Highlights from all books

The active effort required to resist the slide into entropy wasn’t there, and decay inevitably followed.

Science has heroes, but no gods. The great Names are not our superiors, or even our rivals; they are passed milestones on our road. And the most important milestone is the hero yet to come.

manipulating which meanings go with which words.

Since the days of Socrates at least, and probably long before, the way to appear cultured and sophisticated has been to never let anyone see you care strongly about anything. It’s embarrassing

Curiosity, as a human emotion, has been around since long before the ancient Greeks. But what set humanity firmly on the path of Science was noticing that certain modes of thinking uncovered beliefs that let us manipulate the world.

If you are a scientist just beginning to investigate fire, it might be a lot wiser to point to a campfire and say “Fire is that orangey-bright hot stuff over there,” rather than saying “I define fire as an alchemical transmutation of substances which releases phlogiston.” You should not ignore something just because you can’t define it.

“What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world.”

“People,” Shai said, rising to fetch another seal, “by nature attempt to exercise power over what is around them. We build walls to shelter us from the wind, roofs to stop the rain. We tame the elements, bend nature to our wills. It makes us feel as if we’re in control. “Except in doing so, we merely replace one influence with another. Instead of the wind affecting us, it is a wall. A man-made wall. The fingers of man’s influence are all about, touching everything. Man-made rugs, man-made food. Every single thing in the city that we touch, see, feel, experience comes as the result of some person’s influence. “We may feel in control, but we never truly are unless we understand people.

The real challenge of any public spending idea is whether the country actually has the resources and ability to do the job. We can’t build a colony on Mars not because we “can’t pay for it” but because we literally lack the ability to do

In the case of sincere seekers, the answer is only slightly less obvious: who of us would want to become finders, as long as our search so meaningfully - so nobly! - structures our time and wards off boredom, and as long as the Nothing - which some say lies at the end of our quest - reads at this safe distance much more like an unveiled threat than a veiled promise? No, we have every reason to remain humble seekers! We are not enlightened! The fact is that in us all lurks an existential terror, a powerful and altogether natural resistance to what - seemingly - amounts to sudden death and annihilation.

One of the more beautiful things about the scientific method is that it is cumulative and incremental. Today, many of us can understand things that would have seemed entirely incomprehensible even in principle to our ancestors, maybe even to scientists and philosophers working just a few decades ago. Over time, mystery 20after mystery has yielded to the systematic application of reason and experiment. If we take mysterianism as a serious option we might as well all give up and go home. So, let’s not.

The real problem accepts that conscious experiences exist and focuses primarily on their phenomenological properties.

The fatal flaw of vitalism was to interpret a failure of imagination as an insight into necessity. This is the same flaw that lies at the heart of the zombie argument.

Equally important, it pushes back against the limiting idea that consciousness is just ‘one thing’ – a single intimidating mystery that might elude scientific explanation altogether. We will instead see how different properties of consciousness come together in different ways, across species and even among different people. There are as many different ways of being conscious as there are different conscious organisms. Eventually, the hard problem itself may succumb, so that we will be able to understand consciousness as being continuous with the rest of nature without having to adopt any arbitrary ‘ism’ stating by fiat how phenomenology and physics are related. This is the promise of the real problem.

At any one time we have precisely one conscious experience out of vastly many possible conscious experiences. Every conscious experience therefore delivers a massive reduction of uncertainty, since this experience is being had, and not that experience, or that experience, and so on. And reduction of uncertainty is – mathematically – what is meant by information.

This underpins the main claim of the theory, which is that a system is conscious to the extent that its whole generates more information than its parts.

It’s important to recognise that these challenges – including that of measuring intrinsic information, rather than observer-relative, extrinsic information – are only problems for us as scientists, as external observers, trying to calculate Φ. According to IIT, any particular system would just have a Φ. It would go about its business integrating information in just the same way that when you throw a stone, it traces an arc through the sky without needing to calculate its trajectory according to the laws of gravity. Just because 68a theory is difficult to test doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It just means it’s difficult to test.

More than a thousand years later, but still a thousand years ago, the Arab scholar Ibn al Haytham wrote that perception, in the here and now, depends on processes of ‘judgement and inference’ rather than providing direct access to an objective reality.

The third and most important ingredient in the controlled hallucination view is the claim that perceptual experience – in this case the subjective experience of ‘seeing a coffee cup’ – is determined by the content of the (top-down) predictions, and not by the (bottom-up) sensory signals. We never experience sensory signals themselves, we only ever experience interpretations of them. Mix these ingredients together and we’ve cooked up a Copernican inversion for how to think about perception. It seems as though the world is revealed directly to our conscious minds through our sensory organs. With this mindset, it is natural to think of perception as a process of bottom-up feature detection – a ‘reading’ of the world around us. But what we actually perceive is a top-down, inside-out neuronal fantasy that is reined in by reality, not a transparent window onto whatever that reality may be.

When I look at a red chair, the redness I experience depends both on properties of the chair and on properties of my brain. It corresponds to the content of a set of perceptual predictions about the ways in which a specific kind of surface reflects light. There is no redness-as-such in the world or in the brain. As Paul Cézanne said, ‘colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet.’

In statistics, the essence of prediction is in catering for the absence of sufficient data. Whether this is because predictions are about the future – one can think of the future as ‘insufficient data’ – or about some current but incompletely unknown state of affairs, doesn’t matter.

Thinking about action in this way underlines how action and perception are two sides of the same coin. Rather than perception being the input and action being the output with respect to some central ‘mind’, action and perception are both forms of brain-based prediction.

Our perceptual world alive with colours, shapes, and sounds is nothing more and nothing less than our brain’s best guess of the hidden causes of its colourless, shapeless, and soundless sensory inputs.

The concept of the beholder’s share cries out to be connected with predictive theories of perception – like the controlled hallucination theory. As Kandel put it: ‘The insight that the beholder’s perception involves a top-down inference convinced Gombrich that there is no “innocent eye”: that is, all visual perception is based on classifying concepts and interpreting visual information. One cannot perceive that which one cannot classify.’

I wanted a cup of tea, but I did not choose to want a cup of tea. Voluntary actions are voluntary not because they descend from an immaterial soul, nor because they ascend from a quantum soup. They are voluntary because they express what I, as a person, want to do, even though I cannot choose these wants.

The second defining feature is the feeling that I could have done otherwise. When I experience an action as voluntary, the character of the experience is not only that I did X, but that I did X and not Y, even though I could have done Y.

This is the essence of the real problem approach to consciousness. Accept that consciousness exists, and then ask how the various phenomenological properties of consciousness – which is to say how conscious experiences are structured, what form they take – relate to properties of brains, brains that are embodied in bodies and embedded in worlds

Capitalist economy is strikingly characterized by a special kind of periodic economic crisis, not met with or occurring only very rarely and on limited scales in other types of society. These capitalist crises of production have no relation either to “natural catastrophes” (drought, famine, plague, etc.) or to people’s biological and psychological needs for the goods that might be turned out, one or the other of which determined most crises in other types of society. The capitalist crises are determined by economic relations and forces. It is not necessary for our purpose to enter into the disputed question of the exact causes of the crises; whatever account is given, no one denies their reality, their periodic occurrence, and their basic difference from dislocations of production and consumption in other types of society.

An “ideology” is similar in the social sphere to what is sometimes called “rationalization” in the sphere of individual psychology. An ideology is not a scientific theory, but is nonscientific and often antiscientific. It is the expression of hopes, wishes, fears, ideals, not a hypothesis about events—though ideologies are often thought by those who hold them to be scientific theories.

Among the elements entering into the ideologies typical of capitalist society, there must be prominently included, though it is not so easy to define what we mean by it, individualism. Capitalist thought, whether reflected in theology or art or legal, economic, and political theory, or philosophy or morality, has exhibited a steady concentration on the idea of the “individual.” We find the “individual” wherever we turn: in Luther’s appeal to “private interpretation” of the Bible as the test of religious truth;

According to the prevailing capitalist idea, the fundamental unit of politics, psychology, sociology, morality, theology, economics was thought of as the single human individual. This individual was understood as complete “in himself,” in his own nature, and as having only external relations to other persons and things. Though Hegel and his followers notoriously reject this conception, it is unquestionably typical, and is implicit where not explicit in most of the influential doctrines and public documents of the fields just mentioned. The Church, the state, the ideal utopia, are not realities in themselves but only numerical sums of the individuals who compose them.

Finally, in capitalist society, the theological and supernatural interpretation of the meaning of world history was replaced by the idea of progress, first appearing in the writers of the Renaissance and being given definite formulation during the eighteenth century. There were two factors in the idea of progress: first, that mankind was advancing steadily and inevitably to better and better things; and, second, the definition of the goal toward which the advance is taking place in naturalistic terms, in terms we might say of an earthly instead of a heavenly paradise.

If socialism is to come, the working class, as we have seen, has always, and rightly, been held to be the primary social group which will have a hand in its coming. According to Marx himself, the inherent development of capitalist society as it tended toward centralization and monopoly was such that there would take place the “proletarianization” of the overwhelming bulk of the population; that

There has been a corresponding change in the technique of making war, which, since social relations are ultimately a question of relative power, is equally decisive as a mark of the deterioration in the social position of the working class.

The general field of the science of politics is the struggle for social power among organized groups of men.

“Defense” for an individual usually means preventing some other individual from hitting him; “struggle” means literal and direct physical encounter, and we can easily observe who wins such a struggle. But “defense” and “struggle” in the case of social groups—classes or nations or races or whatever the groups may be—are far more complicated matters. Such words are, when applied to groups, metaphors. This does not mean, as we are told by our popularizing semanticists who do not understand what semantics teaches, that we ought not use such words. It means only that we must be careful, that we must not take the metaphor as expressing a full identity, that we must relate our words to what actually happens.

First, that the net result in terms of alterations of the structure of society was to benefit, above all, the bourgeoisie, as against all other sections of society, and to leave the bourgeoisie ever more securely the ruling class in society. Second, the bulk of the actual fighters were not themselves capitalists. Presumably, at least where it was not a matter of direct compulsion, most of those who fought believed that they did so for ends which were beneficial to themselves; but, at least so far as economic and social benefit went, this turned out, for the non-bourgeois bulk of the fighters, either not to be the case at all or at least far secondary to the benefit resulting to the capitalists. Similar remarks apply to the development of the new ideologies. From the time of the Renaissance a number of more or less related new ideologies—religions, philosophies, moralities, theories of law and politics and society—were developed, and some of them became widely believed. None of these ideologies spoke openly in the name of the bourgeoisie; none of them said that the best kind of society and politics and morality and religion and universe was one in which the capitalists were the ruling class; they spoke, as all important ideologies do, in the name of “truth” and for the ostensible welfare of all mankind.

It must be stressed that the building of bourgeois dominance began and was carried far within feudalism, while the structure of society was predominantly feudal in character, while, in particular, the political, religious, and educational institutions were still controlled in the primary interests of the feudal lords. This was possible because society accorded the capitalists, at least to a sufficient extent, those “rights” necessary for carrying on capitalist enterprise—of contract, of taking interest, hiring free workers for wages, etc.—in spite of the fact that most of these rights were directly forbidden by feudal law, custom, and philosophy (often, as in the case of taking interest, pious formulas were used to get around the prohibitions), and in spite of the fact that the wide extension of capitalist relations meant necessarily the destruction of the social dominance of the feudal lords.

A bourgeois state, a state “controlled” by the bourgeoisie, means fundamentally a state which, by and large, most of the time and on the most important occasions, upholds those rights, those ways of acting and thinking, which are such as to permit

A third source of conflict is found in what we might call “occupational bias,” a point to which we shall return later. The different things which these different groups do promote in their respective members different attitudes, habits of thought, ideals, ways and methods of solving problems. To put it crudely: the managers tend to think of solving social and political problems as they co-ordinate and organize the actual process of production; the nonmanagerial executives think of society as a price-governed profit-making animal; the finance-capitalists think of problems in terms of what happens in banks and stock exchanges and security flotations; the little stockholders think of the economy as a mysterious god who, if placated properly, will hand out free gifts to the deserving.

These two rights (control of access and preferential treatment in distribution) are fundamental in ownership and, as we have noted, determine the dominant or ruling class in society—which consists simply of the group that has those rights, or has them, at least, in greater measure than the rest of society, with respect to the chief instruments of production.

But if we reinterpret the phrase “separation of ownership and control” to mean “separation of control over access from control over preferential treatment in distribution”—and this is partly what lies back of the Berle and Means analysis—then we are confronted

The contention of the last chapter that control over the instruments of production is everywhere undergoing a shift, away from the capitalists proper and toward the managers, will seem to many fantastic and naïve, especially if we are thinking in the first instance of the United States. Consider, it will be argued, the growth of monopoly in our time. Think of the Sixty Families, with their billions upon billions of wealth, their millions of shares of stock in the greatest corporations, and their lives which exceed in luxury and display anything even dreamed of by the rulers of past ages. The managers, even the chief of them, are only the servants, the bailiffs of the Sixty Families. How absurd to call the servant, master! Such would have been the comment—except, perhaps, of a few in a few small towns—Florence, Genoa, Venice, Bruges, Augsburg—if anyone had in the early fifteenth century been so much a dreamer as to suggest that control was then shifting from the feudal lords toward the small, dull, vulgar group of merchants and traders and moneylenders.

The instruments of production are the seat of social domination; who controls them, in fact not in name, controls society,

The inability of a ruling class to assimilate fresh and vigorous new blood into its ranks is correctly recognized by many sociologists as an important symptom of the decadence of that class and its approaching downfall.

In capitalist society, the role of government in the economy is always secondary. The government acts in the economy chiefly to preserve the integrity of the market and of capitalist property relations, and to give aid and comfort, as in wars or international competition or internal disturbances, where these are needed. This we have noted in describing the general features of capitalist society. This restriction in the government’s sphere of activity—whatever the form of the government, dictatorial or democratic, in the political sphere—is not a coincidence, but, it must be stressed again, an integral part of the whole social structure of capitalism. Capitalist economy is a system of private ownership, of ownership of a certain type vested in private individuals, of private enterprise. The capitalist state is therefore, and necessarily, a limited state.

you cannot call an economy of state ownership capitalist, because in it there are no capitalists A capitalist is one who, as an individual, has ownership interest in the instruments of production; who, as an individual, employs workers, pays them wages, and is entitled to the products of their labor.

There are many millions of persons and many groups in the world today who consciously advocate state ownership of the instruments of production. They do so out of a variety of motives: some because they think it will bring a classless society and freedom, others because they think it will make possible universal material well-being, others from even more abstractly moral reasons. The attitude and actions of these persons and groups are one of the important social forces tending to bring about state ownership. Nevertheless, the result of state ownership does not depend upon the motives from which these persons advocate it.

Many persons want state ownership and control, but the tendency toward state ownership and control is not by any means dependent exclusively on the fact that many people want it and deliberately work toward it. There are persons who want to revive feudalism, who would like socialism, no doubt even those who wish for chattel slavery; but actual conditions prevent their wants from having any chance of being realized. The circumstances, problems, and difficulties of the present, however, all combine to furnish soil on which state ownership and control grow rapidly. Private enterprise proves unable to keep the productive process going; the state therefore steps in. Modern total war demands the co-ordination of the economy; this can be done only through state control. Private investment dries up; state investment takes its place. Private enterprise fails to take care of the unemployed; the state gives them jobs.

managerial economy is no longer “the profit system.”

Managerial economy would not be going to replace capitalist economy unless it could solve, at least in some measure, those key difficulties (which we noticed in Chapter III) that are faced by capitalism and make impossible the continuance of capitalism. We know, without waiting for the future, that managerial economy can do away with mass unemployment or reduce it to a negligible minimum. This was done, by managerial methods, in Russia and Germany at the same time that England, France, and the United States proved incapable of doing it by capitalist methods. The question here is not whether we “approve” of the way in which mass unemployment was or will be got rid of. We may think that unemployment is preferable to, for example, conscript labor battalions. Nevertheless, mass unemployment is the most intolerable of all the difficulties that any economy can face, sufficient, by itself, to guarantee the collapse of an economic system; and we are concerned with the fact, already sufficiently proved, that managerial methods and managerial economic relations can get rid of unemployment, whereas capitalist methods no longer can do so.

Put in the crudest way, there will continue to be, as there has always been in human history, fighting over the spoils. The fight may translate, and thereby partly hide, itself into political and juridical, as well as physical, forms that we do not as yet suspect, but it will go on. And this is sufficient reason, if there were no others, why we should have as little faith in the promises of the ideologies of the managers—fascist or Leninist or Stalinist or New Dealer or technocratic—as we ought to have learned to have in those of the capitalists, when they tell us that following their pipe will guarantee

Any organised society patterns its life according to certain rules—customs, laws, decrees. These rules may not be written down, may not be explicitly formulated even in verbal terms, but they must exist or there would be no sense in calling the society organized. The origin of many of the rules, at any given moment, is lost in a remote past; but there must be within the society some mechanism for enforcing those taken over from the past, and, since the rules are always changing and being added to or dropped, for stating and enforcing new or changed rules. A social group which makes and enforces its own rules for itself, and does not recognize rules made for it by an agency outside the group, is called “autonomous” or “sovereign”—such as the capitalist nations all claimed to be and the chief of them in fact were.

The “sovereignty” of the group, by virtue of which rules are made, cannot, however, simply float in the group air. It must be localized, concretized, in some human institution which is accepted as the institution from which rules (in complex society called “laws”) come.

Freedom along certain lines always implies restrictions along other lines.

The key characteristic of “democracy” as we use the word (whatever it may have meant to the Greeks who invented it) is the granting of the right of political expression to minorities. More fully: democracy is a political system where policy is decided, directly or indirectly, by a majority, and where minorities, differing in their opinion from the majority, have the right of political expression and the opportunity, thereby, of becoming a majority.

Furthermore, there are always, in fact, restrictions about the limits of democratically acceptable opposition. When the minority goes beyond these limits it is not given rights to propagate its views but suppressed as “subversive” or “criminal” or “vicious.”

Discontent and opposition, under an absolute dictatorship, having no mechanism for orderly expression, tend to take terroristic and, in times of crisis, revolutionary forms. The example of capitalist parliaments shows how well democratic possibilities are able to make discontent and opposition harmless by providing them with an outlet.

Sovereignty for a nation implies that the nation makes laws for itself and recognizes no superior lawmaker. It means that the nation sets up tariffs and other import and export controls, regulates its own foreign policies and its own currency, and maintains civil, diplomatic, and military establishments. The simultaneous existence of many sovereign nations in the modern world necessarily means an anarchic situation in world politics. This must be because, since each sovereign nation recognizes no lawmaker superior to itself, there is in the end no way except by force to mediate the deep conflicts that are bound to arise among the various nations.

All organized societies are cemented together, not merely by force and the threat of force, and by established patterns of institutional behavior, but also by accepted ways of feeling and thinking and talking and looking at the world, by ideologies.

The problem with an ideology is not, when properly understood, whether it is true, but: what interests does it express, and how adequately and persuasively does it express them?

Scientific theories are always controlled by the facts: they must be able to explain the relevant evidence already at hand, and on their basis it must be possible to make verifiable predictions about the future. Ideologies are not controlled by facts, even though they may incorporate some scientific elements and are ordinarily considered scientific by those who believe in them.

The major ideologies of capitalist society, as we noted briefly in an earlier chapter, were variants on the themes of: individualism; opportunity; “natural rights,” especially the rights of property; freedom, especially “freedom of contract”; private enterprise; private initiative; and so on. These ideologies conformed well to the two requirements stated above. Under the interpretations given them, they expressed and served the interests of the capitalists. They justified profit and interest. They showed why the owner of the instruments of production was entitled to the full product of those instruments and why the worker had no claim on the owner except for the contracted wages. They preserved the supremacy of the field of private enterprise. They kept the state to its limited role.

In 1933, in Germany itself, no group among the masses was willing to risk life to stop the Nazi assumption of power; Hitler took power without a civil war. The capitalist ideologies did not provide a sufficient incentive for heroism. In the Saar and in the Sudetenland, the masses had had their experience of capitalism and capitalist democracy. They chose Hitler and Nazism. There is not the slightest doubt that overwhelming majorities in both were in favor of becoming part of Hitler’s Germany. It may be granted that terrorism and skilled propaganda methods played some part in influencing opinion. But to imagine that these were the full explanation would be shallow and absurd. Terrorism and skilled technique cannot by themselves put across an ideology that has no roots in mass appeal. The fact is that Nazism was preferred by the masses to the capitalist ideologies.

differences, but these are of no serious importance. The anticapitalist pages of fascist and communist analyses could usually be interchanged without anyone’s being able to tell which came from which. This holds for the critiques of capitalist economy, politics, and ideologies. The two ideologies are the same also—and this is most influential in developing patterns of attitude—in their scorn and contempt for “capitalist morality,” in their scathing dismissal of “natural rights” as capitalism understands these rights. They unite to attack “individualism,” root and branch. In both ideologies, the “state,” the “collectivity,” “planning,” “co-ordination,” “socialism,” “discipline” replace the “individual,” “free enterprise,” “opportunity,” as attitude-terms to hammer into the consciousness of the masses. Fascist and communist ideologies denounce in the same words the “chaos” and “anarchy” of capitalism. They conceive of the organization of the state of the future, their state, exactly along the lines on which a manager, an engineer, organizes a factory; that is, their conception of the state is a social extension generalized from managerial experience. And they have identical conceptions of “the party”—their party, with a monopoly in the political field.

Communism (Leninism-Stalinism), fascism-Nazism, and to a more-partial and less-developed extent, New Dealism and Technocracy, are all managerial ideologies. That is, in short: as ideologies they contribute through their propagation to the development of attitudes and patterns of response which are adverse to the continuance of capitalism and favorable to the development of managerial society, which are adverse to the continued social acceptance of the rule of the capitalists, and favorable to the social acceptance of the rule of the managers.

The mysteries and puzzles that are found in connection with Russia, the failure of predictions about her future course, can be accounted for in just the same way that similar mysteries and puzzles and failures are accounted for in other fields: by the fact that the phenomenon of Russia is treated from the point of view of false theories. The false conclusions drawn, the bewilderment, show us that the theories from which they proceed are wrong. Commentators, in desperation, fall back on the “morbid Russian soul” to excuse their inability to understand events. Disappointed friends of Russia keep complaining that the Russian government is “inconsistent with its principles,” that it has “betrayed” socialism and Marxism—in

The Russian Revolution was not a socialist revolution—which, from all the evidence, cannot take place in our time—but a managerial revolution. It was not the only possible kind of managerial revolution, but it was one kind, the kind the pattern of which this chapter has explained. The sharp revolutionary crisis has been succeeded by the consolidation of the new class regime in a manner altogether analogous to a number of the capitalist revolutions. The outcome of the revolution is the development of a new structure of society—managerial society, a new order of power and privilege which is not capitalist and not socialist but that structure and order which this book has described. Leninism-Stalinism (“Bolshevism”) is not a scientific hypothesis but a great social ideology rationalizing the social interests of the new rulers and making them acceptable to the minds of the masses. There is nothing inconsistent between this ideology on the one side and the purges, tyrannies, privileges, aggressions on the other: the task of the ideology is precisely to give fitting expression to the regime of those

Money left its “free” metallic base to become “managed currency” under the direction of the state.

It is always popular when someone promises us the world, bailouts and free stuff. But it just does not work. Still doesn’t. There are no free lunches, and wealth has to be created before it can be distributed. Sooner or later you always run out of other people’s money, as Thatcher put it, and if you print more then sooner or later you’ll ruin its value.

This is because the country followed the three steps of socialism, which were identified by the British economics writer Kristian Niemietz when he studied how an admiring outside world viewed countries such as the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and Venezuela:37 Step 1: The honeymoon. The strongman distributes the country’s resources and Western supporters declare triumphantly that he has shown that socialism is superior to capitalism and should be introduced everywhere, instantly. Step 2: The excuses. The honeymoon does not last for ever. Soon, the outside world receives information about how the economy doesn’t work, resources run out and problems pile up. Now the admirers become defensive and explain that the difficulties are due to bad luck, the wrong administrators ending up in the wrong places, falling commodity prices, bad weather that destroyed the crops, or sabotage from the elites or the outside world. If not for that, you would all have seen how well socialism works. (In Venezuela, for example: ‘They were unlucky with the oil price’ – despite the fact that the price in 2010 was still around six times higher than when Chávez took office. ‘It is because of US sanctions’ – even though sanctions against the oil industry were not introduced until 2019, when the collapse was already a fact.) Step 3: ‘It was not real socialism.’ In the end, it’s impossible to deny that the economy is not working, hunger is rising and people are fleeing for their lives. No one wants to be associated with the experiment any more. Now instead it is said that the country never introduced real socialism but some form of corrupt state capitalism that only appropriated the socialist brand, and it is intellectually dishonest to use that failure as evidence that socialism is not working, especially as real socialism right now is being developed elsewhere, in the hopeful country X, which you should look at instead. (At which point the foreign admirers move on to the next experiment and the process begins again from step 1.)

Free enterprise is not primarily about efficiency or optimal use of resources. It is about opening the dams for human creativity – to let everyone participate and test their ideas and see if they work. But this is precisely why it guarantees a decent use of resources. We test more solutions and we get immediate feedback from consumers that is honest because their response is not about which project they think has the best intentions, think sounds convincing or has passed some sort of bureaucratic test, but about what they are actually willing to buy with their own money.

Ten thousand people do not serve you coffee because they are part of a Big Coffee Plan where a coffee tsar decides who will make what, when, how and at what price. In fact, it can only happen because there is no such coffee plan. The process works because each of these ten thousand people uses their individual knowledge of what they can do and how they can do it better. A centrally placed coffee tsar would never be able to centralize all this complex knowledge. Even if he had been able to do so, the interests, skills, supplies and circumstances would have changed before he had time to send out detailed orders about who should do what.

Profit is the reward for those who create a whole that others find more valuable than its constituent parts.

The uniqueness of the free market is revealed every time you arrive at the counter and pay for your coffee. You say thank you, and the cashier answers with a thank-you. We hear such strange double thank-yous in all marketplaces, from the square where we buy vegetables and the restaurant when we pay the bill, to the meeting room where a contract is written with a supplier. It is not a thank-you followed by a ‘you are welcome’ or a ‘yes, sir’. It is a thank-you that is answered with a thank-you, for each party has done the other a favour. This mutual gratitude is the sign that you have created value for someone else.

The free society is based on the fact that, in as many areas as possible, we replace the logic of the chop and the blow with the logic of the voluntary handshake. That we do not compel and command but ask, offer and negotiate. We do not dictate who should do what but let everyone test their ideas and keep the fruits of their labour if there are any. And we say no when something does not add anything to us.

If you doubt the ability of people to adapt in times of crisis, take a look at the shelves of your local shop. Do you remember when you stockpiled cans, coffee and toilet paper when the world was closing during the first weeks of the pandemic? The food industry in particular was shaken by a perfect storm. New trade barriers were created, a large part of the workforce stayed at home while others were forbidden to cross national borders, and deliveries to the restaurant industry collapsed at the same time as demand for other food supplies soared when shoppers became preppers. The incredible thing about your shop shelves was that almost nothing happened. Through round-the-clock work to change suppliers, reallocate labour, adjust production methods and redirect transportation, the food industry managed to rebuild global supply chains in just a few weeks. It is an absolutely amazing achievement and we consumers noticed almost none of it. It was not done by any food tsar who dictated what everyone should do. It worked because it was not a centralized process. Each adjustment of the processes was based on local knowledge of what could be done in a particular place with the available raw materials and the workforce present – and what they could stop doing without creating catastrophic shortages elsewhere.

When it comes to food deliveries, permanent employment means that workers must be very productive. They must, for example, cycle fast uphill in the rain, and the company must monitor them so that they know they are doing so. If you get the same salary no matter how fast you pedal, the slow cyclists will be thrown out. It thus turns out that some of the worst aspects of the gig economy are paradoxically the result of not having respected the flexible nature of the profession and wanting to regulate them as ordinary jobs. ‘And just like that, a simple bywork for anyone who can ride a bike, has turned into a qualified job for the strong, fast and physically fit,’ as economist Andreas Bergh puts

In a free market, you make a profit if you have given others something they want, whatever it may be.

‘When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators,’ as P. J. O’Rourke has observed.

At any given stage, it is understandable why central banks act as they do. When a housing bubble is punctured or companies face a debt crisis, the consequences can be dire. The only problem is that the attempts to save people from the consequences of their folly is to fill the world with fools.

Capitalism is a profit and loss system – profits when

This means there must be something wrong with the new monopoly narrative. What that is becomes evident when you look at the extent to which the market share is concentrated in a small number of firms at different geographical levels. Then you see that market concentration increases nationally but actually decreases locally and regionally. It sounds contradictory but is two different ways of looking at the same change. If there is only one cafe in your village and suddenly a Starbucks opens, this means that the concentration decreases locally, but it increases nationally because Starbucks is already the largest cafe chain. So what looks like increased monopolism nationally may locally mean greater choice and increased competition. And that is good news because we consumers live in a local

Was that a bit too much? Sounds like I’m idealizing corporations? As if the big bullies are just good entrepreneurs with the public interest in mind? In that case, I have not made myself clear. I know that some will be tempted to lie and deceive, and I know perfectly well that there are thieves and bandits hiding among the companies. That is why we must have free markets. Had we always been able to rely solely on their goodwill, we could have offered them monopoly power and tariff protection. It is precisely because we cannot count on their goodwill that we need to control them with free competition and consumer choice, as well as an independent legal system and free media.

Anthropologists and archaeologists have not found a single human culture that has not in any way adorned itself. One hundred thousand years before the beauty industry told us we needed to groom and decorate ourselves, our ancestors were willing to offer everything they had and even risk their lives in battle to get coveted pigments to colour their skin. The Neanderthals had no luxury brands that manipulated them, but they still fought over the best eagle claws to make necklaces and bracelets from. Anyone who believes that consumer culture is a result of the pressure of commercial interests has a hard time explaining why people who threw off the yoke of communism immediately coveted jeans and record players. In the Taliban’s Afghanistan around the turn of the millennium, women went to underground beauty salons and painted themselves under the burqas, despite being threatened with flogging. The moment the Taliban fell in 2001, Afghans lined up to buy make-up, televisions and VCRs. Undignified, thought Western intellectuals, and ‘how depressing was it to see Afghan citizens celebrating the end of tyranny by buying consumer electronics?’ lamented one Western journalist.17 But that’s human nature for you, says archaeologist Brian Hayden, who has lived with indigenous peoples in the Middle East, the Far East, North America and Australia. It is not commercialism – it is us: ‘I can say categorically that the people of all the cultures I have come in contact with exhibit a strong desire to have the benefits of industrial goods that are available. I am convinced that the “nonmaterialistic culture” is a myth.’

the critics must learn to understand what we know as individuals: that this is about trade-offs and there are no perfect solutions.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Politicians and bureaucrats may in fact occasionally know better than we mere mortals, but in that case we should ask them to put their own money where their tax money is. If they are so convinced that a European search engine or ethanol from cellulose is the future, we should at least request that they put their own savings in the project before they force us to chip in. The

This form of environmental degradation runs counter to the fundamental capitalist principle that everyone should bear the costs of their own behaviour. Polluters privatize profits (for example, from production or transport) but socialize costs (for example, through emissions that harm others, the waters they fish in or the climate we all depend on).

Some emissions are destructive and yet have alternatives so that they can be banned outright, such as freons in refrigerators or lead in petrol, while other emissions are so central to human well-being, like the greenhouse gases that our lifestyle relies on so far, that it is better to put a price on them so that there is an incentive to reduce emissions and find alternatives. This creates difficult demarcation problems to which I cannot give any precise answers, but the principle is important and, as always, it is better to be approximately right than exactly wrong.

The best way to encourage such development everywhere is to make people pay for the consequences of their actions. A tax on all forms of fossil fuels at the wholesale level means that the cost of them is spread to industries and consumers at the next level. It makes everyone feel their contribution to global warming, not only in their conscience but also in their wallets. It gives everyone an incentive to direct their consumption towards goods and services that create less greenhouse gases, and motivates everyone to come up with their best ideas on how to reduce CO2 in the cheapest way possible and develop new technologies that minimize emissions.

If one claims that political opponents create human isolation and mental illness, one takes on a rather heavy burden of proof. Incredibly, such sweeping statements are only very rarely followed by attempts to document any causal link or even a correlation. Surprisingly often, a quick misreading of classical liberals is enough to prove the connection between liberalism and greed and loneliness. As if the resistance to forced relationships was based on a resistance to relationships.

Liberalism is not about finding all life’s meaning in a shopping list, it just says that we need more meaning than can be found in a ballot paper. And that those who seek the meaning of life in collective projects that they try to enforce on everybody have less of a sense of the beautiful richness and diversity of human nature than the

In all these areas, constructive free marketeers – and everyone else too – have an awe-inspiring to-do list. But even if we were to solve all these problems, capitalism is not always beautiful, because we humans aren’t and even our utopias are built on trade-offs. The creative destruction that constantly creates wealth and new jobs harms those who lose the old ones. When consumers control production, they will demand a lot of things that are surely illegal, immoral, fattening, addictive, vulgar or impossible. And business owners will not hesitate to satisfy them and become filthy rich and buy a stupid car. Annoyingly, a disproportionately large proportion of those who do this are probably some old classmates of yours who did not understand arithmetic and did not care about ancient literature.

The open society guarantees nothing, in the way centralized systems can at least pretend to. It is not always a joy to live with such openness and unpredictability.

Sometimes when I present the evidence for the world’s unique progress during the era of global capitalism, I get the response: yes, it’s good – no one is opposed to it – but why should we be happy with it? Why not make it even better? I agree. I’m not saying that’s enough. We should be proud but not content. We have begun to see what actually works. And that is a rare thing in human history. We must not take it for granted, we must make sure that it survives and spreads, precisely because we cannot be satisfied with the progress we have seen so far. What we mustn’t do is throw it all away because it is not as perfect as our fantasies. Without the sometimes problematic creative destruction that is constantly transforming our economy and technology, we will stagnate and lose the opportunity to solve the problems we will be surprised by in the future.

‘Fewer sandtrout – the ecological transformation of the planet…’ ‘They resist it, of course,’ she said, and now she began to understand the fear in his voice, drawn into this thing against her will. ‘When the sandtrout go, so do all the worms,’ he said. ‘The tribes must be warned.’ ‘No more spice,’ she said. Words merely touched high points of the system danger which they both saw hanging over human intrusion into Dune’s ancient relationships. ‘It’s the thing Alia knows,’ he said. ‘It’s why she gloats.’ ‘How can you be sure of that?’ ‘I’m sure.’ Now she knew for certain what disturbed him, and she felt the knowledge chill her. ‘The tribes won’t believe us if she denies it,’ he said. His statement went to the primary problem of their existence: What Fremen expected wisdom from a nine-year-old? Alia, growing farther and farther from her own inner sharing each day, played upon this. ‘We must convince Stilgar,’ Ghanima said. As one, their heads turned and they stared out over the moonlit desert. It was a different place now, changed by just a few moments of awareness. Human interplay with that environment had never been more apparent to them. They felt themselves as integral parts of a dynamic system held in delicately balanced order. The new outlook involved a real change of consciousness which flooded them with observations.

For an instant, temptation warred with fear within him. This flesh possessed the ability to transform melange into a vision of the future. With the spice, he could breathe the future, shatter Time’s veils. He found the temptation difficult to shed, clasped his hands and sank into the prana-bindu awareness. His flesh negated the temptation. His flesh wore the deep knowledge learned in blood by Paul. Those who sought the future hoped to gain the winning gamble on tomorrow’s race. Instead they found themselves trapped into a lifetime whose every heartbeat and anguished wail was known. Paul’s final vision had shown the precarious way out of that trap, and Leto knew now that he had no other choice but to follow that way. ‘The joy of living, its beauty is all bound up in the fact that life can surprise you,’ he said.

‘Alia is possessed,’ she said. ‘That could happen to us. It could already have happened and we might not know it.’ ‘No.’ He shook his head, met her gaze. ‘Alia resisted. That gave the powers within her their strength. By their own strength she was overcome. We’ve dared to search within, to seek out the old languages and the old knowledge. We’re already amalgams of those lives within us. We don’t resist; we ride with them. This was what I learned

‘Ambitions tend to remain undisturbed by realities,’ The Preacher said. ‘I dare such words because you stand at a crossroad. You could become admirable. But now you are surrounded by those who do not seek moral justifications, by advisers who are strategy-oriented. You are young and strong and tough, but you lack a certain advanced training by which your character might evolve.

‘Once your father confided in me that knowing the future too well was to be locked into that future to the exclusion of any freedom to change.’ ‘The paradox which is our problem,’ Leto said. ‘It’s a subtle and powerful thing, prescience. The future becomes now. To be sighted in the land of the blind carries its own perils. If you try to interpret what you see for the blind, you tend to forget that the blind possess an inherent movement conditioned by their blindness. They are like a monstrous machine moving along its own path. They have their own momentum, their own fixations. I fear the blind, Stil. I fear them. They can so easily crush anything in their path.’

Stilgar turned his back on the desert, stared toward the oasis of his beloved Sietch Tabr. Such talk always disturbed him. Leto sensed the sweaty smell of Stilgar’s movement. It was such a temptation to avoid the purposeful things which had to be said here. They could talk half the day away, moving from the specific to the abstract as though drawn away from real decisions, from those immediate necessities which confronted them.

men change their faces at her command,’ Leto said. ‘A ruler need not be a prophet, Stil. Nor even godlike. A ruler need only be sensitive.

They had suppressed creativity and all sense of progress, of evolution. Prosperity had been dangerous to the old Imperium and its holders of power.

In the old ways and old religions, there’d been no future, only an endless now. Before Muad’Dib, Stilgar saw, the Fremen had been conditioned to believe in failure, never in the possibility of accomplishment. Well… they’d believed Liet-Kynes, but he’d set a forty-generation timescale. That was no accomplishment; that was a dream which, he saw now, had also turned inward. Muad’Dib had changed that!

Change was dangerous. Invention must be suppressed. Individual willpower must be denied. What other function did the priesthood serve than to deny individual will? Alia kept saying that opportunities for open competition had to be reduced to manageable limits. But that meant the recurrent threat of technology could only be used to confine populations – just as it had served its ancient masters. Any permitted technology had to be rooted in ritual. Otherwise… otherwise…

‘Just as individuals are born, mature, breed, and die, so do societies and civilizations and governments.’ Dangerous or not, there would be change. The beautiful young Fremen knew this. They could look outward and see it, prepare for it. Stilgar was forced to stop. It was either that or walk right over Leto. The youth peered up at him owlishly, said: ‘You see, Stil? Tradition isn’t the absolute guide you thought it was.’

‘They sell pieces of etched marble,’ he said, pointing. ‘Did you know that? They set the pieces out in the desert to be etched by stormsands. Sometimes they find interesting patterns in the stone. They call it a new art form, very popular: genuine storm-etched marble from Dune. I bought a piece of it last week – a golden tree with five tassels, lovely but very fragile.’ ‘Don’t change the subject,’ Alia said. ‘I haven’t changed the subject,’ he said. ‘It’s beautiful, but it’s not art. Humans

You can work your own muscles, exercise them, strengthen them, but the mind acts of itself.

Planetary feudalism remained in constant danger from a large technical class, but the effects of the Butlerian Jihad continued as a damper on technological excesses. Ixians, Tleilaxu, and a few scattered outer planets were the only possible threat in this regard, and they were planet-vulnerable to the combined wrath of the rest of the Imperium. The Butlerian Jihad would not be undone. Mechanized warfare required a large technical class. The Atreides Imperium had channeled this force into other pursuits. No large technical class existed unwatched. And the Empire remained safely feudalist, naturally, since that was the best social form for spreading over widely dispersed wild frontiers – new planets.

‘But surely your own mother would not turn against you!’ ‘She was Bene Gesserit long before she was my mother. Duncan, she permitted her own son, my brother, to undergo the test of the gom jabbar! She arranged it! And she knew he might not survive it! Bene Gesserits have always been short on faith and long on pragmatism.

Not once did Stilgar think of taking his problem to Alia. That ruled out Irulan, who ran to Alia with anything and everything. In coming to his decision, Stilgar realized he had accepted the possibility that Leto judged Alia correctly.

This is the fallacy of power: ultimately, it is effective only in an absolute, a limited universe. But the basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that things change. Any power must always meet a greater power. Paul Muad’Dib taught this lesson to the Sardaukar on the Plains of Arrakeen. His descendants have yet to learn the lesson for themselves.

‘If you put away those who report accurately, you’ll keep only those who know what you want to hear,’ Jessica said, her voice sweet. ‘I can think of nothing more poisonous than to rot in the stink of your own reflections.’

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles. – Words of an ancient philosopher, (Attributed by Harq al-Ada to One Louis Veuillot)

then. She turned to look at the rock wall on her left. ‘Alia grasps the power firmly now.’ She looked back at Idaho. ‘You understand? One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.’

The universe is just there; that’s the only way a Fedaykin can view it and remain the master of his senses. The universe neither threatens nor promises. It holds things beyond our sway: the fall of a meteor, the eruption of a spiceblow, growing old and dying. These are the realities of this universe and they must be faced regardless of how you feel about them. You cannot fend off such realities with words. They will come at you in their own wordless way and then, then you will understand what is meant by ‘life and death’. Understanding this, you will be filled with joy. – Muad’Dib to his Fedaykin

‘You see, Tyek, the influence of a planet upon the mass unconscious of its inhabitants has never been fully appreciated. To defeat the Atreides, we must understand not only Caladan but Arrakis: one planet soft and the other a training ground for hard decisions. That was

In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding – symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation of those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our Imperial Security Force must be ever alert to the formation of sub-languages. –Lecture to the Arrakeen War College,

But one learns from books and reels only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.’

Farad’n knew his own talents and held few illusions about them. He was a historian-archaeologist and judge of men. Necessity had forced him to become an expert on those who would serve him – necessity and a careful study of the Atreides. He saw it as the price always demanded of aristocracy. To rule required accurate and incisive judgments about those who wielded your power. More than one ruler had fallen through mistakes and excesses of his underlings.

The Mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: ‘There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.’ The Mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena.

‘Abandon certainty! That’s life’s deepest command. That’s what life’s all about. We’re a probe into the unknown, into the uncertain.

The one-eyed view of our universe says you must not look far afield for problems. Such problems may never arrive. Instead, tend to the wolf within your fences. The packs ranging outside may not even exist.

In the Bene Gesserit Way, he opened his mind to Jacurutu, seeking to know nothing about it. Knowing was a barrier which prevented learning.

If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.

‘Every judgment teeters on the brink of error,’ Leto explained. ‘To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge

He knew his previous mistake now: he had sought power in the reality of his trance, choosing that rather than face the fears which he and Ghanima had fed in each other. Fear defeated Alia! But the seeking after power spread another trap, diverting him into fantasy. He saw the illusion.

‘I am your spirit. I am the only life you can realize. I am the house of your spirit in the land which is nowhere, the land which is your only remaining home. Without me, the intelligible universe reverts to chaos. Creative and abysmal are inextricably linked in me; only I can mediate between them. Without me, mankind will sink into the mire and vanity of knowing. Through me, you and they will find the only way out of chaos: understanding by living.’

‘Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power, all of it mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is “Thou shalt not question!” But we question. We break that commandment as a matter of course. The work to which we have set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination, the harnessing of imagination to humankind’s deepest sense of creativity.’

Peace demands solutions, but we never reach living solutions; we only work toward them. A fixed solution is, by definition, a dead solution. The trouble with peace is that it tends to punish mistakes instead of rewarding brilliance.

Jessica held her arms stiffly at her side, said: ‘I am charged to say this to you. “I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand someday. I pray to your presence that this be so. The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas. We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.”

People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness – they cannot work and their civilization collapses.

Halleck looked once more at Leto, really saw him. He saw the signs of stress around the eyes, the sense of balance in the stance, the passive mouth with its quirking sense of humor. Leto stood out from his background as though at the focus of a blinding light. He had achieved harmony simply by accepting it.

The child who refuses to travel in the father’s harness, this is rite symbol of man’s most unique capability. ‘I do not have to be what my father was. I do not have to obey my father’s odes or even believe everything he believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be.’ – Leto Atreides II,

‘Each day, each moment brings its changes,’ Ghanima said. ‘One learns by recognizing the moments.’

“The question is one of powers and how they may be used,” Scytale said, moving closer to the Guildsman’s tank. “We of the Tleilaxu believe that in all the universe there is only the insatiable appetite of matter, that energy is the only true solid. And energy learns. Hear

“The Fremen are civil, educated and ignorant,” Scytale said. “They’re not mad. They’re trained to believe, not to know. Belief

“I told him that to endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.” She shook her head. “That’s… that’s…” “A bitter pill,” he said, watching the guards run toward them across the roof, taking up their escort positions. “Bitter nonsense!” “The greatest palatinate earl and the lowliest stipendiary serf share the same problem. You cannot hire a Mentat or any other intellect to solve it for you. There’s no writ of inquest or calling of witnesses to provide answers. No servant—or disciple—can dress the wound. You

Production growth and income growth must not get out of step in my Empire. That is the substance of my command. There are to be no balance-of-payment difficulties between the different spheres of influence. And the reason for this is simply because I command it. I want to emphasize my authority in this area. I am the supreme energy-eater of this domain, and will remain so, alive

Paul’s foot caught in a low drift of sand across the street. For an instant, he felt mud clinging to the shoes of his childhood. Then he was back in the sand, in the dust-clotted, wind-muffled darkness with the Future hanging over him, taunting. He could feel the aridity of life around him like an accusation. You did this! They’d become a civilization of dry-eyed watchers and tale-tellers, people who solved all problems with power… and more power… and still more power—hating every erg of it.

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy.” —Addenda to Orders in Council The Emperor Paul Muad’Dib

When they arose to dress for the day, she said: “If the people only knew your love…” But his mood had changed. “You can’t build politics on love,” he said. “People aren’t concerned with love; it’s too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos. We can’t have that, can we? And how do you make despotism lovable?” “You’re not a despot!” she protested, tying her scarf. “Your laws are just.” “Ahh, laws,” he said. He crossed to the window, pulled back the draperies as though he could look out. “What’s law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law—our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don’t look too closely at the law. Do, and you’ll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You’ll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.”

Alia reviewed the letter as she walked down the ramp to the antechamber where her guard amazons waited. “You produce a deadly paradox,” Jessica had written. “Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and holy yearnings which hammer out a significant morality. Government, on the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions and contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must take

“There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers.”

Every discussion is influenced by emotions, no matter how rational the topic at hand. When starting a dialogue, it helps to think of the discussion as a negotiation where the prize is figuring out what everyone wants. And, above all, the most

Ehdaie’s biggest mistake was assuming, at the start of a conversation, that he knew what the patient wanted: Objective medical advice, an overview of options to make an informed choice. “But you don’t want to begin a negotiation assuming you know what the other side wants,” Malhotra said. This is the first part of the What’s This Really About? conversation: Figuring out what everyone wants to talk about. The simplest method for uncovering everyone’s desires, of course, is simply asking What do you want?

Differences in how couples seek control are only one factor that helps explain why some marriages succeed while others stumble. But if, during moments of tension, we focus on things we can control together, conflicts are less likely to emerge. If we focus on controlling ourselves, our environment, and the conflict itself, then a fight often morphs into a conversation, where the goal is understanding, rather than winning points or wounding our foes.