State Of Instability Quotes

The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.

THE MIDDLE OF WHAT? EAST OF WHERE? THE REGION’S VERY name is based on a European view of the world, and it is a European view of the region that shaped it. The Europeans used ink to draw lines on maps: they were lines that did not exist in reality and created some of the most artificial borders the world has seen. An attempt is now being made to redraw them in blood.

Life is simply a particular state of organized instability.

Sonnet of Abortion My body, my decision, Whether I choose birth or abortion. Till a state can care for the newborn, No bill is qualified to offer resolution. Instead of controlling my birth canal, Work on carving a paradigm of equality. Build a world where a newborn is a gift, Not a burden on life, dream or economy. Abolish all disparities born of greed, Strip the wealthy of their ill-gotten riches. Use all resources for collective welfare, So that status ends up on history pages. Worse than aborting is birthing in instability. I'll give birth when I need not rely on pity.

we need to put our full hope, trust, and dependency on God, and God alone. And if we do that, we will learn what it means to finally find peace and stability of heart. Only then will the roller coaster that once defined our lives finally come to an end. That is because if our inner state is dependent on something that is by definition inconstant, that inner state will also be inconstant. If our inner state is dependent on something changing and temporary, that inner state will be in a constant state of instability, agitation, and unrest. This means that one moment we’re happy, but as soon as that which our happiness depended upon changes, our happiness also changes. And we become sad. We remain always swinging from one extreme to another and not realizing why.

In light of recent events—genocide in East Africa, the collapse of democracy throughout the continent, the isolation of Cuba, the overthrow of progressive movements throughout the so-called third world—some might argue that the moment of truth has already passed, that Césaire and Fanon’s predictions proved false. We’re facing an era where fools are calling for a renewal of colonialism, where descriptions of violence and instability draw on the very colonial language of “barbarism” and “backwardness” that Césaire critiques in these pages. But this is all a mystification; the fact is, while colonialism in its formal sense might have been dismantled, the colonial state has not. Many of the problems of democracy are products of the old colonial state whose primary difference is the presence of black faces. It has to do with the rise of a new ruling class—the class Fanon warned us about—who are content with mimicking the colonial masters,

The word ‘crisis’ is of Greek origin, meaning a point of culmination and separation, an instant when change one way or another is impending.” He compares the crisis in an individual life to that of a society in disaster: “Life becomes like molten metal. It enters a state of flux from which it must reset upon a principle, a creed, or purpose. It is shaken perhaps violently out of rut and routine. Old customs crumble, and instability rules.” That is, disasters open up societies to change, accelerate change that was under way, or break the hold of whatever was preventing change.

The real debate about both the horrific inequality in the world and about the terrorism and frightening instability in the world requires analysis of the differences in upset-adaption or alienation-from-soul between individuals, races, genders, generations, countries, civilisations and cultures, but until the human condition could be explained and the upset state of the human condition compassionately understood and thus defended that debate could not take place.

In a state of chaos, the instability gives some the feeling of power, for while chaos prevails they maliciously feel stronger.

The culturalization of politics analytically vanquishes political economy, states, history, and international and transnational relations. It eliminates colonialism, capital, caste or class stratification, and external political domination from accounts of political conflict or instability. In their stead, “culture” is summoned to explain the motives and aspirations leading to certain conflicts

How and why, then, did California go about the biggest prison-building project in the history of the world? In my view, prisons are partial geographical solutions to political economic crises, organized by the state, which is itself in crisis. Crisis means instability that can be fixed only through radical measures, which include developing new relationships and new or renovated institutions out of what already exists.

Transient states of depersonalisation are appreciably commoner during migraine auras. Freud reminds us that “… the ego is first and foremost a body-ego … the mental projection of the surface of the body.” The sense of “self” appears to be based, fundamentally, on a continuous inference from the stability of body-image, the stability of outward perceptions, and the stability of time-perception. Feelings of ego-dissolution readily and promptly occur if there is serious disorder or instability of body-image, external perception, or time-perception, and all of these, as we have seen, may occur during the course of a migraine aura.

The United States Department of Defense makes its position clear in a policy statement published in 2014. The document begins: Among the future trends that will impact our national security is climate change. Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe. In our defense strategy, we refer to climate change as a “threat multiplier” because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today—from infectious disease to terrorism. We are already beginning to see some of these impacts.

The novel, then, provides a reduction of the world different from that of the treatise. It has to lie. Words, thoughts, patterns of word and thought, are enemies of truth, if you identify that with what may be had by phenomenological reductions. Sartre was always, as he explains in his autobiography, aware of their being at variance with reality. One remembers the comic account of this antipathy in Iris Murdoch Under the Net, one of the few truly philosophical novels in English; truth would be found only in a silent poem or a silent novel. As soon as it speaks, begins to be a novel, it imposes causality and concordance, development, character, a past which matters and a future within certain broad limits determined by the project of the author rather than that of the characters. They have their choices, but the novel has its end. * ____________________ * There is a remarkable passage in Ortega y Gasset London essay ' History as a System' (in Philosophy and History, ed. Klibansky and Paton, 1936) which very clearly states the issues more notoriously formulated by Sartre. Ortega is discussing man's duty to make himself. 'I invent projects of being and doing in the light of circumstance. This alone I come upon, this alone is given me: circumstance. It is too often forgotten that man is impossible without imagination, without the capacity to invent for himself a conception of life, to "ideate" the character he is going to be. Whether he be original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself... Among... possibilities I must choose. Hence, I am free. But, be it well understood, I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not... To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity, not to have subscribed to a determined being, to be able to be other than what one was...' This 'constitutive instability' is the human property lacking in the novels condemned by Sartre and Murdoch. Ortega differs from Sartre on the use of the past; but when he says that his free man is, willy-nilly, 'a second-hand God,' creating his own entity, he is very close to Sartre, who says that to be is to be like the hero in a novel. In one instance the eidetic image is of God, in the other of the Hero.

But soon the poltergeist ran out of ideas in connection with Aunt Maud and became, as it were, more eclectic. All the banal motions that objects are limited to in such cases, were gone through in this one. Saucepans crashed in the kitchen; a snowball was found (perhaps, prematurely) in the icebox; once or twice Sybil saw a plate sail by like a discus and land safely on the sofa; lamps kept lighting up in various parts of the house; chairs waddled away to assemble in the impassable pantry; mysterious bits of string were found on the floor; invisible revelers staggered down the staircase in the middle of the night; and one winter morning Shade, upon rising and taking a look at the weather, saw that the little table from his study upon which he kept Bible-like Webster open at M was standing in a state of shock outdoors, on the snow (subliminally this may have participated in the making of lines 5-12). I imagine, that during the period the Shades, or at least John Shade, experienced a sensation of odd instability as if parts of the everyday, smoothly running world had got unscrewed, and you became aware that one of your tires was rolling beside you, or that your steering wheel had come off.

And the United States has not poured endless federal and state dollars into public education campaigns aimed at regulating corporate food production, subsidizing nutritious foods, or ending poverty and economic instability—top predictors of individual health, according to the US Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.43 Instead, fat bodies themselves are targeted in the “war on obesity” and the “childhood obesity epidemic.

She was theorizing on the Deep State; that enduring Turkish paranoia that the nation really was a conspiracy run by a cabal of generals, judges, industrialists and gangsters. The Taksim Square massacre of three years before, the Kahramanmaraş slaughter of Alevis a few months after, the oil crisis and the enduring economic instability, even the ubiquity of the Grey Wolves nationalist youth movement handing out their patriotic leaflets and defiling Greek Churches: all were links in an accelerating chain of events running through the fingers of the Derin Devlet. To what end? the men asked. Coup, she said, leaning forward, her fingers pursed. It was then that Georgios Ferentinou adored her. The classic profile, the strength of her jaw and fine cheekbones. The way she shook her head when the men disagreed with her, how her bobbed, curling hair swayed. The way she would not argue but set her lips and stared, as if their stupidity was a stubborn offence against nature. Her animation in argument balanced against her marvellous stillness when listening, considering, drawing up a new answer. How she paused, feeling the regard of another, then turned to Georgios and smiled. In the late summer of 1980 Georgios Ferentinou fell in love with Ariana Sinanidis by Meryem Nasi’s swimming pool. Three days later, on September 12th, Chief of General Staff Kenan Evren overthrew the government and banned all political activity.

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice,’ concludes Alan Bullock’s study of Hitler: ‘If you seek his monument, look around.’ The division of Germany, the exhaustion of British power, the entrenchment and paranoia of Soviet Russia, the denials of freedom in the Eastern half of Europe, the entanglement of America in the Western half, the creation of the State of Israel and the consequent instability of the Middle East – all, in a sense, have been bequeathed to us by Adolf Hitler.

Yet there is purpose in all this, for when we reflect on the instability and fickleness of such things, we are led to seek refuge in the enduring things that are to come. For if life always went well, would we not become so attached to our present state, even though we know it will not last, and by deception become enslaved to pleasure? In the end we would think that our present life is the best and noblest, and forget that, being made in the image of God, we are destined for higher things.

Nothing that remains static is truly ever alive. Nature does not abide idleness. All energy sources of the natural world and the cosmos are in a constant motion, they are in a perpetual state of fluctuation. All forms of living must make allowances for the seasons of change. The Earth itself is twirling through space, spinning on its axis analogous to a child’s top. The unpredictable forces of instability brought about by a combination of motion, change, and flux propels the miraculous dynamism of existence.

Many pundits, politicians and ordinary citizens believe that the Syrian civil war, the rise of the Islamic State, the Brexit mayhem and the instability of the European Union all result from a clash between ‘Western Civilisation’ and ‘Islamic Civilisation’. Western attempts to impose democracy and human rights on Muslim nations resulted in a violent Islamic backlash, and a wave of Muslim immigration coupled with Islamic terrorist attacks caused European voters to abandon multicultural dreams in favour of xenophobic local identities.

In my view, there is absolutely no doubt that the increase of inequality in the United States contributed to the nation’s financial instability. The reason is simple: one consequence of increasing inequality was virtual stagnation of the purchasing power of the lower and middle classes in the United States, which inevitably made it more likely that modest households would take on debt, especially since unscrupulous banks and financial intermediaries, freed from regulation and eager to earn good yields on the enormous savings injected into the system by the well-to-do, offered credit on increasingly generous terms.

After mentioning these and other examples, Modris Eksteins correctly observes that the Holocaust was not exclusively a German affair. Hitler may have found ‘willing executioners’ among his own people, but also among the citizens of the lands he conquered. ‘The Holocaust was enacted in the fevered dreamscapes of Eastern Europe where right and wrong were seldom on opposite sides, and where fear and hatred were a way of life. This was a frontier land where borders and peoples had fluctuated throughout history, and where the Jew and the Gypsy were symbols of transience and instability. Holocaust was a state of mind here before it was a Nazi policy.

…the third article we discovered was by Linda Hartling, who ties together research from several areas to propose a model explaining how humiliation can lead to violence. Hartling suggests that humiliation can trigger a series of reactions, including social pain, decreased self-awareness, increased self-defeating behavior, and decreased self-regulation, that ultimately lead to violence. Hartling and colleagues state that “humiliation is not only the most underappreciated force in international relations, it may be the missing link in the search for root causes of political instability and violent conflict…perhaps the most toxic social dynamic of our age.” This connection between humiliation and aggression/violence explains much of what we’re seeing today. Amplified by the reach of social media, dehumanizing and humiliating others are becoming increasingly normalized, along with violence. Now, rather than humiliating someone in front of a small group of people, we have the power to eviscerate someone in front of a global audience of strangers. I know we all have deeply passionate and cultural beliefs, but shame and humiliation will never be effective social justice tools. They are tools of oppression. I remember reading this quote from Elie Wiesel years ago and it’s become a practice for me-even when I’m enraged or afraid: “Never allow anyone to be humiliated in your presence.

[Hannah] Arendt pointed out that both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes conducted periodic purges or crackdowns, which she called 'an instrument of permanent instability.' Constant flux was necessary for the system's survival: 'The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the point where a new way of life could develop - one which might, after a time, lose its bastard qualities and take its place among the widely differing and profoundly contrasting ways of life of the nations of the earth.' Indeed, she wrote, 'The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.

Imagine yourself having a fight with your romantic partner. The tension of the situation makes your limbic system run at full throttle and you become flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenalin. The high levels of these chemicals suddenly make you so damn angry, that you burst out in front of your partner saying, “I wish you die, so that I can have some peace in my life”. Given the stress of the situation through highly active limbic system, your PFC loses its freedom to take the right decision and you burst out with foul language in front of your partner, that may ruin your relationship. In simple terms due to your mental instability, you lost your free will to make the right decision. But when the conversation is over, and you relax for a while, your stress hormone levels come down to normal, and you regain your usual cheerful state of mind. Immediately, your PFC starts analyzing the explosive conversation you had with your partner. Healthy activity of the entire frontal lobes, especially the PFC suddenly overwhelms you with a feeling of guilt. Your brain makes you realize, that you have done something devilish. As a result, now you find yourself making the willful decision of apologizing to your partner and making up to him or her, no matter how much effort it takes, because your PFC comes up the solution that it is the healthiest thing to do for your personal life. From this you can see, that what you call free will is something that is not consistent. It changes based on your mental health. Mental instability or illness, truly cripples your free will. And the healthier your frontal lobes are, the better you can take good decisions. And the most effective way to keep your frontal lobes healthy is to practice some kind of meditation.

Yet the Constitution did not hold factions in check, and as early as 1791, Madison had begun to revise his thinking. In an essay called “Public Opinion,” he considered a source of instability particular to a large republic: the people might be deceived. “The larger a country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained,” he explained. That is, factions might not, in the end, consist of wise, knowledgeable, and reasonable men. They might consist of passionate, ignorant, and irrational men, who had been led to hold “counterfeit” opinions by persuasive men. (Madison was thinking of Hamilton and his ability to gain public support for his financial plan.) The way out of this political maze was the newspaper. “A circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people,” he explained, “is equivalent to a contraction of territorial limits.” Newspapers would make the country, effectively, smaller.90 It was an ingenious idea. It would be revisited by each passing generation of exasperated advocates of republicanism. The newspaper would hold the Republic together; the telegraph would hold

We have to make a consideration: emotional states are deeply influenced by external events, and here lies the problem. Since the external events are unstable, namely, that they are in perpetual change - a situation that Buddhist tradition defines as “impermanence” - they are very difficult to be managed, and this bring people to panic. This difficulty to experience a reality in which nothing is permanent, that all is in constant motion- change, belongs to the human incapacity to accept the discontinuity of an occurrence of events that are always unpredictable and new. Impermanence is a principle that is a natural thing, but, in relation to the social and interhuman fields, this becomes a problem: especially in the last ten years, we can witness scenarios where instability, turbulence and uncertainty, frantically increase and continue to increase. Instability and change are perceivable everywhere - from the personal interaction between people to economic instability: in poor words, we don’t know what the future will bring to us and we feel a continuous pressure. People feel a need for safety and stability, but this is an impossible thing in the conditions in which society finds itself, and here lies one of the main reasons why tensions, anxiety, and panic have became common situations.

My discussion of unpredictable instability made some headlines. What would have truly made national news was the conversations we’d had behind closed doors, that—based on publicly available information, and not on any particular intelligence—the United States had begun to show many of the same characteristics of instability we used to assess other nation-states.

Head people, those in the intellectual center, have highly developed mental faculties they use to assess and address everything in life that is experienced as a threat or an assault on their inner state. Head people believe in competency as the cure for instability. Through mastering their environment, head people think they’re able to secure their own self-preservation.

Housing instability is a hallmark of life among the $2-a-day poor. Children experiencing $2-a-day poverty are far more likely to move over the course of a year than other kids—even than children living in less extreme poverty. Much of this instability is fueled by perilous double-ups, which mark—and often speed—the descent of those who are already suffering from the fallout from nonsustaining work into the ranks of the desperately poor. Every family whose story is told in this book has doubled up with kin or friends at some point, because their earnings haven’t been sufficient to maintain a place of their own. While living with relatives sometimes offers strength and uplift, it can also prove toxic for the most vulnerable in our society, ending in sexual, physical, or verbal abuse. The trauma from this abuse is sometimes a precipitating factor in a family’s fall into $2-a-day poverty, or the calamity that keeps them in such a state for far too long. The

In 1933, Batista closely allied himself with the newly created, five-man Presidency of Cuba named “The Pentarchy.” Sergio Carbó y Morera, an influential member of the new Executive Commission of the Pentarchy, became Batista’s inside man. On the morning of September 8th, with the country in a precarious state of instability, and as the self-appointed head of the Provisional Government of Cuba, Carbó y Morera appointed Batista as “Chief of the Army” instantly promoting him from sergeant stenographer, to the rank of Colonel. This promotion was supposedly “for merits of war and exceptional services to the country.” Of course, everyone knew that this appointment was only made because of Batista’s successful sergeants’ rebellion and insistent demands. It also mysteriously happened, without the approval of the other four members of the Pentarchy. Ascending to the rank of Colonel without proper approval, Batista took over “Command and Control” of the Cuban army and unbelievably, summarily discharged the entire cadre of Commissioned Officers.

Everything is present in the world. However, your ‘emotional state’ does not allow it to come to you. ‘Emotional’ as in instability. While going to eat, one will worry, 'will I get food or not?' That indeed is instability. If you remain stable, then everything will come to you.

But the deeper root cause could only be found in the minds of humankind. Never explicitly stated, and perhaps not even consciously understood, a gravitational wave ship was too powerful—so powerful that it terrified its creator. If something—a droplet attack or something else—forced such ships to depart for deep space, and they could never return to the Solar System due to the presence of enemy threats, they would turn into copies of Blue Space and Bronze Age, or something even more horrific. Each gravitational wave ship, with its no-longer-human crew, would also possess the power to broadcast to the universe (though limited by the half-life of the vibrating string), thus controlling the fate of humanity. A frightful instability would be permanently scattered among the stars. At its root, this fear was a fear of dark forest deterrence itself. This was characteristic of ultimate deterrence: The deterrer and the deteree shared the same terror of deterrence

Before continuing further, it is important to gain an understanding of how democracy is perceived by the ordinary people of the Middle East. Democracy, as a secular entity, is unlikely t be favorably received by the vast majority of Middle Easterners who are devout followers of the Islamic faith. Traditionally, there is tension among the Muslim countries with respect to the establishment of a democratic form of government. On the one hand, there are those who believe that democratic rule can co-exist with the religious nature of the Middle Easter societies; however, on the other hand there are those who believe that the tribal structure of the Middle Eastern countries may not be suitable for democratic rule as too many factions will emerge. The result will be a "fractured" society that cannot effectively unite and there is also the risk that this could impact the cohesion produced by the Muslim faith. Although concerns exist, for the most part, the spirit of democracy, or self rule, is viewed as a positive endeavor so long as it builds up the country and sustains the religious base versus devaluing religion and creating instability. Creating this balance will be the challenge as most Western democracies have attempted to maintain a separation of church and state. What this suggests is that as democracy grows in the Middle East, it is not necessarily going to evolve upon a Western template—it will have its own shape or form coupled with stronger religious ties.

After January 1, 1959, the Castro Revolution changed the way business was done in Cuba. Abruptly, supplies for Cubana were no longer available, most routes were altered or suspended, and many of the pilots deserted their jobs or were exiled. In May of 1960, the new Castro administration merged all of the existing Cuban airlines and nationalized them under a drastically restructured Cubana management. At the time, many of Cubana’s experienced personnel took advantage of their foreign connections, and left for employment with other airlines. During the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April of 1961, two of the remaining Cubana DC-3’s were destroyed in the selective bombing of Cuba’s airports. Actually the only civil aviation airport that was proven to be bombed was the Antonio Maceo Airport in Santiago de Cuba. During the following years, the number of hijackings increased and some aircraft were abandoned at American airports, as the flight crews sought asylum in the United States. This corporate instability, as well as political unrest, resulted in a drastic reduction of passengers willing to fly with Cubana. Of course, this resulted in a severe reduction in revenue, making the airline less competitive. The Castro régime reacted by blaming the CIA for many of Cubana’s problems. However, slowly, except to the United States, most of the scheduled flights were restored. Not being able to replace their aging fleet with American manufactured aircraft, they turned to the Soviet Union. Currently Cubana’s fleet includes Ukrainian designed and built Antonov An-148’s and An-158’s. The Cubana fleet also has Soviet designed and built Illyushin II-96’s and Tupolev TU-204’s built in Kazan, Russia. Despite daunting difficulties, primarily due to the United States’ imposed embargo and the lack of sufficient assistance from Canada, efforts to expand and improve operations during the 1990’s proved successful. “AeroCaribbean” originally named “Empresa Aero” was established in 1982 to serve as Cuba’s domestic airline. It also supported Cubana’s operations and undertook its maintenance. Today Cubana’s scheduled service includes many Caribbean, European, South and Central American destinations. In North America, the airline flies to Mexico and Canada. With Cuban tourism increasing, Cubana has positioned itself to be relatively competitive. However much depends on Cuba’s future relations with the United States. The embargo imposed in February of 1962 continues and is the longest on record. However, Cubana has continued to expand, helping to make Cuba one of the most important tourist destinations in Latin America. A little known fact is that although Cubana, as expected, is wholly owned by the Cuban government, the other Cuban airlines are technically not. Instead, they are held, operated and maintained by the Cuban military, having been created by Raúl Castro during his tenure as the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces.

If our inner state is dependent on something changing and temporary, that inner state will be in a constant state of instability, agitation, and unrest. This means that one moment we're happy, but as soon as that which our happiness depended upon changes, our happiness also changes.

15. From this poisoned source of indifferentism flows that false and absurd, or rather extravagant, maxim that liberty of conscience should be established and guaranteed to each man - a most contagious error, to which leads that absolute and unbridled liberty of opinion which for the ruin of Church and State spreads over the world, and which some men, by unbridled impudence, fear not to represent and advantageous to the Church. "And what more certain death for souls," says Saint Augustine, "than the liberty of error!" On beholding them thus, indeed, take away from men every rein able to restrain them in the paths of truth, hurried us they already to ruin by a nature inclined to evil, we may say in truth that there yawns that pit of the abyss, from which Saint John beheld ascending a smoke that obscured the sun, and locusts to lay waste the earth. Thence, in fact, the instability of minds; thence, the ever increasing corruption of the young; thence, in the people, the contempt of sacred rights and holiest laws and things; thence, in a word, the saddest scourge that can ravage States, since experiences attests, and the remotest antiquity teaches, that cities powerful in wealth, dominion, and glory perished by this sole evil - the unbridled liberty of opinions, the license of public discourse, the passion for changes.

Whether in emerging economies or on the occasion of Secretary of the Treasury Geithner’s visits to Europe during the height of the debt crisis there in 2012, there is something of a tendency these days to downplay the views of the United States, even when they make clear sense.

The relationship became so close by the mid-1970s that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin invited South African Prime Minister John Vorster to visit, including a tour of Yad Vashem, the country’s Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Vorster had been a Nazi sympathizer and member of the fascist Afrikaner group Ossewabrandwag during World War II. In 1942, he proudly expressed his admiration for Nazi Germany. Yet when Vorster arrived in Israel in 1976, he was feted by Rabin at a state dinner. Rabin toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence.” Both nations faced “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness.” A few months after Vorster’s visit, the South African government yearbook explained that both states were facing the same challenge: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”6 The relationship between the nations was broad but also sworn to secrecy. In April 1975, a security agreement was signed that defined the relationship for the next twenty years. A clause within the deal stated that both parties pledged to keep its existence concealed.

Our analysis points to four structural drivers of instability: popular immiseration leading to mass mobilization potential; elite overproduction resulting in intraelite conflict; failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state; and geopolitical factors. The most important driver is intraelite competition and conflict, which is a reliable predictor of the looming crisis.

And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being, she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comforts of ignorance seemed utterly denied her. She was a feather blown on the gale.

With the natural caution of a scientist venturing outside his field, Dr. Cannon concluded his study of 'The Wisdom of the Body' with the suggestion that the model of the living organism might be applied with advantage to the larger human community. Since technologies and economic systems are themselves products of life, it is not strange that, to the degree that they work effectively at all, they have incorporated many organic devices not in line with their own abstract ideological or institutional premises. But because brain physiology, dream exploration, and linguistic analysis were all outside his are of high competence Dr. Cannon never faced the central problem that arose, at a very early point, I suspect, once the enlargement of man's neural functions enabled him to escape the automatism of his reflexes and hormones. how under those conditions to prevent the brain from succumbing to its own disorderly hyperactivity, once liberated from the bodily functions and environmental contacts and social pressures necessary for its existence? The need to recognize this special source of instability coming from the extraordinary powers of the mind, and to take measures for overcoming it, is not the least lesson to be drawn from man's historic development. In so far as automatic systems become more lifelike as well as more powerful, they carry with them the threat of increasing human irrationality at higher levels. To follow an organic model, then, not only the system as a whole must be kept in view, but each individual part must be in a state of alertness, ready to intervene at any point in the process and take over.

Development of states, urbanization, mechanization and industrialisation have all brought phenomenal strides to growth and prosperity of economies and their populace. They have also brought with them the insatiable need for energy resources with the related offspring of instability, conflict, war and corruption.

One of the standard arguments used in the 1990s to justify the introduction of a common European currency was that exchange-rate instability would disrupt trade in the common market. A monetary union between Canada and the US, however, has never been seriously considered even though the trading relationship between these two countries is the largest bilateral trading relationship in the world, see the preceding section. The fact that Canadian and US traders continue to operate, apparently with success, using their own currencies shows that the argument about currency swings dampening inter-state trade is far from convincing. Trade is also booming between Canada, Mexico and the US, the three members of NAFTA, in spite of the coexistence of three national currencies (Vega Cànovas 2010).

Supercapitalism has triumphed as power has shifted to consumers and investors. They now have more choice than ever before, and can switch ever more easily to better deals. And competition among companies to lure and keep them continues to intensify. This means better and cheaper products, and higher returns. Yet as supercapitalism has triumphed, its negative social consequences have also loomed larger. These include widening inequality as most gains from economic growth go to the very top, reduced job security, instability of or loss of community, environmental degradation, violations of human rights abroad, and a plethora of products and services pandering to our basest desires. These consequences are larger in the United States than in other advanced economies because America has moved deeper into supercapitalism. Other economies, following closely behind, have begun to experience many of the same things. Democracy is the appropriate vehicle for responding to such social consequences. That’s where citizen values are supposed to be expressed, where choices are supposed to be made between what we want for ourselves as consumers and investors, and what we want to achieve together. But the same competition that has fueled supercapitalism has spilled over into the political process. Large companies have hired platoons of lobbyists, lawyers, experts, and public relations specialists, and devoted more and more money to electoral campaigns. The result has been to drown out voices and values of citizens. As all of this has transpired, the old institutions through which citizen values had been expressed in the Not Quite Golden Age—industry-wide labor unions, local citizen-based groups, “corporate statesmen” responding to all stakeholders, and regulatory agencies—have been largely blown away by the gusts of supercapitalism. Instead of guarding democracy against the disturbing side effects of supercapitalism, many reformers have set their sights on changing the behavior of particular companies—extolling them for being socially virtuous or attacking them for being socially irresponsible. The result has been some marginal changes in corporate behavior. But the larger consequence has been to divert the public’s attention from fixing democracy. 1

Lack of creative destruction and innovation is not the only reason why there are severe limits to growth under extractive institutions. The history of the Maya city-states illustrates a more ominous and, alas, more common end, again implied by the internal logic of extractive institutions. As these institutions create significant gains for the elite, there will be strong incentives for others to fight to replace the current elite. Infighting and instability are thus inherent features of extractive institutions, and they not only create further inefficiencies but also often reverse any political centralization, sometimes even leading to the total breakdown of law and order and descent into chaos, as the Maya city-states experienced following their relative success during their Classical Era. Though

Infighting and instability are thus inherent features of extractive institutions, and they not only create further inefficiencies but also often reverse any political centralization, sometimes even leading to the total breakdown of law and order and descent into chaos, as the Maya city-states experienced following their relative success during their Classical Era. Though

As a nation assumes a democratic social state and communities lean toward a republic, it becomes increasingly dangerous to unite religion with political institutions; for the time is coming when power will pass from hand to hand, when one political theory will replace another, when men, laws, and constitutions themselves will vanish or alter daily, and that not for a limited time but continuously. Agitation and instability cling naturally to democratic republics just as immobility and somnolence are the rule in absolute monarchies.

On January 25, 1995, Russian president Boris Yeltsin came within minutes of initiating a full nuclear strike on the United States because of an unidentified Norwegian scientific rocket. Concern has been raised over a U.S. project to replace the nuclear warheads on two of the twenty-four D5 ICBMs carried by Trident submarines with conventional warheads, for possible use against Iran or North Korea: Russian early-warning systems would be unable to distinguish them from nuclear missiles, expanding the possibilities for unfortunate misunderstandings. Other worrisome scenarios include deliberate malfeasance by military commanders triggered by mental instability and/or fringe political/religious agendas. But why worry? Surely, if push came to shove, reasonable people would step in and do the right thing, just as they have in the past? Nuclear nations do indeed have elaborate countermeasures in place, just as our body does against cancer. Our body can normally deal with isolated deleterious mutations, and it appears that fluke coincidences of as many as four mutations may be required to trigger certain cancers. Yet if we roll the dice enough times, shit happens-Stanley Kubrick's dark nuclear war comedy Dr. Strangelove illustrates this with a triple coincidence.

May 14, 1948. Within a day of proclaiming its statehood, Israel was invaded by neighboring Arab states with the help of Arab Palestinians who were already fighting Jewish Palestinians.243 This began the First Arab-Israeli War.244 By 1949, Israel had defeated the Arab coalition, and the resulting armistices gave Israel control over most of the land of the Mandate.245 Only the Gaza Strip and so-called West Bank remained in Arab hands. The West Bank was occupied by Jordanian military forces, and the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egyptian forces until the Six-Day War in 1967, when those territories also came under Israeli control.246 Jordan continued to formally claim control over the West Bank until 1988, when King Hussein granted the request of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to renounce any Jordanian claims to the West Bank, after which the PLO became the sole Arab claimant of that territory.247 It is important to note that from 1967 until today, neither the PLO, the current Palestinian Authority (PA), nor any other Arab Palestinian political entity has exercised sovereign control over the West Bank. Further, prior to Israel’s acquisition of the territory in 1967, dating back to the rule of the Ottoman Turks, there had never been a lawfully recognized Arab Palestinian sovereign over the territory in the former Mandate for Palestine.248 Today, one can hardly talk about the Middle East without bringing up war, terror, and unrest. The region has become synonymous with geopolitical instability and territorial conflicts, specifically with regard to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian issue. Despite the fact that Arab Palestinians have no greater historical claim to the territories for which they are fighting than do Jewish inhabitants of the land of Palestine, the majority of the international community continues to demand that Israel relinquish control of these territories to allow the establishment of an independent Arab state ruled by a political entity whose ultimate goal is the utter destruction of Israel.249

Between state building and economic growth Having a state is a basic precondition for intensive economic growth. The economist Paul Collier has demonstrated the converse of this proposition, namely, that state breakdown, civil war, and interstate conflict have very negative consequences for growth.20 A great deal of Africa’s poverty in the late twentieth century was related to the fact that states there were very weak and subject to constant breakdown and instability. Beyond the establishment of a state that can provide for basic order, greater administrative capacity is also strongly correlated with economic growth. This is particularly true at low absolute levels of per capita GDP (less than $1,000); while it remains important at higher levels of income, the impact may not be proportionate. There is also a large literature linking good governance to economic growth, though the definition of “good governance” is not well established and, depending on the author, sometimes includes all three components of political development.21 While the correlation between a strong, coherent state and economic growth is well established, the direction of causality is not always clear. The economist Jeffrey Sachs has maintained that good governance is endogenous: it is the product of economic growth rather than a cause of it.22 There is a good logic to this: government costs money. One of the reasons why there is so much corruption in poor countries is that they cannot afford to pay their civil servants adequate salaries to feed their families, so they are inclined to take bribes. Per capita spending on all government services, from armies and roads to schools and police on the street, was about $17,000 in the United States in 2008 but only $19 in Afghanistan.23 It is therefore not a surprise that the Afghan state is much weaker than the American one, or that large flows of aid money generate corruption.

Among ideas, legitimacy, and all of the other dimensions of development Ideas concerning legitimacy develop according to their own logic, but they are also shaped by economic, political, and social development. The history of the twentieth century would have looked quite different without the writings of an obscure scribbler in the British Library, Karl Marx, who systematized a critique of early capitalism. Similarly, communism collapsed in 1989 largely because few people any longer believed in the foundational ideas of Marxism-Leninism. Conversely, developments in economics and politics affect the kinds of ideas that people regard as legitimate. The Rights of Man seemed more plausible to French people because of the changes that had taken place in France’s class structure and the rising expectations of the new middle classes in the later eighteenth century. The spectacular financial crises and economic setbacks of 1929–1931 undermined the legitimacy of certain capitalist institutions and led the way to the legitimization of greater state control over the economy. The subsequent growth of large welfare states, and the economic stagnation and inflation that they appeared to encourage, laid the groundwork for the conservative Reagan-Thatcher revolutions of the 1980s. Similarly, the failure of socialism to deliver on its promises of modernization and equality led to its being discredited in the minds of many who lived under communism. Economic growth can also create legitimacy for the governments that succeed in fostering it. Many fast-developing countries in East Asia, such as Singapore and Malaysia, have maintained popular support despite their lack of liberal democracy for this reason. Conversely, the reversal of economic growth through economic crisis or mismanagement can be destabilizing, as it was for the dictatorship in Indonesia after the financial crisis of 1997–1998.33 Legitimacy also rests on the distribution of the benefits of growth. Growth that goes to a small oligarchy at the top of the society without being broadly shared often mobilizes social groups against the political system. This is what happened in Mexico under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, who ruled the country from 1876 to 1880 and again from 1884 to 1911. National income grew rapidly in this period, but property rights existed only for a wealthy elite, which set the stage for the Mexican Revolution of 1911 and a long period of civil war and instability as underprivileged groups fought for their share of national income. In more recent times, the legitimacy of democratic systems in Venezuela and Bolivia has been challenged by populist leaders whose political base is poor and otherwise marginalized groups.34

...the Nixon administration also blocked the efforts of the UN and the Arab states, and at times even its own State Department, to settle the Palestine question, helping to maintain the forms of instability and conflict on which American ‘security’ policy would now increasingly depend. In Kurdistan, the other conflict keeping Arab states ‘pinned down’, Washington was unable to prevent Iraq from reaching a settlement with the Kurds in 1970, but responded to this threat of stability in the Gulf two years later by agreeing with Israel and Iran to reopen the conflict with renewed military support to one of the Kurdish factions. The aim was not to enable the Kurds to win political rights, according to a later Congressional investigation, but simply to ‘continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of our ally’s neighboring country [Iraq]’. The arms sales to Iran and their supporting doctrine played no important role in protecting the Gulf or defending American control of the region’s oil. In fact the major US oil companies lobbied against the increased supply of weapons to Iran and the doctrine used to justify them. They argued that political stability in the Gulf could be better secured by America ending its support for Israel’s occupation of Arab territories and allowing a settlement of the Palestine question. The Nixon administration had also initiated a large increase in the sale of arms to Israel, although weapons sent to Israel were paid for not with local oil revenues but by US taxpayers. Arming Iran, an ally of Israel, the companies argued, only worsened the one-sidedness of America’s Middle East policy.

The Sovereign has also implied that the instability in their marriage is an over-riding consideration in any musings she may have about abdication. Naturally this does not please Prince Charles who refused to speak to his mother for several days following her 1991 Christmas broadcast when she spoke of her intention to serve the nation and the Commonwealth for “some years to come”. For a man who holds his mother in total awe that silence was a measure of his anger. Once again he blamed the Princess of Wales. As he stalked along the corridors at Sandringham the Prince complained to anyone who would listen about the state of his marriage. Diana pointed out to him that he had already abdicated his regal responsibilities by allowing his brothers, Princes Andrew and Edward, to take over as counsellors of state, the official “stand ins” for the Sovereign when she is abroad on official business. If the Prince showed such indifference to these nominal constitutional duties, she asked sweetly, why should his mother give him the job. Certainly the last twelve months have seen the Queen and daughter-in-law develop a more relaxed and cordial relationship. At a garden party last summer the Princess felt confident enough to essay a little joke about the Queen’s black hat. She complimented her on the choice, remarking how it would come in useful for funerals. In a more serious vein they have had confidential discussions about her eldest son’s state of mind. At times the Queen finds the direction of his life unfocused and his behaviour odd and erratic. It has no escaped her notice that he is as unhappy with his lot as his wife.

In physics terms, the reason for symmetry breaking is the instability of the symmetric state.

where the wisdom of deliberation comes in. It is that deliberation that is one of the principal features of American conservatism as a coherent governing philosophy. If conservatives do not believe in the calm, sober use and restraint of government power, then we believe in nothing. Especially when it is exercised in haste, arbitrarily, and without deliberation or care. There is the trust your gut, shoot from the hip approach to political decision-making, and then there is the fly off the handle approach. As evidenced by the 2016 presidential campaign, flying off the handle is a big, big hit right now—at least in terms of its entertainment value and ratings. In this book I mean to establish that as a governing philosophy, the instability of flying off the handle is a disaster for the United States and is profoundly unconservative. The same goes for our state-of-the-art presidential bellicosity—which seems to be quite popular in “conservative” circles these days. That is the antithesis of conservatism, too. And it is also very often the antithesis of truth.

Changes elsewhere in the Middle East swept a region racked by continued instability. Following a bitter clash with Allied occupying forces, the nucleus of a Turkish republic arose in Anatolia in place of the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, Britain failed to impose a one-sided treaty on Iran and withdrew its occupation forces in 1921. France established itself in Syria and Lebanon, after crushing Amir Faysal’s state. Egyptians revolting against their British overlords in 1919 were suppressed with great difficulty by the colonial power, which was finally obliged to grant Egypt a simulacrum of independence in 1922. Something analogous occurred in Iraq, where a widespread armed uprising in 1920 obliged the British to grant self-rule under an Arab monarchy headed by the same Amir Faysal, now with the title of king. Within a little more than a decade after World War I, Turks, Iranians, Syrians, Egyptians, and Iraqis all achieved a measure of independence, albeit often highly constrained and severely limited. In Palestine, the British operated with a different set of rules.

Suffering persists when we resist accepting the complementary polarities of emotions like grief and joy. Every conflict contains the seeds of its resolution. As the Hindu sage Patanjali stated in one of his Yoga Sutras, 'By experiencing the pairs of opposites, suffering ceases. When distress arises, ride opposing thoughts back into nondual awareness. By reversing instability into stability, from refusing into non-refusing, suffering is relinquished. Through disidentification, the pairs of opposites cease their noxious effect. By reversing the pairs of opposites stability and the release of suffering are quickly achieved.

During the Warring States Period in China, three significant philosophies emerged that delineate the fundamental dimensions of the exercise of political power. Confucianism, which is based on virtue and tradition, is more prevalent in periods of stability, emphasizing the importance of moral values ​​and social rituals. Taoism, centered on harmony and natural law, tends to flourish in times of progress, promoting a life in accordance with the natural flow of the universe. On the other hand, legalism, which advocates the imposition of order through punishment, generally emerges in moments of great instability. These philosophies reflect the different approaches adopted by governments throughout human history in managing societies.

What westerners call progress is for nothing but change and instability; [...] he who has reached a state of equilibrium no longer feels this need, just as he who has found no longer seeks.

Thus the Utopia of terrestrial paradise implies an absolute humanity within the transitory relations of terrestrial history. But there is no room in terrestrial reality, by its nature strictly confined and limited, for an absolute life. Yet the Utopia theory asserts that what has been impossible until now will not be so always, that an absolute and conclusive state will sooner or later crown historical relations. It affirms, not a transition from limited historical relations to some other plane of being, to some fourth dimension commensurable with the closed three dimensional world, but a fourth dimension of absolute life within the very framework of three-dimensional space. In this lie its fundamental metaphysical antithesis and essential instability, instead of seeing absolute life as the transition from terrestrial to, celestial history, it presupposes an ultimate solution of human destiny within the framework of terrestrial relations, a final integration of the three-dimensional world. It desires to humanize that absolute perfection and beatitude which can only be attained in the celestial reality and only contained in the fourth dimension.

Why would the United States risk its entire standing as a force for peace and stability, its so-called ‘soft power’? Why would the U.S. risk creating instability in the entire oil-producing world, perhaps even the risk of a new oil price shock and a global economic depression, in order to strike Iraq? The official Washington answer was that Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and that he had ties to Al Qaida terrorists. Was that sufficient to explain the clear obsession of George W. Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others in Washington for a new Iraq war? Many were not convinced. Their skepticism was confirmed, but only after 130,000 American troops had been firmly entrenched in Iraq.

Russian political strategist Aleksandr Dugin wrote that restoring the power of the ancient Russian empire depended on destabilizing the American democracy that supported liberal democracies in Europe. He called for provoking “instability and separatism within the borders of the United States,

the Syrian delegation to the United Nations ended up, in 1948, in the tiny town of Benton in southern Illinois. They were there to seek out a certain James Menhall, who had emigrated decades earlier from Syria to the United States. Menhall had come up with several patents for portable drilling rigs, and had developed some producing oil wells in the small oil fields of Illinois and Kentucky. He was their man. But because of political instability in Syria, he was not able to start drilling for another eight years, not until the spring of 1956. Within half a year, he had discovered commercial oil. Unfortunately, shortly after Syria merged with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic under Nasser, Menhall’s concession was canceled, with no compensation.

Some analysts have renamed the welfare state, which obtained basically from about 1945 until in the 1970s, the garrison state. State legitimacy now depends on protection from these threats by targeting of dangerous others. I’ll say more about this in two weeks, but just to repeat what I indicated last week, the idea that the globalized form of capitalism means that decisions about the economic security and welfare of citizens are no longer within the hands necessarily of nation-state governors. To preserve their legitimacy as governors, they need to find a new basis for legitimation. Some people are arguing, and I would agree with much of this, that this is the new basis. The protection from dangerous others. We have endless enemies. Foreign communism morphed into terrorism. We now have a tremendous fear of immigrants and refugees. Witness the recent ban orders, the deportations, the detentions, the demonization of others. We have domestic enemies, people of color, the young, the old, LGBTQ communities, the differently abled, and along with that the militarization of the police and the criminalization of protest, which we’ll talk about in the last couple of weeks. Where is all of this headed? The Pentagon has a very bleak view of the future (see “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity: A Pentagon Video”), which views urban areas (both foreign and domestic) as basically breeding grounds for instability, unrest, and chaos. To think about the kind of underlying view of humanity this way I think comes naturally in some sense out of this very long history of militarization. That is, if you think of yourself as military, then everybody outside is an enemy. This is also what becomes part of the problem of militarizing the police. As the police become increasingly militaristic, the people that they supposedly protect and serve begin to look more and more like the non-police, like the enemy. This is, I think, an extremely dangerous kind of trend that we’re seeing. The forecast that this is the way in which the military will sort of reproduce itself by now being able to respond to these kinds of future threats where the mass of humanity is either an enemy or is in a witting or unwitting cloak for enemies. It’s extremely dangerous. One we should think very carefully about, but this is the Pentagon’s view largely of what that future looks like, and it is, in fact, urban, militarized, and dangerous.

Only then did scientists realize the rather profound conclusions of the experiment: REM sleep is what stands between rationality and insanity. Describe these symptoms to a psychiatrist without informing them of the REM-sleep deprivation context, and the clinician will give clear diagnoses of depression, anxiety disorders, and schizophrenia. But these were all healthy young individuals just days before. They were not depressed, weren’t suffering from anxiety disorders or schizophrenia, nor did they have any history of such conditions, self or familial. Read of any attempts to break sleep-deprivation world records throughout early history, and you will discover this same universal signature of emotional instability and psychosis of one sort or another. It is the lack of REM sleep—that critical stage occurring in the final hours of sleep that we strip from our children and teenagers by way of early school start times—that creates the difference between a stable and unstable mental state.

The United States will deal with it as it always does, with its citizens going through a decade of intense political rage at each other, accompanied by an economic crisis and a social one: the old against the young, and the problem of innovation leading to instability. Finally, the political process will create a solution, with a failing president who worships the old cycle, followed by one who will claim credit for presiding over the new cycle and its solutions.

Whenever there is a breakdown in...stability, as has happened frequently in Pakistan, the military translates its potential into the will to dominate, and we have military intervention followed by military rule,’ states former army chief General Jehangir Karamat. ‘But,’ he states, ‘As far as the track record of the military as rulers in the past is concerned, I am afraid it is not much better than the civilians.

and other Arab states, like Egypt and Lebanon, which also have constitutions, are struggling with serious political violence and instability,

In the end, the annexation goal was spurred on by falling sugar prices and the rising belief that the United States must control Hawaiʻi against other foreign interests and to protect the West Coast of the contiguous United States of America. There was also a perceived air of economic instability and the potential for an economic depression to beset the islands. This spurred Americans like Lorrin Thurston and Minister John L. Stevens to zealously promote and push the idea of annexation abroad, leading to many US politicians to buy into the idea. Stevens asked the US State Department to send additional naval forces to protect American interests and asked Washington to station a warship in Honolulu indefinitely to secure the islands. This was the beginning of a rapid increase in American military might in Hawaiʻi.

The newly formed United States offered both opportunity and instability. Citizens were afforded the chance to move, experiment, succeed, and, just as often, fail within a nation that prioritized the individual over the community.

a very strange and brilliant marine major named Earl “Pete” Ellis wrote a paper for the Marine Corps in which he said that Japan was the United States’ greatest enemy and the two would ultimately engage in war. He based his hypothesis on the tactical movements of Japan in the Pacific after World War I and on what he interpreted as its clear goals of expansion under the cloak of secrecy. He predicted with uncanny prescience that the initial strategy of a Japanese attack would be to destroy a great portion of the US fleet. He further predicted that the United States, in declaring war in retaliation, would adopt an island-hopping strategy across the Pacific, building up advance bases and airstrips until the Japanese homeland was close enough to be easily attacked. The only way to fend off the Japanese would be by adopting an amphibious assault doctrine as a new kind of military strategy. Ellis may have been the most brilliant marine in history and also the most tragic. Suspected to be bipolar and hospitalized several times for alcoholism, he never went above the rank of major because of his emotional instability. He died in 1923 at the age of forty-two on the Japanese-controlled island of Palau in the western Pacific while supposedly on a spy mission. No one knows quite how he died. But his amphibious assault theory, now considered one of the greatest

The “Chinese question” found its answer at the national level, in the debate over a California-led plan for Chinese exclusion. In reconstructing the United States, California was emerging as the regional swing vote, just as the state’s enfranchised settlers became single-issue voters. The transcontinental railroad solidified the state’s membership in the Union, which was far from a given considering how often the territory had changed hands in the previous few decades as well as its continual political instability and foreign interference in Mexico, not to mention the temporary sundering of the United States itself. California’s Unionist majority helped repair that split, cutting off the Confederacy’s western tendency. But Unionist didn’t necessarily mean faithfully devoted to principles of abolition democracy and the spirit of the slave revolution. The race-based exclusion of Chinese from the country flew in the face of Reconstruction and the black-led attempt to create a pluralist, racially equal nation. But that seeming contradiction was no contradiction at all for California’s white Jacksonians, because they maintained a consistent position in favor of free white labor and free white labor only. As for the regionally aligned party duopoly, California’s vote swung against the South during the war, but it could swing back. Federal civil rights legislation meant to force the ex-Confederate states to integrate also applied to settler California’s relations with the Chinese, which left the southern and western delegations looking for a solution to their linked nonwhite labor problems. If former slaves and their children were able to escape not just their commodity status but also their working role in the regional economy, southern planters threatened to bring in Chinese laborers to replace them, just as planters had in the West Indies. That would blow the exclusion plan out of the water, which gave California an incentive to compromise with the South. These two racist blocs came to an agreement that permanently set the direction of the modern American project: They agreed to cede the South to the Confederate redeemers and exclude the Chinese.

I have also learned that most any decision made in a state of fear is the wrong one. It impedes our judgment and preys on us in times of weakness and instability. It is an evil force that can cripple us with harmful thoughts and emotions running amok. It causes us to exaggerate the dangers we face. Remember, darkness is present only in the absence of light. Whether literal, emotional, metaphorical, or spiritual, it is necessary to turn on the light to drive out the darkness. Fear need not have any place of prominence in our lives. We must chase it away as soon as we recognize it has encroached into our spaces.

The variables which were apt for management by central authorities were interest rates and taxation, which he proposed that governments should adjust in order to stimulate investment and to seek full employment. However, he said little of emergency public works, and nothing about fiscal methods of demand management. He did not recommend increasing the government’s current expenditure by running a budget deficit to meet a deficiency of demand. He gave no encouragement to profligate finance ministers. He urged that additional government expenditure should be on capital account and financed from a separate capital budget while so far as possible the regular budget should be kept in balance. He suggested that full employment might be maintained by redistribution of income. If wealth was more equitably dispersed in the population, effective demand would be stimulated and would thus help capital growth. As the scarcity of capital diminished, investors would be rewarded less. He never believed that state planning would eliminate economic instability. He saw national economies as inherently wobbling: they were susceptible to rational management, but with irrational elements.73

epidemics and even pandemics strike disproportionately often during the disintegrative phases of secular cycles (Turchin 2008b). Instability also has a negative impact on the productive capacity of a society. Lacking strong government to protect them, peasants cultivate only fields that are near fortified settlements or other strongpoints (e.g., hilltop settlements). Conversely, the strong state protects the productive population from external and internal (banditry, civil war) threats, and thus allows the whole cultivable area to be put into production.

one of the most reliable predictors of state collapse and high political instability is elite overproduction (Turchin and Nefedov 2009:314).

In a society of declining intelligence, we would expect: rising crime and corruption; decreasing civic participation and lower voter turn-out; higher rates of illegitimacy; poorer health and greater obesity, an increased interest in the instinctive, especially sex; greater political instability and decline in democracy; higher levels of social conflict; higher levels of selfishness and so a decline in any welfare state; a growing unemployable underclass; falling educational standards; and a lack of intellectualism and thus decreasing interest in education as a good in itself. We would also expect more and more little things to go wrong that we didn’t used to notice: buses running out of petrol, trains delayed, aeroplanes landing badly, roads not being repaired, people arriving late and thinking it’s perfectly okay; several large and lots of little lies . . . In addition, the broader modern system – especially of extended formal education (stretching ever further into adult life), exam results and continuous assessments, required subjects and courses; the supposed ‘meritocracy’ – suppresses the influence of genius, since the Endogenous personality is seeking, ever more strongly with age, to follow his inner drives, his Destiny, and all the paraphernalia of normal, standard requirements stands in his path. While others need sticks and carrots, and are grateful for encouragement, discipline and direction; the Endogenous personality is driven from within and (beyond a basic minimum) he neither needs nor appreciates these things – at best they slow him down, at worst they thwart and exclude him. The Endogenous personality requires mainly to be allowed to do what he intrinsically and spontaneously wants to do – but in modern society he is more likely to be prevented.

To solve the inability of middle-class renters to purchase single-family homes for the first time, Congress and President Roosevelt created the Federal Housing Administration in 1934. The FHA insured bank mortgages that covered 80 percent of purchase prices, had terms of twenty years, and were fully amortized. To be eligible for such insurance, the FHA insisted on doing its own appraisal of the property to make certain that the loan had a low risk of default. Because the FHA's appraisal standards included a whites-only requirement, racial segregation now became an official requirement of the federal mortgage insurance program. The FHA judged that properties would probably be too risky for insurance if they were in racially mixed neighborhoods or even in white neighborhoods near black ones that might possibly integrate in the future. When a bank applied to the FHA for insurance on a prospective loan, the agency conducted a property appraisal, which was also likely performed by a local real estate agent hired by the agency. as the volume of applications increased, the agency hired its own appraisers, usually from the ranks of the private real estate agents who had previously been working as contractors for the FHA. To guide their work, the FHA provided them with an Underwriting Manual. The first, issued in 1935, gave this instruction: 'If a neighborhood is to retain stability it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally leads to instability and a reduction in values.' Appraisers were told to give higher ratings where '[p]rotection against some adverse influences is obtained,' and that '[i]mportant among adverse influences . . . are infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups.' The manual concluded that '[a]ll mortgages on properties protected against [such] unfavorable influences, to the extent such protection is possible, will obtain a high rating.' The FHA discouraged banks from making any loans at all in urban neighborhoods rather than newly built suburbs; according to the Underwriting Manual, 'older properties . . . have a tendency to accelerate the rate of transition to lower class occupancy.' The FHA favored mortgages in areas where boulevards or highways served to separate African American families from whites, stating that '[n]atural or artificially established barriers will prove effective in protecting a neighborhood and the locations within it from adverse influences, . . . includ[ing] prevention of the infiltration of . . . lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.

The Maya experience illustrates not only the possibility of growth under extractive institutions but also another fundamental limit to this type of growth: the political instability that emerges and ultimately leads to collapse of both society and state as different groups and people fight to become the extractors.

Six months before Israel’s birth, the United Nations had decided by a two-thirds majority that the only just solution to the British departure from Palestine would be the establishment of a Jewish state and an Arab state side by side. The undeniable fact remains: The Jews accepted that compromise; the Arabs rejected it. With a vengeance. On the day the British pulled down their flag, Israel was invaded by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Iraq—650,000 Jews against 40 million Arabs. Israel prevailed, another miracle. But at a very high cost—not just to the Palestinians displaced as a result of a war designed to extinguish Israel at birth, but also to the Israelis, whose war losses were staggering: 6,373 dead. One percent of the population. In American terms, it would take 35 Vietnam memorials to encompass such a monumental loss of life. You rarely hear about Israel’s terrible suffering in that 1948–49 war. You hear only the Palestinian side. Today, in the same vein, you hear that Israeli settlements and checkpoints and occupation are the continuing root causes of terrorism and instability in the region.

Warm winds and cold winds charged into the system--the collision of temperatures that keeps a baby spinning, breathing. The goal is to get that rotation to be self-sustaining. It's an art, no doubt, to calibrate your inputs so that you fight off homeostasis, keeping a young storm in that growth state. A tornado farmer is always in pursuit of a paradox: consistent instability. As Estelle and our girls would tell you, if I have one talent, its for this: knowing what a developing storm needs to stay angry, to live on.

Let’s assume the Americans and their allies eventually defeat ISIS and roll back the caliphate. What then? Will Syria be put back together again? Will Iraq? Will the Americans stay this time to ensure the peace? Unlikely, which means there’s going to be several million disaffected and disenfranchised Sunni Muslims living between the Tigris and the Euphrates. They will be a source of regional instability for generations to come.” “They were artificial countries to begin with, Iraq and Syria. Maybe it’s time to draw new lines in the sand.” “Another failed Arab state in the making,” said Gabriel. “Just what the Middle East needs.” “Perhaps

When there is no true balance there are bound to be repercussions.” He paused. “I hinted once that the human body was out of tune. The same, with due respect, applies to the mental state. A man’s mind should be precisely balanced between emotion and reason. In true order a man would consult reason before being swept away by emotion. The emotion itself should be the force to vitalize and empower his considered action. Bluntly, the race is unstable and out of balance. You consider this instability normal because you have met and experienced no other.” “I get your point, but I’m not sure I care for it.” Gaynor was frowning. “Hell, you’re telling me politely we’re all nut cases.” Duncan looked at him directly and without smiling. “Mr. Gaynor, you’re demonstrating my point admirably. You’re allowing pride and resentment to overrule your intellect.

Out of this historic interlude of hope and chaos, into the resulting vacuum of instability, the Islamic State emerged. It was sophisticated, organized, and determined to exploit all the grievances, cracks, and disorder the lost revolutions so generously offered. And it had perceptively noted women as a rising political force, even as it proposed a radically patriarchal form of family organization and politics that stripped women of their autonomy.

No Saudi king ever came to power facing greater regional instability than Salman bin Abdulaziz. In January 2015, the very existence of Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen was in question. The Islamic State, or ISIS, had become the first terrorist organization with its own capital city and oil production. Iran was supporting the Houthi insurgents in Yemen, who had just taken the capital, Sanaa, and were on the verge of capturing the entire country. Not since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century had the Arab world seen such widespread chaos—and all of it threatened Saudi security.

Firstly, given that a lasting solution to security threats requires fundamental change rather than near-constant crisis suppression and stabilisation, is there any way to avoid a trade-off between less short-term security and greater long-term security? At a superficial level, such a trade-off seems unavoidable but the dilemma may be largely one of risk perception and the need to be seen to act decisively. The 2011 uprisings across the region appear to testify against the notion that short-term security can be purchased at the expense of a state’s longer-term development and self determination. A critical question, therefore, becomes whether there is a way to avoid a perceived trade-off between less short-term security and more long-term security in front of a domestic audience? In other words, can a Western audience perceive the risks associated with political instability in the Middle East to be potentially beneficial for building more stable polities in the future and, moreover, something over which its elected officials can exercise little real positive influence in the short-term? US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others have repeatedly stressed their concerns that a power vaccuum or a civil war in Yemen may play into al-Qaeda’s hands.

Even today, many poor and lower-middle-class whites feel more solidarity with Bill Gates and George W. Bush than with African-Americans or Hispanic-Americans of comparable economic status. Indeed, as many have observed, large numbers of working-class whites in the United States oppose welfare and increased government spending on social services, often voting against what might be expected to be their economic self-interest. It is widely suspected that racism (together with a thriving ideology of upward mobility) plays a role in this pattern.

Page 259: The bottom line is this. Democracy can be inimical to the interests of market-dominant minorities. There were good reasons why the Indians in Kenya and whites in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and America’s Southern states resisted democratization for generations. Market-dominant minorities do not really want democracy, at least not in the sense of having their fate determined by genuine majority rule. Some readers will surely protest. Many market-dominant minorities—the Chinese in Malaysia, for example, or Jews in Russia, and Americans everywhere—often seem to be among the most vocal advocates of democracy. But “democracy” is a notoriously contested term, meaning different things to different people. When entrepreneurial but politically vulnerable minorities like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, or Jews in Russia call for democracy, they principally have in mind constitutionally guaranteed human rights and property protections for minorities. In other words, in calling for democracy, these “outsider” groups are precisely seeking protection against “tyranny of the majority.

Page 207 In the inner cities of all the major metropolitan areas across the United States, ethnic Koreans represent an increasingly glaring market-dominant minority vis-à-vis the relatively economically depressed African-American majorities around them. In New York City, Koreans, less than .1 percent of the city’s population, own 85 percent of produce stands, 70 percent of grocery stores, 80 percent of nail salons, and 60 percent of dry cleaners. In portions of downtown Los Angeles, Koreans own 40 percent of the real estate but constitute only 10 percent of the residents. Korean-American businesses in Los Angeles County number roughly 25,000, with gross sales of $4.5 billion. Nationwide, Korean entrepreneurs have in the last decade come to control 80 percent of the $2.5 billion African-American beauty business, which—“like preaching and burying people”—historically was always a “black” business and a source of pride, income, and jobs for African-Americans. “They’ve come in and taken away a market that’s not rightfully theirs,” is the common, angry view among inner-city blacks. Page 208 At a December 31, 1994, rally, Norman “Grand Dad” Reide, vice president of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, accused Koreans of “reaping a financial harvest at the expense of black people” and recommended that “we boycott the bloodsucking Koreans.” More recently, in November 2000, African-Americans firebombed a Korean-owned grocery store in northeast Washington, D.C. The spray-painted message on the charred walls: “Burn them down, Shut them down, Black Power!

The teens are emotionally unstable and pathic. It is a natural impulse to experience hot and perfervid psychic states, and it is characterized by emotionalism. We see here the instability and fluctuations now so characteristic. The emotions develop by contrast and reaction into the opposite.

Climate scientists encountered Lorenz’s ideas in 1965, when he gave the keynote address at a conference in Colorado called “The Causes of Climate Change,” the first big scientific gathering devoted to the subject. As he described the instability he had uncovered, his audience made the connection with carbon dioxide. Conference organizer Roger Revelle, who had been skeptical, was persuaded. If small changes in initial conditions could have enormous long-term effects, he said in a summary speech, then perhaps tiny rises and falls in atmospheric carbon dioxide could “ ‘flip’ the atmospheric circulation from one state to another.” Arrhenius and Callendar had been vindicated. A scientific consensus was emerging: a tiny shift in the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide load could make Earth hard to live on. And Keeling had shown that carbon dioxide levels were rising in exactly the way that might lift temperatures to new heights. Revelle was then on a panel charged by the U.S. president with writing a report about environmental pollution. He took advantage of the position to create a subpanel on carbon dioxide and write the first-ever official government report about the possibility of climate change.

Even when states attain security, it is too often fleeting. Instead, states must always be on their guard, and possibly even always seeking to expand, regardless of what effect it might have on other states.24 Norms, institutions, and international organizations are of little value in dampening this dangerous state of affairs.25 This result is something more properly termed a “security paradox,” in which the innate desire for security counterintuitively begets insecurity and instability.26 The

Polarization, of course, is no accident. A divide and conquer game is now underway inside the United States which is calculated to produce instability. It naturally comes on the heels of a societal demoralization (decades in the making). Given current preparations for war in Korea, stage three (crisis) will likely result from a military clash in the Far East. The final stage (normalization), signifies the acceptance by the United States of Russian and Chinese military dominance (formalized by a treaty). This, of course, is only one dimension of the crisis/normalization process. Yet, if things go according to plan, it will be the decisive dimension. Of course, destabilization is carried out by secret agent networks in much the same way as demoralization. It is a process guided by KGB officers and recruited agents. These agents not only operate on the political left. In order to guide the process the KGB has placed agents on the political right – in the guise of rock-solid conservatives. Bezmenov says that recruiting agents on the left is, in fact, not as important as recruiting (or planting) them on the right.

...decision makers should realize that even with rational models and established parameters, situations will arise that may compel the United States to participate in peace operations. Humanitarian issues may seem compelling; domestic political pressures and pressures from allies may develop; and a range of foreign and domestic policy issues may require response, even if important U.S. security interests are not at stake directly. Military strategist and planners should be aware, also, that in a democratic society and an interdependent world, sometime decisions will be made outside established parameters for interventions. That makes the development of a strategy and the establishment of criteria all the more important, although planning for such events is necessarily less predictable and necessarily of lower priority. The systematic ability to analyze both the significance for national security and the immediate rationale for involvement may permit policy makers to withstand pressures if the consequences might be negative, or set limits that reduce potential harm. The...debate...about U.S. involvement in the former Yugoslavia is a microcosm of the varied and conflicting pressures that may arise. Some combination of assessment of national interest weighed against risk has militated against any commitment of ground troops while hostilities continue. Yet the importance of protecting allies may cause the policy to bend somewhat before the war ends, and the United States may become involved in an operation on a scale that may have been unnecessary if a strategy and the organization of national assets to support it had been available to prevent the crisis in the first place. Traditionally, peace operations, especially peacekeeping, were viewed as operations that came at the tail end of conflict. There will continue to be a need for peace operations to assist in bringing about and guaranteeing peace. However, the value of peace operations in dealing with precursor instabilities - to prevent, contain, or ameliorate incipient conflicts -- must be considered also. In this sense, peace operations are investments. Properly conducted by forces that have planned, prepared and trained for them within the proper strategic framework, peace operations may well preclude the need to deploy larger forces at substantial costs in both blood and treasure later.

bear in mind that since our equation states that a necessary condition for cultural stability is perfect economic complementarity, it follows that lack of complementarity—a modern condition in which new objects are constantly seeking new needs, and new needs are constantly chasing after new objects—involves cultural instability.