is it preprogrammed by heredity. It is a product of development in a certain context, and it continues to be maintained by factors in the environment.
The ecological view sees addiction as a changeable and evolving dynamic that expresses a lifelong interaction with a person’s social and emotional surroundings and with his own internal psychological space. Healing, then, must take into account the internal psychological climate — the beliefs, memories, mind-states and emotions that feed addictive impulses and behaviours — as well as the external milieu.
In an ecological framework recovery from addiction does not mean a “cure” for a disease but the creation of new resources, internal and external, that can support different, healthy ways of satisfying one’s genuine needs. It also involves developing new brain circuits that can facilitate more adaptive responses and behaviours.
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Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
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You’ve begun to master several techniques for controlling your anxiety. You’re learning the finer points of interaction and studying ways to apply your interactive skills. The next step is to add community resources—relevant agencies, groups, and organizations—to your self-help program. As you consider your particular needs, look to your own community for ways to enhance your social system: Parks and recreation departments, churches and synagogues, singles groups, self-help groups, clubs, volunteer organizations, business associations—there is an infinite array of resources to choose from. Contact your local chamber of commerce, consult newspapers for upcoming activities, and even inquire at area shops about any clubs or groups that share an interest (for example, ask at a garden center about a garden club, at a bookstore about a book club, and so on). Working through the exercises in this book is merely one component of a total self-help program. To progress from background knowledge to practical application, you must venture beyond your home and workplace (and beyond the confines of a therapist’s office, if you are in counseling). For people with social anxiety an outside system of resources is the best place to work on interactive difficulties. Here are three excellent reasons to use community resources:
1. To facilitate self-help. Conquering social anxiety necessitates interaction and involvement within the community, which is your laboratory. Using community resources creates a practical means of refining your skills and so moving forward on your individual map for change.
2. To diminish loneliness. Becoming part of the community provides the opportunity to develop personal and professional contacts that can enhance your life in many ways.
3. To network. Community involvement will not only give you the chance to improve your interactive skills, but will allow you to promote your academic or work life as well as your social life. Building connections on different levels can be the key. Any setting can provide a good opportunity for networking. In fact, I met the writer who helped me with this book in a fairly unlikely place—on the basketball court! A mutual friend introduced us, and when the subject of our professional interests came up, we saw the opportunity to work together on this project. You never know!
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Jonathan Berent (Beyond Shyness: How to Conquer Social Anxieties)
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Emotions are simply mental reactions characterized by strong feeling and corresponding physical effects. They can also be described as powerful social signals that send us messages to spur us to respond to our environment. Emotions help us communicate either in a voluntary or non-voluntary manner, thus facilitating our social interactions.
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Benjamin Smith (Emotional Intelligence: Exploring the Most Powerful Intelligence Ever Discovered)
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All socioeconomic activity in cities involves the interaction between people. Employment, wealth creation, innovation and ideas, the spread of infectious diseases, health care, crime, policing, education, entertainment, and indeed, all of the pursuits that characterize modern Homo sapiens and are emblematic of urban life are sustained and generated by the continual exchange of information, goods, and money between people. The job of the city is to facilitate and enhance this process by providing the appropriate infrastructure such as parks, restaurants, cafés, sports stadiums, cinemas, theaters, public squares, plazas, office buildings, and meeting halls to encourage and increase social connectivity.
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Geoffrey West (Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies)
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Physical proximity, of course, facilitates the common education of the affects, but also essential are the intense experiences of cooperation, the creation of mutual security in a situation of extreme vulnerability, and the collective deliberation and decision-making processes. The encampments are a great factory for the production of social and democratic affects.
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Michael Hardt (Declaration)
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The social media facilitates each one of us, to perform, what it wants.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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When people are not accountable and cannot evaluate their own efforts, responsibility is diffused across all group members (Harkins & Jackson, 1985; Kerr & Bruun, 1981). By contrast, the social facilitation experiments increased exposure to evaluation. When made the center of attention, people self-consciously monitor their behavior (Mullen & Baumeister, 1987). So, when being observed increases evaluation concerns, social facilitation occurs; when being lost in a crowd decreases evaluation concerns, social loafing occurs.
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David G. Myers (Social Psychology)
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Hannah Arendt was right that genocide had to be linked to race ideology and bureaucratic efficiency if it was to be brought within the realm of comprehension. But she was mistaken in thinking that race was a singular South African, Boer, discovery. Had she added to the list of imperial horrors the genocide of the Amerindians and the centuries-long trans-Atlantic slave trade, she would have come to a different conclusion. For the nurturing ground of scientific racism was not as much the Boer experience in South Africa as the imperial encounter with continental Africa. The trans-Atlantic slave trade racialized notions of Africa. It fueled the conceptual tendency to divide Africa in two: that above the Sahara and that below it. From a bridge that had for centuries facilitated a regular flow of trading camel caravans between civilizations to its north and south, the Sahara was now seen as the opposite: a great civilizational barrier below which lay a land perpetually quarantined, “Negro Africa.” “True” Africa, “real” Africa, was now seen as identical with tropical (“sub-Saharan”) Africa geographically and Negro (“Bantu”) Africa socially.
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Mahmood Mamdani (When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda)
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Social facilitation experiments show that groups can arouse people, and social loafing experiments show that groups can diffuse responsibility. When arousal and diffused responsibility combine, and normal inhibitions diminish, the results may be startling. People may commit acts that range from a mild lessening of restraint (throwing food in the dining hall, snarling at a referee, screaming during a rock concert) to impulsive self-gratification (group vandalism, orgies, thefts) to destructive social explosions (police brutality, riots, lynchings).
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David G. Myers (Social Psychology)
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Psychological consultants"
(The propaganda) organization can be the integration of an entire population into cells by agents in each block of residences; in that case. It operates inside a society by integrating the whole social body. (Of course this is accompanied by all the psychological work needed to press people into cells.) Or an effective transformation can be made in the economic political, or social domain. We know that the propagandist is also a psychological consultant to governments; he indicates what measures should or should not be taken to facilitate certain psychological manipulations. It is too often believed that propaganda serves the purpose of sugar-coating bitter pills, of making people accept policies they would not accept spontaneously. But in most cases propaganda seeks to point out courses of action desirable in themselves, such as helpful reforms. Propaganda then becomes this mixture of the actual satisfaction given to the people by the reforms and subsequent exploitation of that satisfaction.
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Jacques Ellul (Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes)
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This dissatisfaction with existing models coupled with new forms of bottom-up democracy enhanced by social media make this a perfect time to revisit our social dreams and ideals and design's role in facilitating alternative visions rather than defining them. Of being a catalyst rather than a source of visions. It is impossible to continue with the methodology employed by the visionary designers of the 1960s and 1970s. We live in a very different world now but we can reconnect with that spirit and develop new methods appropriate for today's world and once again begin to dream.
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Anthony Dunne (Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (The MIT Press))
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Social media and the internet have facilitated the emergence of self-contained communities, walled off not by physical barriers but by belief in shared identity.
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Francis Fukuyama (Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment)
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Minus The Agent is a leading property portal in Australia that aims to empower a property owner to make a deal without engaging an agent. It achieves this by enabling online selling or renting of property. The user on this site can easily list a property. There are a number of packages available for selling and renting purposes for a user to choose from. The user can select a package as per his requirements and pay for it. Minus The Agent believes that publicity and marketing are necessary for a successful sale. Therefore, it enhances the visibility of the property by listing it on leading property websites in Australia. Further, the property is advertised on social media sites. The site believes in providing complete autonomy to its users. This enables them in being in complete control of the deal. This is facilitated by allowing the users to upload details and photographs of their choice of property. They also have 24/7 access to the site to modify this data if required. There are no hidden charges. Once listed, the property remains on the site till the deal is done.
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Jodie Kelly
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Keyboard of Revolution (The Sonnet)
I wrote most of my works,
On broken down laptops.
Perhaps that's why they work well,
With this broken down world.
I don't write to butter the assheads of pomposity,
My duty is to till the soil of grassroots reform.
That's why I feel at home creating on humble machines,
The very thought of fancy devices makes my stomach turn.
I once said to you, ripped jeans and twenty dollar shirt,
That's how we change the world, how we build the world.
Often a fancy exterior is indicative of a rotten interior,
It's a simple life that facilitates a magnificent world.
I don't need thousand dollar machines to cause ascension.
Give me a keyboard, I'll give you revolution.
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Abhijit Naskar (Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans)
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Here we see the unequaled role that the prohibition of enjoyment plays in the construction of a social order. It provides the foundation on which all the structures of society necessarily rest. Prohibition performs this function because it eliminates the threat that unrestrained enjoyment poses to society as a whole. Without prohibition, enjoyment would constantly threaten the stability and security of the social order. The antisocial danger represented by enjoyment finds perhaps its most poetic expression in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), in the figure of Hannibal Lecter. The film demonstrates, quite clearly, that Lecter derives his enjoyment from eating people: he doesn’t eat people because he bears them ill-will, but simply because he enjoys it. Rather than facilitating harmonious intersubjective contact, as the example of Lecter indicates, enjoyment threatens the big Other, insofar as it disregards the desire of the Other altogether. Though Lecter’s mode of procuring enjoyment is undoubtedly extreme, it is nonetheless exemplary, because all enjoyment involves seeing the Other as nothing more than a tool and not showing “consideration” for the Other. As Serge André points out, to enjoy something “is to be able to use it to the point of abusing it—the abuse being precisely that which the law seeks to delimit.” In the act of barring this unrestrained enjoyment from the social order, prohibition produces habitable space in which we can coexist without directly confronting the horror of the Other’s enjoyment, which is why Lévi-Strauss sees prohibition at the root of everything social.
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Todd McGowan (The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (Psychoanalysis and Culture))
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Charlotte had memorized the political circumstances she learned from her retainers and greeted the representatives from other duchies, making sure to smile at the other first-year archduke candidates to facilitate their socializing during lessons.
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Miya Kazuki (Ascendance of a Bookworm (Light Novel), Part 4 Volume 6)
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Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information. Our strong ties tend to travel in the same social circles and know about the same opportunities as we do. Weak ties are more likely to open up access to a different network, facilitating the discovery of original
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Adam M. Grant (Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success)
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The socializing function of finance capital facilitates enormously the
task of overcoming capitalism. Once finance capital has brought the most
importance branches of production under its control, it is enough for
society, through its conscious executive organ - the state conquered by
the working class - to seize finance capital in order to gain immediate
control of these branches of production. Since all other branches of
production depend upon these, control of large-scale industry already
provides the most effective form of social control even without any
further socialization. A society which has control over coal mining, the
iron and steel industry, the machine tool, electricity, and chemical
industries, and runs the transport system, is able, by virtue of its
control of these most important spheres of production, to determine the
distribution of raw materials to other industries and the transport of
their products. Even today, taking possession of six large Berlin banks
would mean taking possession of the most important spheres of
large-scale industry, and would greatly facilitate the initial phases of
socialist policy during the transition period, when capitalist
accounting might still prove useful. There is no need at all to extend
the process of expropriation to the great bulk of peasant farms and
small businesses, because as a result of the seizure of large-scale
industry, upon which they have long been dependent, they would be
indirectly socialized just as industry is directly socialized. It is
therefore possible to allow the process of expropriation to mature
slowly, precisely in those spheres of decentralized production where it
would be a long drawn out and politically dangerous process. In other
words, since finance capital has already achieved expropriation to the
extent required by socialism, it is possible to dispense with a sudden
act of expropriation by the state, and to substitute a gradual process
of socialization through the economic benefits which society will confer.
[pp. 367-368]
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Rudolph Hiferding (Finance Capital: A study in the latest phase of capitalist development (Economic History))
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One example of taking a male-friendly approach [in therapy] is the view that traditional masculinity is not the root cause of men’s mental health problems, and, in fact, might contain valuable resources that can enhance mental health. This viewpoint allows therapists to understand men in a way that is more likely to foster better rapport between therapist and client, facilitating a more successful therapy.
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Dr Val Thomas (Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice)
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In the United States, generations of allegedly neutral experts have hollowed out public goods, degraded the public sphere, facilitated the monetization of everything from health to aptitude, and indebted generations of Americans in a fantasy of meritocracy enhanced social mobility. Liberals have sat by while finance capital and corporate interests gutted the public treasury.
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Catherine Liu (Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class)